From the Oscar-winning Drive My Car to festival favourite Hit the Road, audiences and critics are relishing the recent wave of road movies. Here, Geoff Dyer delves into the roots of the genre
Wherever there is an actual physical journey there is inherent narrative interest. It doesn’t matter whether the journey is on foot through the Australian outback (Walkabout) or in the Antarctic (Scott of the…), on horseback (Lonesome Dove) or covered wagon (um, Wagon Train), by boat (Apocalypse Now, Deliverance), train (Von Ryan’s Express), aircraft or spaceship (take your pick), car, or some permutation of any of the above: Planes, Trains and Automobiles. With jour, journey and journal(ism) sharing the same root, we’re linguistically programmed to follow day-by-day accounts of journeys. Writing in 1849, Thomas De Quincey celebrated the unprecedented “velocity” of English mail coaches that revealed to him, first “the glory of motion: suggesting, at the same time, an under-sense, not unpleasurable, of possible though indefinite danger; second, through grand effects for the eye between lamp-light and the darkness upon solitary roads”. De Quincey used that phrase “The Glory of Motion” as a subtitle for his essay, but one is tempted to insert “Pictures” at the end, for these 50 thrilled and thrilling pages are like a trailer (“Coming soon…”) for the invention of the aptly named movies. One of the first of which showed a train arriving at a station in 1895, though this arrival actually heralded a medium of departures, sending us into transports of delight as it whisked us off us to multiple elsewheres, real and imagined.
It quickly became evident that each form of transportation had its particular filmic advantages. Ships and planes mean there is not just a captive audience but a captive cast; since no one can safely leave, the mode of transport becomes a sealed world. Films such as Stagecoach (1939), the logical and geographical extension of De Quincey’s draft treatment, show the dual advantages of a carriage that will, in time, become horseless: a group of characters thrown together in a cramped and jolting stage set, making more or less frequent stops and exposed, whether in repose or at a gallop, to multiple interactions with the hostile world in this back of the western beyond (a word to which we shall return). The difference with trains is that although a route is planned it is not fixed. (While filmic heists are planned, often meticulously, they tend to go better, as far as the audience is concerned, when they don’t go as planned; in Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway, Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw are reduced to travelling in the back of a garbage truck, which is not how either of them envisaged things panning out.) In real-world Los Angeles the dream of automotive freedom meant that you became routinely stuck in traffic – as exuberantly celebrated at the start of La La Land – en route to the studio, but the lived frustration of gridlock only enhanced the siren song of the open road, as proclaimed in Walt Whitman’s poem of the same name: “To see nothing anywhere but what you may reach it and pass it.” For film directors, this adds up to a perfect combination of tried and tested generic expectations and the liberty to surpass previous iterations, even if that means going, on occasion, completely off the rails.
