Though remembered best for the exuberance of its freewheeling first half, Easy Rider is essentially the tragedy of a duo of hippie bikers (Hopper and Peter Fonda) setting out from LA to New Orleans for the festival Mardia Gras and, indirectly, to find the American dream. This is the strain of pessimism found in what might be the quintessential American road movie, Dennis Hopper’s 1969 Easy Rider.
So as often as redemptive the road is portrayed as an unforgiving place of broken dreams, of struggle, hopelessness, and death. The award, when Borg finally accepts it, no longer means a thing to him, far more important is his newfound peace of mind.Ĭonveniently heartwarming. As goes the maxim the journey turns out to be more important than the destination. On the road Borg is stirred by vivid dreams into confronting demons from his past long since repressed and is reminded of happier times by a young hitchhiker Sara (Bibi Andersson) who reminds him of a young love his own, and given the time and the rejuvenating power of travel Borg is able to work things out with Marianne.
#ON THE ROADMOVIE MOVIE#
Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 Wild Strawberries is a perfect example of the road movie in its classical form, where the Scrooge-like Professor Isak Borg (Victor Sjöström) receiving an award in celebration of his career sets off on a trip from Stockholm to Lund with his estranged daughter-in-law Marianne (Ingrid Thulin) to accept it. The plot of the road movie half writes itself in the getting from A to B, whatever internal movements the characters are undergoing become mapped onto the road itself, and the confinement of travel companions together makes for just the kind of hothouse atmosphere to bring idle talk and latent tensions spilling forth into conflict. This is the basis for the road movie, the generic use of travel as both a production tactic and a foundation for narrative.
In the at-hand mythologies of the open road as a place of freedom, possibility, and exile, of travel as a passage of self-discovery, and in the harsh realities that lie beneath them. In the self-contained, often symmetrical structure of the trip that lends itself so easily to narrative structure, that makes of the destination a symbol. In the way travel makes one perpetually a foreigner, newly attuned to each passing image of the everyday. In the travelogue of sights, in the ever-changing surroundings and continuous road, the compression of space – city after city – and the expansion of time – the monotony of travel itself. There is something inherently cinematic in the road trip.
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