page_title: Road movie
section_title: United States
hierarchical_section_title: Road movie / Country or region of production / United States
caption_attribution_description: Cropped screenshot of Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable from the trailer for the film It Happened One Night. Colbert's costume is by costume designer Robert Kalloch.
context_page_description: A road movie is a film genre in which the main characters leave home on a road trip, typically altering the perspective from their everyday lives. Road movies often depict travel in the hinterlands, with the films exploring the theme of alienation and examining the tensions and issues of the cultural identity of a nation or historical period; this is all often enmeshed in a mood of actual or potential menace, lawlessness, and violence, a "distinctly existential air" and is populated by restless, "frustrated, often desperate characters". The setting includes not just the close confines of the car as it moves on highways and roads, but also booths in diners and rooms in roadside motels, all of which helps to create intimacy and tension between the characters. Road movies tend to focus on the theme of masculinity, some type of rebellion, car culture, and self-discovery. The core theme of road movies is "rebellion against conservative social norms".
  There are two main narratives: the quest and the outlaw chase. In the quest-style film, the story meanders as the characters make discoveries.
context_section_description: The road movie is mostly associated with the United States, as it focuses on "peculiarly American dreams, tensions and anxieties". US road movies examine the tension between the two foundational myths of American culture, which are individualism and populism, which leads to some road films depicting the open road as a "utopian fantasy" with a homogenous culture while others show it as a "dystopian nightmare" of extreme cultural differences. US road movies depict the wide open, vast spaces of the highways as symbolizing the "scale and notionally utopian" opportunities to move up upwards and outwards in life.
  In US road movies, the road is an "alternative space" where the characters, now set apart from conventional society, can experience transformation. For example, in It Happened One Night (1934), a wealthy woman who goes on the road is liberated from her elite background and marriage to an immoral husband when she meets and experiences hospitality from regular, good-hearted Americans who she never would have met in her previous life, with middle America depicted as a utopia of "real community". The scenes in road movies tend to elicit longing for a mythic past.
  American road movies have tended to be a white genre, with Spike Lee's Get on the Bus (1996) being a notable exception, as its main characters are African-American men on a bus travelling to the Million Man March, to the historic role of buses in the US civil rights movement. Asian-American filmmakers have used the road movie to examine the role and treatment of Asian-Americans in the United States; examples include Wayne Wang's Chan Is Missing (1982), about a taxi driver trying to find about the Hollywood detective character Charlie Chan, and Roads and Bridges (2001), about an Asian-American prisoner who is sentenced to clean up garbage along a Midwestern highway.
caption: It Happened One Night (1934) is about a rich woman who learns about regular Americans when she travels the Interstate system by car.
exif: {"Image DateTime": "2017:06:05 12:19:28"}