Aspects include the Departure/Separation, Challenges, Revelation, Transformation, and Atonement.Ĭharacters hit the open road looking for love, freedom, redemption, safety, or understanding (). Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, also known as the hero’s journey, touches the main components of the stereotypical road trip. In either case, the travelling ends with a changed perspective on life. In our road trip analysis, we wonder: what compels us to leave what we know, the familiar, and wander into the unknown? In most stories, it’s rooted in one of two things: a conscious dissatisfaction with current life or a necessity to change a character’s flaw. Sounds like a truck commercial, doesn’t it? What Makes a Road Movie a Road Movie? Essentially, to discover yourself and America, you need to be on a motorcycle or in an American-made automobile. Occasionally, you’ll see BMWs or Subarus, but they’re either the butt of jokes or the representation of foreign/wealthy influences on the characters. A journey into the heart of American wilderness is typically done in a GM, Ford, or Chevy- not an Asian-produced Kia. That’s why the vast majority of road movies involve American-made vehicles. Who hasn’t thought about giving into their innate wanderlust and escaping down Route 66? Travelling the open road is rooted in American culture. Travelling across the continent has been part of the American ideal for ages– from the compulsion of westward expansion via Manifest Destiny to the exploration of the great frontier. And, the road trip typically involves an automobile– characters don’t undergo self-discovery on airplanes. The prevalence of the plot structure increased dramatically with the boom of vehicle production in the early twentieth century. The bind between road trips and American literature isn’t surprising. Photo: Wikipedia Vehicles in the Road Trip Analysis Twain’s monumental journey of Jim and Huck down the Mississippi River. It’s about self-discovery.īy the time Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road were released, and early film allowed viewers to see locations around the world, the road trip blueprint had been set. That is what the heart of road trips are: not the destination, nor the detours along the way, but how the journey affects the traveler’s heart. The conclusion of the journey isn’t even about freeing Jim, as technically he’s already been freed in his owner’s will– it’s about Huck deciding to rescue Jim and re-think the racial biases he’s been instilled with. Along his journey, he meets Jim the slave and multiple situations that compel him to question his youthful beliefs. The titular character escapes to the “open road” without much of a goal in mind, apart from finding peace away from an abusive home. The journey takes place along a specific route (the Mississippi River) and crosses multiple states (Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, and Arkansas). It started with what many argue is the first great “road trip” story and the birth of American literature: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Overall, the “road trip” form as we know it didn’t develop until American literature began to form. The stories rarely are concerned with the protagonist’s change in character than his quest to overcome obstacles. Although early semblances of the genre appear in Homer’s The Odyssey, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, these would be better categorized as travelogues, satires, or allegories. Because of this, one would expect to see numerous examples of the “road trip” formula on bookshelves. While film is still a relatively new storytelling medium, literature has been around for eons. More: Robots can have road trips too– like this one!Ī Brief History of Road Trips In Literature Hence, we present you with our closing road trip analysis. While we’re not the first to study the intricacies of the road movie formula in screenwriting, we can still over our perspective on it. We’ve barely scratched the surface with our road trip film series but already we can see certain patterns, both in formulaic cliché elements and ways in which certain films break those clichés. Having witnessed so many journeys, we’ve learned a few things along the way–including that Disney seriously struggles with making a decent road trip flick. Through the junk and the gems, we’ve practically traveled to every point in America. After collectively studying almost thirty road trip films in depth, we offered our choices for the best, worst, and goofiest of them last week. As today is the first day of autumn, it’s time for The News Wheel to close its summer series on road trip movies (aka road movies).
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