Mobilities

ISSN: 1745-0101 (Print) 1745-011X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rmob20

Genre on the road: the road movie as

automobilities research

Neil Archer

To cite this article: Neil Archer (2017) Genre on the road: the road movie as automobilities
research, Mobilities, 12:4, 509-519, DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2017.1330988

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2017.1330988

Published online: 31 May 2017.

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Mobilities, 2017
VOL. 12, NO. 4, 509–519
https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2017.1330988

Genre on the road: the road movie as automobilities research

Neil Archer
School of Humanities, Keele University, Keele, UK

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This article argues for the use of film studies in the study of mobilities, with a Received 5 October 2016
specific focus on the analysis of genre, and the particularly fictional character Accepted 24 April 2017
of genre film. The article focuses on genre’s emerging and shifting forms
KEYWORDS
across temporal, geographical and gendered circumstances of production, Automobility; genre;
identifying that the road movie establishes an imaginary relationship road movie; technology;
with actual contexts; one that is, in itself, highly suggestive as a means of sociology; performance
representation. As I go on to discuss, with reference to specific film examples,
this imaginary dimension to the fictional road film, and the nature of genre
film as a mode of performance, enable it to envision or project subjective or
repressed contexts of automotive mobility; contexts that are in this instance
less accessible to more objective modes of observation and recording.

It is perhaps no accident that the flourishing of automobilities as an area of study should coincide with
a parallel interest, in film and cultural studies, in the road movie. The essays collected in the special
‘Automobilities’ issue of Theory, Culture and Society in 2004, for instance, looked to establish this subject
as a vital area of research, responding to the motor car’s dominance in social life; its ‘visibility and influ-
ence … as a key object of mass production (Fordism) and mass consumption, [its] impact on spatial
organization through roads, city layout, suburban housing and shopping malls’ (Featherstone 2004, 1).
Stressing the combination of autonomy and mobility central to both the promise and practices of driv-
ing, scholars in this emerging field sought to document the experience of automobility, considering
from a phenomenological approach the affective and perceptual impacts of driving on our sight and
hearing (Bull 2004; Edensor 2004); the ‘hybrid’ embodiment of driver, car and its software (Thrift 2004);
or the sense of inhabiting the motor vehicle as a form of Heideggerian ‘dwelling’ (Urry 2007).
Contemporaneous work on the road movie, in particular Mazierska and Rascaroli’s Crossing New
Europe (2006), especially in its move away from the genre’s predominantly American connotations
(cf. Cohan and Hark 1997; Laderman 2002), emphasised the new types of narratives and protagonists
engendered by newly porous borders; but also the effects of globalisation, environmental change
and war on the movement of peoples – with a particular focus on the increasingly ubiquitous cultural
figure of the migrant (Mazierska and Rascaroli 2006; Naficy 2001). This move was significant in stress-
ing both the possibilities and constraints on human mobility that subtend the road movie’s narratives
and representations. This interest in the road movie as mapping this century’s alternately ‘open’ and
‘closed’ global routes has by now assumed a central position in studies of the road movie as a global
film genre (Costanzo 2014; Gott and Schilt 2013). If such recent work has drawn on traditional social
sciences research, it has largely been to provide a detailed contextual framework through which we
might read the road movie. Such a move underlines the urgency and geopolitical relevance of the

CONTACT  Neil Archer  n.archer@keele.ac.uk

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
510    N. ARCHER

films in question, feeding into a broader positioning of film practice and representation within our
understanding of politics, geography, culture, and their mutual interrelation.
As the above examples suggest, the broader interests of mobilities offer a wealth of supporting
context for the study of films. The question raised by this essay, in line with the others in this volume,
concerns the disciplinary borders and methods for approaching mobilities, and more particularly, how
specific and distinctive disciplinary interests of film studies might shed light on this area of research.
While it is not necessarily an issue in any of the studies cited above, I am wary of the implications for
film studies of both approaching and justifying its subject of study by reference to other disciplinary
frameworks, and the resistance to dealing with films as films, using them instead largely as the cultural
manifestation of a social and political context. A film within such terms can only be about or illustrative
of something else that pre-exists the text, in effect making the study of the film in itself potentially
redundant. A possible consequence of such an approach is that it privileges more overtly realist road
movies, whose narrative contents can be most clearly mapped onto actual circumstances, Or alterna-
tively, elements of a given film less reducible to social contexts – aspects of fantasy, for instance – may
be downplayed, or the films in question positioned to the side of these contexts. We might note, for
example, the historical response to a road movie like Wild at Heart (1990), which, like many other
American films from the period, eschews the rebelliousness and nihilism of an earlier phase of films, in
favour of what one prominent theorist of the genre calls its ‘comic tone’ and ‘surrealistic histrionics’. As
this same writer puts it, the result of this move is to ‘displace any social or political grounding’, replacing
it instead with the ‘flashy, bizarre’ motifs associated with that catch-all term of ‘cinematic postmodernism’
(Laderman 2002, 166).
A main argument of this essay, by contrast, is that we engage seriously with those aspects of the road
movie that are not so obviously reflective, in a mimetic sense, of social and/or political contexts. I sug-
gest that the genre is pertinent to the understanding of mobilities as much in its specifically fictional or
even fantastical qualities, and that we risk undervaluing the genre’s importance if we downplay what is
specific about it as a cinematic experience. In a vital intersection between traditional academic domains,
bringing together cultural geography and film studies, Borden has recently identified the way books
about the road movie often ‘avoid much of the actual experience of driving in terms of space, velocity
and vision’ (2012, 15). Indeed, road-movie studies such as Crossing New Europe, Laderman’s mostly
American-centric Driving Visions (2002), and to an extent my own The French Road Movie (2013), while
looking at what is aesthetically specific and unique in the genre, use it largely to identify its particular
configurations of national and/or transnational space, and its embodiment of various identity formations
via its mobile protagonists, often downplaying the road movie’s distinctive representation of the auto-
motive experience. Borden’s approach consequently looks to rediscover the actual experience of driving
via movies about driving, in which mediation is a means of reintroducing us to its particular qualities.
Beyond the fairly well-worn idea that being in a car and being in the cinema share experiential qualities,
as Borden argues, the nature of film viewing can ‘lift’ the otherwise ‘normal’ event of driving to a new
perceptual level, revealing an experience we might otherwise only perceive subconsciously (2012, 14).
Borden’s work is instructive for this essay in highlighting the way films and their analysis produce
meaning, rather than merely confirming established theses. Such an approach moves on from the notion
that road movies provide mostly second-hand evidence of the motor car’s centrality to twentieth- and
early twenty-first century society, and asks us in fact to decipher the experience of automobility from
films themselves. While endorsing this idea, my approach here differs from Borden in its specific focus
on the road movie as genre, considering in this instance what the analysis of genre as it emerges and
evolves through time can inform us about the contexts underpinning it. The thematic structure of
Borden’s book (divided into sections such as ‘Cities’, ‘Journeys’ and ‘Altered States’) allows him to move
across geographic and historical contexts, in order to illuminate the shared qualities of experience
evoked and explored through the genre. Beyond the initial assertion, though, that the American film
and car industries share a mutual preoccupation with youth, speed and expansion (2012, 13), Drive is less
concerned with what informed the evolution and shaping of the genre, taking in fact the existence of the
‘road movie genre’ as something of a given from its first mention (2012, 15). Looking at the road movie
 MOBILITIES   511

both as a theorist and historian of film, I am consequently interested here in what initially informs the
development of genre and its representations, as well as how and why the genre has assumed the form
it has done at certain points and across particular contexts. Like all cinematic genres, the road movie did
not just come inevitably into uncontested being, but operates as the culmination and manifestation of
producer and audience interest over different timeframes. Genres also shape themselves around certain
narrative and formal expectations, the reiteration of which produces the pleasures inherent to their
viewing. They are largely defined and bound by their own generically-specific ‘regimes of verisimilitude’
(Neale 2000, 32), which is not to say that they are ever constrained by ‘realism’, but rather the genre’s
own internal laws and dynamics – the pleasures of which may indeed reside in their capacity to exceed
everyday standards of credibility. To this point, it is the road movie’s transgression of everyday norms
that is precisely its most revealing trait; or indeed, the way certain road movies create a critical dialogue
with these same ‘regimes of verismilitude’ is what is central to the genre’s definition and understanding.
Once we identify the contingency of a genre such as the road movie, and recognise how it has
emerged and developed within particular times and places, developing its own cultural semantics
and syntax (Altman 1999), we can begin to develop a sociological framework for its analysis; one that is
alert to transitions and shifts across a range of filmmaking contexts. My argument here, then, is that the
study of the road movie assumes a particular importance to the study of mobilities when we consider
its movement and inflections, especially when it breaks from its more familiar and even naturalised
connotations (most notably, its predominant associations with automotive experience in the USA, and/
or a certain types of American ‘rebelliousness’ (see e.g. Cohan and Hark 1997; Laderman 2002; Mills
2006)). It is the point when genres become disassociated from their dominant, and even (in the case of
the road movie) defining contexts that their constructed and formal nature is most evident. But perhaps
counter-intuitively, this is also the point when they can prove most revealing, precisely in opening up
interpretive spaces through which the gaps between fiction and actuality, between cinematic fantasy
and everyday possibility, become most visible.
As I propose, it is in these imagined spaces that we can identify experiences of mobility that are oth-
erwise outside the representational domain, not just of the road movie in its more classical (Hollywood)
sense, but also in its more documentarist capacity to capture mobile identities. I am suggesting here
that we read such movies not so much ‘against the grain’, as, to borrow Žižek’s Lacanian term (1991),
‘awry’: from this view, the road movie does not offer a reflection of a pre-established and self-evident
truth, but rather a refraction of actual contexts through the prism of the genre’s imaginary projections.
As this suggests, it is in the visible fictions of the road movie, as it transitions across contexts, that we
can infer otherwise unrepresentable truths of (auto)mobile experience.

Mapping automobilities through genre

In taking this approach, I am not downplaying the value, say, of more notionally direct forms of filmic
representation, such as documentary and video work. I am here, though, motivated by Merriman’s
suggestion that the claims to ‘proximity’ of documentary approaches (as one of the ‘mobile methods’
he critically analyses) can be overstated, difficult as it is for audio-visual recording per se to adequately
capture subjective and differentiated experience. Nor, Merriman adds, do such ‘authentic’ approaches
adequately encompass ‘the many complex (often invisible) social and political practices and relations
which co-constitute spaces, events and contexts’ (2014, 176). In focusing here on the fiction film, then,
I wish to emphasise the importance of aesthetic and narrative interventions beyond the objectivist
claims of documentary ‘evidence’, and also how the history of genre fiction films can inform us about
the ‘social and political practices and relations’ behind them.
In the case of film, by charting the historical shifts in mobility through movies, and correlatively the
emergence of particular genres as conceptual frames for these shifts, we can start to draw out some
of the contexts informing mobility throughout different eras. Though more concerned with aesthetics
than geography, Bordwell’s ‘historical poetics’ of film analysis offers a useful model here, in its ambitious
attempt to read the contexts of production through the variations and developments of film style.
512    N. ARCHER

Film, argues Bordwell, can be made ‘historical’ by identifying across a series of texts ‘a range of norms
arising from formal principles [and] conventional practices of film production and consumption’; in
turn, comparing texts with these ‘prevailing standards and practices’ enables us to elucidate relevant
inflections and shifts within the circumstances of production (Bordwell 1988, 1). The extent to which,
and also the way in which, film style can illuminate context is a keenly debated issue, though what is
beyond doubt is the extent to which the poetics of film, and in turn the evolutions of genre, are signif-
icantly determined by the contexts and means of production.
Any tendency to see the road movie’s representations of mobility only in terms of what they can
concretely indicate about ‘real’ experience is problematic, firstly, in its resistance to the varied practices
determining production. But such approaches would also undervalue those aspects of fantasy that are
indirectly, though no less potently, evocative of a film’s particular context, precisely in their challenge
to, or reflection on, these same contexts. For example, when a white Cadillac appears on the French
seafront in Jacques Demy’s 1961 film Lola, this is hardly an indication that such cars were typical in
France at the time – in reality, they were anything but. Reading the film in the light of statistical research
suggests instead that the Cadillac, or the automobile tout court, was for most French viewers of the time
a desirable or fetish object for a society still undergoing delayed modernisation (Ross 1995, 27–30). In
this case, as in many road movies, we can read the automobility of a particular context through what
is fantasised, out of reach or (in turn) aspired towards. The contexts of the so-called French ‘New Wave’
and beyond, in which the allusion to American films and performers constitutes a key aspect of the film
text and their protagonists’ self-perception, indicate a preoccupation with the American car as a largely
cinematic object of consumer desire: one that is either beyond the purchasing power of the characters
(the 1955 Ford Thunderbird and 1961 Ford Galaxy, both stolen in, respectively, Jean-Luc Godard’s A
bout de souffle [1960] and Pierrot le fou [1965]), or a fetishized, temporary gift (a Chevrolet driven across
France for delivery in Le plein de super [1976]).
In the background of such films, then, is an (American) ‘imaginary’ of automobility; one not necessarily
referring to actual lived experience, but to a large extent one that is already mediated and ideological,
produced in the mutual influence between the automobile- and the suitably-termed ‘motion picture’
industries. Urry’s insistence (2004, 2007) that we see automobility only secondarily in terms of dwell-
ing and sensory habitation, and primarily in terms of its ‘system’, underscores the industrial capitalist
logic underpinning our belief both in the motor car’s twentieth-century pre-eminence, and its asso-
ciations with American culture. As Urry notes, such belief was founded not on the petroleum-fuelled
automobile’s necessary emergence in the early twentieth century, but rather on its ‘accidental’ status
as one possible substitute for the horse-drawn carriage. Consequently the ‘path dependence’ of the
‘petrol system’ came to be ‘“locked” in’ at the point when Henry Ford perfected the mass production
line, General Motors ‘bought up US tramways in order to close them down’, and US government policy
initiated a wave of highway-building (Urry 2007, 114). In much the same way that media scholars have
identified the ideological operations of a US ‘military-industrial complex’ in films from Aliens (1986) and
Armageddon (1998) to Transformers (2007), we can also identify this ‘car-petroleum complex’ naturalised
in various popular road movies celebrating motorised mobility: films featuring initially mismatched duos
on the road, from It Happened One Night (1934) to Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987) and Rain Man
(1988), with their folksy evocation of the binding spirit of travel and the communitarian virtues of motor
transport. Even films ostensibly critical of capitalism, such as The Grapes of Wrath (1940), reiterate the
ideology of the car-petroleum complex, establishing their structure around a form of Exodus narrative
in which the family automobile – the Great Depression notwithstanding – remains an inevitable vehicle
of mobility and hope (Borden 2012, 18). The Route 66 that takes the Joads from Dust-Bowl desolation
to the Californian promised land may not, for them at least, be the place to ‘get their kicks’; though
it was, appropriately enough, the highway opened the same year that Ford lowered the price of his
Model-T (Eyerman and Löfgren 1995, 56), initiating in this same gesture the conversion of the car to mass
consumer item. Indeed, it is notable that the American road movie – even in the 1960s and early 1970s
when it is frequently analysed in term of counter-cultural rebellion (Laderman 2002; Mills 2006) – offers
 MOBILITIES   513

in its fantasies of ‘adventure and freedom’ and of ‘the self-directed life’ (Featherstone 2004, 2) an implicit
reaffirmation of the same car-consumption nexus.

Towards a sociology of the road movie: fictions of the male commuter

As much as it aspires to the representation of new forms of cultural mobility, then, the American road
movie in its most classical form of the late 1960s to early 1970s, emerging out of an era of mass auto-
mobile production and suburbanisation, relies on the ideological premise that roads exist solely for
the pleasure of the driving protagonists: hence the prominent depiction, in films like Easy Rider (1969),
Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) and Vanishing Point (1971), of seemingly open and available highways for their
mostly solitary riders and drivers. More than just an automotive fantasy, this vision of the road is also,
oddly, a throwback precisely to the Depression-era vision of migratory mobility, a nostalgic romanticisa-
tion of the compelled itinerant life as a freedom from existing social and economic constraints. Hark, for
example (1997), has noted how frequently in the later 1980s road movie (in films such as Rain Man and
Planes, Trains and Automobiles) the ‘high flyer’ associated with air-travel commuting and the executive
lounge is literally brought down to earth by the less upwardly-mobile ‘road man’ he is obliged to travel
with. From an economic logic, these relatively big-budget Hollywood productions are targeted at the
same socially-mobile individuals the films depict; those whom the neoliberal economic policies of the
Reagan era helped produce. Yet within these films the same yuppie values are the object of apparent crit-
icism. The cultural, commercially-driven work of such films, as Hark argues, is to construct an imagined
but eventually toothless space of yuppie critique; one narratively endorsed by the way films like Planes,
Trains and Automobiles – in which an advertising executive’s cross-state flight home for Thanksgiving
is deterred by weather, forcing him to take slower and more unaccustomed routes – ultimately allow
their literal high-flyers to have their folksy road trip and come home to their upwardly-mobile comforts
(1997, 218). Or for Laderman, such films come to emblematise the ‘postmodern’ fate of the road movie
as a ‘generic skeleton … gutted by an ‘entertainment’ mentality’ (2002, 133).
It is unsurprising that Hollywood films from the 1980s, like those of earlier decades, should implicitly
endorse the value of petroleum-based mobility, given its continued centrality to the US economy. But
while such ideological critique is the bread and butter of traditional film and cultural studies, reading
such films ‘awry’, and with the sociological dimension I see as its corollary, we find that the analysis of
such films raises a different set of questions. Hark’s approach in this instance fails to consider why such
cinematic representations come into being in the first place. Rather than critically closing off a film like
Planes, Trains and Automobiles on account of its ideological sleight of hand, we should rather ask what it
is about the actual yuppie commuting lifestyle – and by implication, the traveling habits of many of the
film’s same viewers – that is in need of the movie’s ideological resolutions; and by the same token, what
it is about the yuppie commuter lifestyle that requires the film to so astringently complicate it for the
first ninety minutes of its running time. In other words, what is ‘missing’ from the everyday experience of
commuting that these gaps need imaginarily filling-in, as it were, by the work of cinematic fictions? The
analysis of film history has taught us that goal-orientation, problem-solving and decisive endings are
central to classical cinematic narrative (see e.g. Bordwell 1985), and Hollywood films – from Stagecoach
(1939) to The Wizard of Oz (1939) to Planes, Trains and Automobiles – have allied physical destination
to eventual plot resolution. Yet the reductive critical approach to narrative and actual destinations has
not always come to grips with the inherent resistance of films, such as the latter two above, to reaching
their literal and figurative end-points, deferring goal-achievement to the more itinerant pleasures of
movement for its own sake. Hence, we see in Planes, Trains and Automobiles a succession of the latter, as
the film’s high-flying executive is obliged, after his Chicago-bound flight is grounded, to contend with
the less swift contexts of rail and highway travel. While the film technically operates a race-against-time
structure, by putting its protagonist on the ground and needing to get home, the film subjects itself to
a different sort of pace, and also visually opens itself up – typically through montage and panoramic
point-of-view sequences that actually delay narrative progression – both to the proximity of ‘everyday’
co-travellers, and the panoramic possibilities afforded by the train and the car. Both the real pleasure
514    N. ARCHER

and meaning of the film, consequently, are derived from the more meandering, contemplative and
physically-grounded experiences that are only accessible once the most time-economical means of
(cinematic) travel are denied.
The comparatively more aimless and open-ended traveling form of the road movie has defined most
definitions of the genre since the 1970s (see e.g. Elsaesser 1975; Laderman 2002). But such theorisations
typically position the ‘real’ road movie outside the contexts of popular entertainment cinema, in terms
of their plot structure, perspectival and documentary-like camerawork, and ‘rebellious’ protagonists
operating outside the dominant social frameworks. The commuter, as a conservative cinematic figure
that to an extent embodies the cultural ‘norm’, does not fit neatly into this paradigm; yet it is precisely
his or her normality, and the consequent tensions and ambiguities central to road movies about them,
that make the commuter a more interesting and (from a sociological perspective) vital figure of analysis.
L’Emploi du temps/Time Out (2001), directed by Laurent Cantet, brings into focus the significance of
shifting contexts to the reading of genre; and more specifically, what happens when the contexts of
Europe and of the everyday confront the road movie’s inherent fantasies. At the start of the film we see
a man waking up in his car, before spending the day driving around the highways near the French-Swiss
border. With no narrative ‘action’ to speak of, we see the driver stop off at service stations to smoke
a cigarette or do the crossword, before heading home through the rain, to the sound of a drive-time
radio show. Back at his house, he greets his wife and children, who welcome him home from his time
away at work. From this brief description it is clear that something in Time Out is not quite right, and
so it turns out. The driver, Vincent, has in fact lost his executive job some months previously. Rather
than confess to his family and face up to unemployment, Vincent chooses instead to make up a false
job at the World Health Organization in Geneva, enabling him to spend his time away in his car. As this
opening sequence suggests, the essential thriller plot of Time Out gives way to a much more oneiric
type of film, given over to the impressions and aimless pleasures of driving. In this film, driving is less
the interlude between stages of narrative action than it is the motivation and goal of the intrigue itself.
At the end of the film, Vincent, who has embarked on economic fraud and petty smuggling to fund his
new lifestyle, owns up to his wife and goes for a job interview – one that, by all appearances, he will be
successful in. As the film then emphasises, Vincent does not turn to a life of deceit and crime because
he has to, but because he has no desire not to. Losing his job consequently becomes an opportunity
for Vincent to do what he always apparently wanted to do: drive around without being bothered by
anyone. Little wonder then that, on receiving the first instalment from an old friend drawn into his
investment scam, Vincent goes and buys himself an SUV: one that he promptly drives round and round
an off-road track like a child with his first bike.
The film’s real-life inspiration was the horrific case of Jean-Claude Romand, who for years faked a suc-
cessful medical career, living on money embezzled from his wife and parents, whom he later murdered.
Time Out proves especially instructive for this present essay, inasmuch as the film, loosely adapting
Romand’s story, shifts the attention to the commuting lifestyle which, in this case, the protagonist has
legitimately enjoyed prior to redundancy. As a film that is only partly about the loss of paid employment,
and more specifically about the desires for a working routine that is also free from the responsibilities
of work, Time Out sheds light on the type of imaginary and ludic engagements the commuting driver
has with his or her journey beyond its necessary, compelled function as ‘work’. But it is also particularly
emblematic of the possibilities of fiction filmmaking for the study of mobilities, precisely because – to
reiterate Merriman’s (2014) point – it brings into view what cannot so visibly be registered by ‘direct’
filmmaking styles (observational documentary, for example, can show visible instances of commuter
behaviour and habit, but can only remain objectively distant in its approach as far as the commuter’s
subjective experience is concerned).
Time Out’s blending, in this instance, of the observational (via extended sequences of driving) and
the subjective allies the film with Augé’s ‘ethno-fictional’ approach to the study of mobility, oscillating
as it does between the fields of ethnography and narrative fiction. Indeed, the fictional Pierre Dupont,
whose blissful air-travel isolation Augé narrates in a prologue to his book on ‘non-places’, finds his
own cinematic echo in another French ‘yuppie’ road movie, Le Huitième jour/The Eighth Day (1996); the
 MOBILITIES   515

opening of which has Daniel Auteuil’s harassed executive hiding behind his airline sleeping mask (Archer
2013, 114). As with this film and Time Out, just as in Augé’s own writing, we can see the importance of
fiction and imaginary representation, in terms of its capacity to dramatise the individual experience
that makes non-places like the motorway or the service station, not to mention the cinematic, audio-
visual cocoon of the motor car itself, so attractive in the first place; and in turn, to see how individual
automobility shapes social space itself, rather than simply responds to it (Augé 1995; Merriman 2004).
Time Out is most illuminating, in fact, when nothing ‘happens’; when we are allowed to drift along with
the driver, and for the duration of this drift experience the pleasures of a suspended responsibility.
Drama in Cantet’s film emerges from the tension between this drift and its disavowed reality; or in in
other words: between Vincent’s desire to commute, and his unwillingness to work.
As Vanderbilt has shown, this tension is already reflected in the counter-intuitive way commuting
drivers, according to a 2005 study, claim both to drive more than they would like to and more than
they actually need to:
Why were people seemingly acting against their own interests? Why were they doing more of what they wanted
to do less of? The researchers surmised that the driving people didn’t want to do was, in fact, the driving they
needed to do. Maybe it was the reasons they were driving that they wanted to eliminate, rather than the driving
itself. (2008, 140)
Time Out’s interest to automobilities study is consequently the way it strives to identify and narrate
these impulses on the part of the commuter, bringing into focus the way drivers work to create auton-
omous spaces and routines within the enforced trajectories of the work journey. Capitalism and its
automotive corollaries, the film suggests, produce their own fantasies of escape within the practices
of commuting. Vincent’s drama extends this aspect of mobility within work to its most irreconcilable
point, if only to explore more completely the paradoxes of our own everyday working and travelling
experiences.

Who’s at the wheel? Genre, gender and performance

As already noted, there is a point at which ‘historical poetics’ as a sociological method has significant
drawbacks, linked as it necessarily is to social, economic and institutional contexts underpinning rep-
resentation. The study of the road movie is also the study of the hegemony persisting in culture and
the film industries. Without properly registering and accounting for ‘the gaps left … by mainstream
productions’ (Mills 2006, 28) we risk a much too literal and consensual reading of social context via film
text. This is especially relevant to our understanding of gender, and its particular relationship to genre.
As Gledhill suggests in a recent anthology on the subject, our understanding of genre often downplays
gender as a ‘relatively unproblematic component of specific generic worlds’, and questions about the
gendered origins or mutability of genres are side-lined in favour of analyses focusing mainly on ‘narrative
and visual organization’ (Gledhill 2012, 1). It is, in turn, one of the particular qualities of the road movie
that deflections from its ‘natural’ state as a male-driven genre are positioned as exceptional by default,
even within critical works that strive to rethink the gendering of the genre’s history and aesthetics
(Archer 2013, 119–146 being a case in point). As Willis observes, in many road movies ‘the central point
and problem that define the journey reside in embodiment and visibility, as all meanings tend to be
organised by race, gender and sexuality’ (1997, 287, my emphasis). In studying the genre’s development,
it is consequently instructive when we observe significant shifts in practice, revealing as they are of
a response to, or engagement with, this ‘problem’ of visible automobility. Once more, how we make
sense of these films in representational terms is to some extent beside the point, as it is their excessive
or unmanageable positioning within the genre and its semantic/syntactic framework of expectations
that is key. Generic verisimilitude is founded largely on the ‘rules’ of a given genre; though as Todorov
has identified, discourses of verisimilitude in fiction, when rigidly applied, inevitably elide into cultural
verisimilitude: a ‘discourse [that] readers believe is true’ (quoted in Neale 2000, 32). In the case of the road
movie, then, deviations from the generically verisimilar, and viewers’ reactions to them, are significant
in that they expose the dominant cultural frameworks underpinning the production and consumption
516    N. ARCHER

of the genre film; one that institutionally and discursively marginalises certain c­ onstituencies, and
therefore denies the means of representation.
What therefore becomes most significant to the ‘women’s road movie’, such as it exists, may be less
what it says about female mobility per se, but rather how important the technological access is to the
means of production and representation, and the extent to which mobility is culturally performed. To
take the most famous example, Thelma and Louise (1991) sets its two female protagonists on the run
from the law after one of them shoots a would-be rapist. Seeking independence through the desert
landscapes of the American Southwest, the pair’s flight ends in a fateful showdown at the Grand Canyon.
Especially as this trajectory and backdrop is a deliberate recreation of the American cinematic past and
its iconography (Daniel 1999, 176; Eyerman and Löfgren 1995, 67), it makes little sense to view this starry
Hollywood film in any realist representational terms, even if its abiding interest for film scholars is in
its implicit dialogue with, and renegotiation of, the road movie’s broader representations and gender
politics. By opening up the debate about female representation in the genre, its wider significance is
in prompting discussion as to the relationship women have to cars, the road and the experience of
driving. Willis (1993) argues, for instance, that Thelma and Louise raised the possibility for female, and
also feminist, viewers to explore through such films complex questions of identification, desire and
pleasure – especially, in this case, with regard to traditionally masculine genres such as the road movie
(see also Mills 2006, 195). Willis’ broad point was that Thelma and Louise enabled herself as a feminist
viewer to enjoy, openly, putatively ‘masculine’ experiences of genre cinema, but also to relish the cul-
ture of the automobile, of machinery and speed, that she had, in fact, always liked; only that the prior
limitations placed on female mobility in cinema meant that the possibilities to engage with, or even
realise these pleasures, were less available.
As Mills argues, the history of a genre such as the road movie is as much a history of filmmaking
technology; or more specifically, the history of how, when and why particular constituencies gain access
to this technology (Mills 2006, 26–27). The nuanced point here is that such innovations and representa-
tional shifts in genre cinema are not simply points at which we suddenly have access to a previously
unseen reality, but rather the point that cultural notions can be reworked. If we establish that genre exists
as a set of formal and cultural codes, but that these codes can be played with and manipulated through
performance, then the idea of ‘cultural verisimilitude’ can itself be challenged through performance. As
Gledhill puts it, genre as a form is endlessly malleable as it moves across and between producers and
users: consequently, the gendered cultural codes genre reinforces can be equally liable to rethinking
and reshaping. Once we question the ‘discrete identities’ of both genre and gender,
their relationship [in film] may be refigured not in terms of social reflection, ideological misrepresentation, or sub-
ject positioning but as cinematic affect and discursive circulation between society and story, public and imaginary
worlds. Such circulation … enable[s] us to think about the productivity of gender in genre in terms of aesthetic
appeals and symbolic imaginings. (2012, 2)
Thelma and Louise is in this respect an important instance of how fictional narrative media such as
the road movie move beyond the mere ‘representation’ of mobility; to the extent that the envisioning of
mobility itself, especially with respect to gender, is a means through which mobility is re-presented. In its
strategic inversion of the road movie’s traditional gendered norms, Thelma and Louise became a catalyst
for debate around the gendering both of cinema and mobility, and cultural attitudes towards the idea of
women on the road: a debate which, in its own implicit concern for the norms of representation and its
place in the culture, affirmed the importance of fiction film to our understanding of cultural experience.
Made with Hollywood stars, though, and very much within the contexts of the cinematic main-
stream, Thelma and Louise’s significance to the representation of automobility is above all a rhetorical
and discursive one: because it sets itself up so forcibly in dialogue with the iconographic history of the
genre – this is another film, for instance, where the highway is largely offered up as a seemingly open
fantasy vista of possibilities – it is in many respects more interested in cinematic form than it is in the
grounded realities and possibilities of everyday experience; and as already seen with reference to Time
Out, exploring the latter is not mutually exclusive from the more fantastical elements of genre. As with
 MOBILITIES   517

Time Out, then, a more instructive example is found outside the Hollywood context; in this instance, at
the almost diametrical opposite of Thelma and Louise’s filmmaking practices.
10 (2002), made by the late Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, consequently invites us to con-
sider the road movie as a record of gendered driving experience, but this minimalist film represents
an actual intervention in this experience that re-shapes it to political ends. The film plays out a series
of inter-connected scenarios within a single car on the streets of Tehran, driven by a woman called
Mania (played, in this case, by a woman of the same name, whose distinctions from the character she
‘plays’ are not entirely clear). Removing himself from the shooting process, Kiarostami sets up two dig-
ital video cameras on the dashboard, positioned to capture the driver and her front-seat passengers,
along with whatever comes into focus through the often open windows. 10 was consequently filmed
with as much directness as is possible, while still keeping the cameras exposed, imposing a freedom
on the part of the film’s main protagonists that was nevertheless performed, due to their awareness of
the cameras. The resulting conversations – most often between Mania and her (actual) young son, but
also with other women, whether familiar or unknown to her – were subsequently edited into the ten
encounters from which the film derives its title.
The location of the car as a mobile vehicle is an important factor here: Kiarostami has spoken of the
way the car determines behaviour, in ways that are different to the interaction produced by enclosed
and static environments. The intent behind 10 was consequently to record, within a loosely pre-estab-
lished plot, the unpredictable movements of both car and conversation, along with whatever else by
chance came within the sight and sound of the cameras (Andrew 2005). This permitted 10’s narrative
to embrace spontaneity and the random occurrence, as Mania occasionally picks up female passengers
whose entrance was not formally planned by the filmmakers. But it also allows for specifically gendered
interruptions, in the form of comments or lingering looks from passing male motorists and their friends
(Archer 2016, 78). It is evidently one of the film’s intentions to capture the specifically gendered circum-
stances of being a young woman behind the wheel of a car in Tehran; and in this case, it is not just the
gaze of the mobile male that situates Mania within (fairly universal) patriarchal contexts, but the tyranny
of her son, whose attitude to his mother is reinforced by the fact that he exclusively takes up the first
fifteen minutes of screen time, before a cut finally reveals the driver to us. We might argue from this
position that the film adopts a more obviously observational, documentary approach that plays down
its fictional dimension. Yet while the actual, physical contexts of the city are intrinsic to the film’s aims,
from a strict point of view these encounters are not so much already ‘out there’ to be documented, but
are actually produced by the film’s taking up the media of representation, and by its fictional approach:
it is effectively the setting up of narrative frameworks, as well as Mania’s ‘performance’ as a female driver,
that prompts and encourages these interventions.
In the context of 10, in fact, the film’s uncertain positioning between actuality and imagination turns
out to be its very point. This is due to the fact that, within the terms of Tehran in the 2000s, the car
represents a notable, even heterotopian, space of intimacy and mobility for the female driver. But it is
also a unique(ly) cinematic space. Within the strict codes of representation in Iranian cinema, women
could not be filmed without the covering of the chador (headscarf ). This meant that intimate female
conversations in domestic interiors, where the chador would in practice not be necessary, could not
realistically be shown. Consequently, as women in public wearing the appropriate attire, yet talking
informally on a range of social and political subjects, 10 is both realistic and acceptable within the
codes of Iranian cinema (Andrew 2005, 60). But more importantly for our present purposes, it is in turn
revealing of the unique qualities of the driving experience within the culture at that time. What matters
here, then, is the capacity for film not so much merely to record as to create the conditions for a filmic
event, literally mobilised by the presence of the car and the cameras. What we see in 10 is inseparable
from its reality as a piece of media, and its representational distinction as a work about a female driver
in Iran. It thereby underlines this essay’s key point: that the road movie as a genre of fiction film, and its
historical understanding as such, can reveal to us frequently imaginary, invisible or repressed contexts
of mobility otherwise inaccessible through more objective and observational modes of representation.
518    N. ARCHER

Conclusions
10 is more knowing and reflexive than most road movies, mainly in its intentional foregrounding of
media production as its own distinctive experience of automobility. The issues it underlines, though,
inform more broadly our understanding of the genre and its relevance to automobilities research,
drawing attention as it does to the ways representational choices, and shifts in generic semiotics and
syntax, bring into focus both the inscribed tendencies and also – perhaps more importantly – the way
our reading of genre is related to cultural norms and beliefs. 10 is a useful reminder that cinematic genres
are rarely just a matter of aesthetics. Rather, the entire ‘regimes of verisimilitude’ informing genre, and
its subsequent capacity to seemingly ‘represent’ the world as lived, can mask its indebtedness to dom-
inant systems of power, and its ability through representation to re-inscribe these same paradigms. If
Kiarostami’s film makes these paradigms more explicit than others, it nevertheless invites us to consider
those other films from the fictional mainstream with a more historically nuanced perspective.
Where I hope to have progressed the broader discussion of the road movie, then, and above all
its relevance to the study of automobility, is in my claim that filmic analysis of the driving experience
should be alert to the capacities of the fictional, and alive to the movements and transitions in fictional
representations across varied contexts. The aesthetics of film as an audio-visual form offer cogent
scope for the multi-sensory representation of automobility, in their capacity to illuminate our often
subconscious or automatic bodily and mental processes behind the wheel and behind the windscreen.
A fair amount of the analysis in this essay has shared this phenomenological approach to the practice
and interpretation of the road movie; though here I have identified in particular how the specifically
fictional aspects of the genre can extend the idea of such practices as merely imperfect recordings of
actual experience.
It is also in its broader historical analysis as a genre, and not as discrete, individual films, that the
road movie begins to offer us scope for a sociological reading, in terms not just of what the road movie
shows us, but what reading it in light of specific historical and cultural contexts can reveal. Studying the
road movie as a genre, in short, offers invaluable insights into the revealing properties of the imagined
and the performed; a way of seeing that is not so much a transparent window onto the world, but a
reflective and refractive glass, constituted in the interaction of the car’s windscreen and the creative
possibilities of the camera’s lens.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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