Hollywood Utopia

104 Hollywood Utopia
Marx confidently affirmed how technology discloses human nature’s mode of
dealing with nature, the processes of production which sustain life and thereby also
lay bare the mode of formation of social relations and of the mental conceptions
that flow from them (Marx 1967: 352 in Harvey 1996: 149). To enable the car to
achieve its implicit objective of freedom and mobility, for individuals who could
afford such commodified necessities demanded of the new industrialised world,
the very face of the landscape had to be moulded to provide a comprehensive road
network. The car, like other technological breakthroughs within the mass
communication industry of the twentieth century, embodied the new world order,
concurrently invoking the enormous potential of mankind while at the same time
sowing the seeds of man’s possible destruction.
But how can road movies possibly be discussed in the context of ecology when they
appear to care little about the public good, particularly with the greenhouse effect
hanging over the environment. On a more prosaic level, an eclectic radical
moralises, ‘Do the public really want to see the gasoline guzzling V-8 of their
dreams, racing down the highway - a dream they (must) never fulfil!’ (Iche 1990:
201). While audiences might wish to answer in the negative, even if this wish is not
articulated, the textual potential for foregrounding a fractured ecological message
remains compulsive within the road movie genre.
Road movies like westerns are built around notions of freedom and mobility. Most
particularly, with the horrors of depression in the 1930s, the movement of the car
itself became a symbol of hope. As a distinct genre, however, the road movie did not
come to prominence until the late 1960s, forged by the beat writers of the 1950s
and legitimised by its countercultural valorisation of existentialist philosophy. 12
Writers like Alan Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac 13 in the 1950s
were extremely important for the development of road narratives, which
dramatised all the good things that life has to offer. The road became a ritual of
manhood, a way of proving yourself (Eyerman and Lofgren 1995: 54-9).
Easy Rider
This existentialist genre became successfully codified with the 1968 classic Easy
Rider when the market demanded a youth-oriented genre which apparently catered
for a predominately male-addressed audience and endorsed the themes of
adventure and exploration, just as the western had done in its heyday for previous
generations. Bert Schneider, Rob Rafelson and others explored this ‘ride into
nature’ as a metaphor for the escape from urban oppression into the ‘freedom’ of
self-discovery (Ryan et al. 1988: 23). But, as one critic rightly qualifies, this growing
endorsement of self-discovery and freedom was continually explored from a male
narcissistic point-of-view, resulting in regression to a warm, comforting (maternal)
environment in the face of the constraints of modern human existence.