Road Trips

Americans like road trips. Hollywood, understanding this propensity in the 1960s and 70s, drove audiences across the country in some classic films.

These trips aren’t to somewhere. They’re from everything.

Easy Rider (1969) is a double trip (two guys, two meanings for “trip”), financed by cocaine and fueled by marijuana. The quiet, contemplative, some say Christ-like Captain America (Peter Fonda) wears the Stars and Stripes on his jacket, his helmet, and motorcycle. Billy (Dennis Hopper) tags along as an affable apostle.

Along the way, the two rebels-in-search-of-freedom encounter the grandeur of the American landscape (filmed sweepingly by the famed Lazlo Kovacs), the simplicity of country life, the desperation of foolish hippies and the righteous bigotry of fearful minds.

Eventually, they meet a small-town lawyer named George (Jack Nicholson), a man trying to conform to social expectations but failing magnificently. George chucks his mismanaged life, dons his old high school football helmet and climbs on behind the Captain.

Easy is not an easy film. It doesn’t follow narrative conventions any more than its protagonists adhere to social demands. At first it was interpreted as a paean to 1960s America. Now, many critics see it as a still-relevant allegory faithful to its publicity line: “A man went looking for America and couldn’t find it anywhere!”

In Five Easy Pieces (1970) Jack Nicholson, as Bobby Dupea, again runs away from social expectations, especially those of his family. Like George, he’s looking for himself, not America. He conducts most of the search with Rayette (Karen Black, who also appears as a prostitute in Easy).

Five provides three of my most memorable film moments.

Bobby and Rayette drive up the West Coast from their lower-class, country-music Southern California life to his family’s refined, classical-music, Puget Sound island home. On the way the landscape unforgettably changes from hot, sunny colors to muted grey-green-blue mist.

No movie fan from Eugene, Oregon can forget Bobby trying to order something not on the menu at the local Denny’s restaurant.

Nor can I forget how, when Bobby arrives home, his demanding, emotionally sterile background is explained wordlessly by a slow, 360-degree pan around a room’s worth of memories, one of film’s greatest shots ever.

Easy and Five are on top film lists and were nominated for or won various film awards.

Vanishing Point (1971) wasn’t nominated for any awards. Nor is it on anyone’s top films list that I know of. Nevertheless, it’s a famous cult film and the quintessential road movie.

Vanishing’s screenwriters largely left out the plot and just concentrated on a car chase. We do find out, via a series of drug-and-sleep-deprivation-induced flashbacks, that Kowalski (Barry Newman), the driver, is escaping, like George and Bobby, from an unhappy life. Like them, the source of his problems is personal, not social.

Kowalski is aided by an arresting array of people as he leads police and the FBI on a Dodge Challenger muscle car chase. Most interesting is a blind, small-town disc jockey who broadcasts the odyssey, simultaneously providing Kowalski with information about his pursuers’ plans and touting him as “the last free man on earth,” thus making him a cult hero among radio listeners and, in the real world, film fans.

A more recent film combines elements of Easy, Five and Vanishing while conveying a quite different message.

The lead characters in Thelma & Louise (1991) hate their patriarchal society lives as a waitress and housewife. They want something more and don’t look to their men to get it.

Thelma (Geena Davis) and Louise (Susan Sarandon) set off for a short vacation in Louise’s ’66 Thunderbird convertible, taking along a gun Thelma’s moron husband gave her. That night Louise uses the gun to shoot a man who is raping Thelma.

From that point on the women are on the run.

But unlike the characters in Easy, Five, and Vanishing, Thelma and Louise don’t become more unhappy as they whiz along. They feel liberated and empowered.

Thelma & Louise is not a new kind of road movie because it features two women as the travelers.

It stands out because Callie Khouri’s Oscar-winning script creates complex characters who take responsibility for what happens to them instead of retreating into drugs and/or self-pity.