Control is not discipline. You do not control people with a highway. But by making highways, you multiply the means of control.
—Gilles Deleuze
We don’t need a map to keep this show on the road.
—Fozzie and Kermit, The Muppet Movie (1979)
The visibility of roads and their accessories—gas stations, strip malls, oil pipelines, and so on—has made automobility unavoidable in artistic genres. One genre in particular, the road movie, gets its name from infrastructure, and yet theorists of this popular film genre rarely incorporate consideration of the road itself into their analyses; instead, road movie theory tends to emphasize speed and identity, the supposedly rebellious quality of road movie narratives, instead of the constraints of the concrete path on which antiheroes escape the oppressions of industrial capitalism. In this chapter, I examine The Wizard of Oz, Wild at Heart, and TRON as exemplars of what, after Alexander Galloway, might be called protocological control, the road as the constrained technicity of liberalism, which I argue has been overlooked as a primary determinant in the road movie genre. One kind of road movie, the existential road movie exemplified by films such as Two-Lane Blacktop, Vanishing Point, and Drive, actually foregrounds the road as an ontological inevitability, but in doing so this especially white subgenre erases “transportation racism”; in other words, at the peak of its popularity, the road movie erased the infrastructural predicates of the interstate highway and effaced the racist violence of highway construction. I conclude with a consideration of postapocalyptic road movies such as the Mad Max franchise. Postapocalyptic road movies explore the disappearance of protocological control, a speculative politics of life and death in the absence of the state form. The road movie, in this context, represents a specific struggle with liberal governmentality within the confines of infrastructural brutalism.
In the tradition of Harold Innis and James Carey, Jeremy Packer explores the historical relationship between transportation and communication. For Packer, this relationship is a “political rationality” that attempts to consolidate and expand “the possibilities of liberal governance.”1 Specifically, he analyzes “how driving behavior and the mobility it creates have been dually represented, on the one hand, as having great potential and, on the other, as a serious threat to social order.”2 His analysis follows a trajectory familiar to Foucauldian governmentality literature, which posits neoliberal governing as something that “depends not simply on legal compliance, but also on the production of subjects whose freedoms and responsibilities necessitate their investment and belief in popular truth. In simple terms,” Packer writes, “following the law is not necessarily as important as being safe.”3 The discourse of safety unites transportation and communication in the neoliberal governing order. In this context, he argues, “struggles over mobility and access thus need to be examined in both the virtual and material realms.”4 A central component in the production of subjects who prize “freedom that accords with the expansive demands of culture and economy,”5 or freedom that produces governability, is popular culture, specifically, according to Toby Miller, the discourse of genre.6 For Miller, genre is “simultaneously textual, economic, and social,” and “these concepts and their parental human sciences are technologies of governance, systems of ordering conduct.”7 In what follows I argue for one form of struggle over “mobility and access” by examining the genre of the road movie (and its generic cousin, the virtual reality movie) in terms of Alexander Galloway’s notion of protocol. The concept of protocol returns the focus of genre analyses to the material technical delimitations of automobility and its attendant offers of psychic freedom.
In her book The Road Story and the Rebel: Moving through Film, Fiction, and Television, Katie Mills employs the term “automobility” to represent the perceived autonomy and mobility of identity construction in the road movie genre.8 Mills’s treatment of the genre echoes a common articulation of form and content in the once-prototypical American story: “The road genre offers a pop cultural forum for imagining a fluid self and new genres of relating with others.”9 Given the emphasis on autonomy and mobility in much road movie scholarship, it is surprising how many theorists define the genre in terms of the affordances of vehicles and not the constraints of the road. This tends to be the case even though in road stories “the concept of liberty is most consistently defined as freedom of movement,”10 and not as a particular form of movement. Automotive movement is generally only as free as the road permits. Never mind the off-road fantasies of various truck and SUV commercials; or, rather, mind them as indications of just how powerful the desire is to contravene the rules of the road. Mills’s reading of the road movie does not capture the reactionary quality of the genre, in part, I suspect, because of the absence of a proper discussion in the road movie literature of how the road determines the aesthetic and narrative boundaries of the genre. A broader definition of automobility must be considered to account for the central tension of the genre, a tension that several road movie theorists frame as a kind of limitation to the freedom of the road, sometimes even a fatalism of the road trip. The limitations or affordances of the road movie narrative return attention to the materiality of the road.
John Urry’s use of the term automobility incorporates elements similar to Mills’s usage, but expands the definition to recognize that “what is key is not the ‘car’ as such but the system of fluid interconnections” among vehicles, roads, and various extensions of this ecology.11 Automobility, for Urry, “can be conceptualized as a self-organizing autopoietic, nonlinear system that spreads world-wide, and includes cars, car-drivers, roads, petroleum supplies and many novel objects, technologies and signs.”12 This definition foregrounds the systemic materiality of the road rather than the ephemeral desire for freedom. Considered aesthetically, this definition of automobility puts the road back into the road movie. The essential component of this definition is the paradoxical observation that “automobility is thus a system that coerces people into an intense flexibility.”13 The “paradox in the promise of automobility,” as Cotton Seiler calls it,14 actually has a surprisingly extensive history in American writing about cars, but Seiler believes automobility must be considered a greater force than Urry’s “system of fluid interconnections”: “More than merely a set of policies or attitudes cohering around cars and roads,” writes Seiler, “automobility comprises a ‘multilinear ensemble’ of commodities, bodies of knowledge, laws, techniques, institutions, environments, nodes of capital, sensibilities, and modes of perception.”15 Seiler invokes Foucault’s notion of the dispositive, or apparatus, to capture the expansion of governmentality that followed the paving of America. “Automobility—in particular that of the elevated, limited access highway of the postwar era,” Seiler charges, “provided a quotidian performance of both autonomous self-direction and acquiescence to systemic parameters. To drive, in other words, was to live motion without change.”16 “To live motion without change” aptly captures the self-deluding equation of movement with liberation—often either overtly or implicitly incorporated into road movie analyses—and, more broadly, the workings of Foucault’s disciplinary society. In fact, the phrase “to live motion without change” also defines the experience of the audience for a road movie, something not lost on Devin Orgeron, who calls the motion of the road movie a “seductive illusion.”17 It is therefore not surprising, as anthropologists Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox have noted, that roads appeal to citizens as much as they do to banks and governments: “roads continue to invoke, and to materialize, that fundamental principle of ordered freedom that underpins both modern politics and modern science.”18
The paradox of automobility expressed by Urry, Seiler, and others—driving as a freedom born of coercion, the road as built environment or “substrate” for liberal society19—parallels Galloway’s notion of protocol, a form of control based on technicity. Galloway compares the distributed networks of the interstate highway and the Internet, both open systems that achieve openness through voluntary submission to technical protocols (the TCP/IP protocols of the Internet, or the lane markings, signs, and other affordances of highway travel). To enjoy freedom of movement on the interstate highway, one must observe the technical parameters of the road; to enjoy the freedom of communication between computers on the Internet, those computers must speak the same language and observe the same technical protocols. Galloway’s work provides this chapter with a theoretical conjunction between the road movie and virtual reality films, which also depict motion as something achieved by stasis; both genres exhibit freedom as a function of technicity.
For the road movie, the voluntary submission to parameters of protocological control helps explain the central generic tension regarding the material circumscription of the road rather than the vehicles that travel upon it. Most theorists of “road” movies have focused almost exclusively on vehicles in these films. David Laderman, for example, sees the road movie as a specifically “modernist” genre, driven, as it were, by the mechanization of movement and the modernist romanticization of technology.20 He does not mention The Wizard of Oz in his introduction, presumably because Dorothy does not drive a car; “traveling in a motorized vehicle is what road movie characters do,” writes Laderman.21 While he admits, “More significant than the proliferation of the automobile as stylized commodity is the construction of the actual interstate highway system,”22 his discussion of the road movie focuses solely on motorized vehicles and the act of driving. A similar oversight, though one more attuned to the problem of roads, appears in the 2006 anthology Crossing New Europe: Postmodern Travel and the European Road Movie. The editors foreground the materiality of the road:
The type and characteristics of the actual roads along which the [European road movies] are set produce perhaps the most important distinction—the open spaces of North America, with their straight, boundless highways and the sense of freedom and opportunity to reinvent one’s life, are in clear contrast with the European reality of a mosaic of nations, cultures, languages and roads, which are separated by geographical, political and economic boundaries and customs. In European films the emphasis is either placed on crossing national borders or, in the case of national travel, on the landscapes that voyagers traverse, moving, for instance, from deprived to wealthy areas, from the country to the city, or simply through regions presenting different cultures and characteristics.23
The insight here is astute but incomplete, and ultimately the authors of the anthology are most interested in the “geographical, political and economic boundaries and customs” that separate European regions, rather than the materialities of the roads that connect these regions or extend within them. The book’s editors note important distinctions between the forms of transport (public transit or hitchhiking in European films versus the private car or motorbike in American films) and types of travelers (outcasts in America, “ordinary citizens” looking for work or immigration in Europe), but the problem of the road itself is never adequately discussed.
Together, road movies and virtual reality films are expressions of what I will call foregrounding the apparatus. The apparatus is a term that recognizes the paradoxical freedom of distributed networks, a freedom derived from the coercion of technological delimitations; the genres in question typically show or foreground the apparatus that produces reactionary forms of governmentality. A protocological reading of these genres can begin to articulate the constraints of technicity, in the form of a road movie such as The Wizard of Oz (1939), or in the form of a virtual reality film such as TRON (1982). Typically, films that foreground technically restrictive freedom appear during the emergence of new forms of protocols. The meditative and pivotal quality of the Yellow Brick Road in The Wizard of Oz, for example, captures the emergence of newly surfaced roads across America, but before the period of ubiquitous automobility. TRON transforms the Yellow Brick Road into the circuitous control of the so-called network society, at the birth of personal computers and networked computing. The contradictions of highway and cyberspace protocol are better understood in terms of Galloway’s central insight: “The founding principle of the Net is control, not freedom. Control has existed from the beginning. Perhaps it is a different type of control than we are used to seeing. It is a type of control based on openness, inclusion, universalism, and flexibility. It is control borne from high degrees of technical organization (protocol), not this or that limitation on individual freedom or decision making (fascism).”24 On the protocological road, the buoyant refrain “follow the Yellow Brick Road” becomes less the jubilant expression of deliverance from self-imposed exile and more the controlled imperative of industrialized wandering. Or, as Cotton Seiler states, “in these moments of danger that threatened capitalist-liberal hegemony by destabilizing its narrative of selfhood, automobility performed a crucial restorative role by giving that selfhood a vital form conducive to the existing arrangement of power.”25 Is it any wonder that Dorothy’s excursion ends in a solipsistic arrival?
Theorists of the road movie are particularly attuned to this dynamic—a contradictory impulse, an overbearing sense of control in the emancipatory structure of networked abandon—and characterize this central tension as everything from a classical ontological trope of movement versus stasis to a figure for the act of interpretation and its inherent ambiguities. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark argue that the road movie “sets the liberation of the road against the oppression of hegemonic norms,” projecting “American Western mythology onto the landscape traversed and bound by the nation’s highways.”26 Typically, one half of this dialectic—the “liberation of the road,” and not the ways in which the liberation is “bound by the nation’s highways”—is foregrounded as the more salient feature of the road movie; but always the liberation of the road is bound, the outlaw posture always curbed and directed by the asphalt and markings on which it flees. David Laderman describes the road movie dynamic as “a tension between rebellion and conformity.” The rebellious trajectory of classic road movies, often exemplars of sixties counterculture, remains diminished or subverted by the traditions from which it flees.27
In generic terms, Laderman poses this qualified form of cultural critique as a “distinctively modernist staging of a rather classical, perhaps timeless and universal struggle between two primal drives: the dynamic and the static.”28 Devin Orgeron echoes this sentiment, arguing that road movies “extend a longstanding cinematic tradition that posits a hopeless and lamentable mobility in an effort to eulogize or find stability.”29 In his view, this dichotomy of mobility and stability is informed by a reactionary nostalgia, “a desire to roll history back, to return to a pre-technological, mythically innocent moment.”30 However, the contradictory impulses of the road movie, according to Laderman, are “confined by the conventional roadblocks of classical genre film,”31 whereas Orgeron sees the generic contradictions as emanating from a “desire to both admire and critique American mythologies in a distinctly European dialect.”32 The road movie has always been “inherently schizoid,” claims Michael Atkinson, “offsetting our mad romance with the internal combustion engine, upholstery, tailfins and endless asphalt with a seemingly unpreventable collapse into failure and pain.”33 For Stuart C. Aitken and Christopher Lee Lukinbeal, the central tension of the road movie exists at the hysterical “edge of self-identity, being simultaneously motionless (holding onto the seat of one’s identity) and in motion (transcending social/spatial scales and annihilating space and time),” a psychoanalytic expression of the road movie paradox.34 For Christopher Morris, road movie quests are “not only futile but repetitive” because they “anticipate” and dramatize “paralysis and redundancy in reading.”35 Morris sees road movie reflexivity as analogous to the Derridean “act of reading.”36 The genre itself is elusive and full of contradiction because the road is a figure “for reading itself.”37 The liberation of the road, then, is bound by the impossibility of the journey, just as meaning through interpretation is bound by interpretive aporias: “the road journey repudiates the idea of arrival at something worthwhile; redundant endings vitiate beginnings.”38 Finally, Corey K. Creekmur reminds us, “Every American who knows ‘there’s no place like home’—the mantra of America’s most famous road movie—also remembers that ‘you can’t go home again.’”39 Folk wisdom frames the freedom of the road trip as redundant, futile, and, upon return home, somewhat tragic.
Whether a classical trope, a generic limitation, a hermeneutic blindside, or a slice of American common sense, the central tension in the road movie—and, as I argue, in the virtual reality movie—expresses an emancipation based on movement and speed and dislocation that is always constrained, redundant, or perhaps unadvised. The road should be a path to freedom, these films want to believe, just as computers conjoined by common languages should embody a form of communicative autonomy. But as Galloway demonstrates, distributed networks such as the highways and the Internet only achieve autonomous postures through the imposition of a reactionary protocol, a set of procedures that enable data transmission between computers or traffic passage between destinations, “a distributed management system that allows control to exist within a heterogeneous material milieu.”40 To illustrate computer protocol, Galloway uses the analogy of the highway system:
Many different combinations of roads are available to a person driving from point A to point B. However, en route one is compelled to stop at red lights, stay between the white lines, follow a reasonably direct path, and so on. These conventional rules that govern the set of possible behavior patterns within a heterogeneous system are what computer scientists call protocol. Thus, protocol is a technique for achieving voluntary regulation within a contingent environment.41
For the Internet, protocol is constructed based on what are called RFC (request for comment) documents. These documents are compiled by experts and contain rules and recommendations for technical standards. On the basis of these standards, open communication is possible on the Internet; that is, the communicative freedom engendered by computers on the Internet is a product of submission to reactionary technical standards. Galloway returns to the analogy of the road to explain the functioning of computer protocols, which delimit control in an otherwise open and decentralized system (whether Internet or interstate highway): “signage and police compel [the] driver to slow down. . . . Bumps, on the other hand, create a physical system of organization. They materially force the driver to acquiesce.”42 “Bumps,” the exemplar of protocological control in this example, shape voluntary submission in a distinctly different fashion than the coercion of police surveillance.
Both the interstate highway and the Internet emerged during the Cold War for the purposes of facilitating increased mobility and communication in the event of a nuclear war;43 in both cases, the specter of war was the impetus for subjecting a greater portion of the populace to “high degrees of technical organization” in the service of open transportation and communication. To forward the case for a federally funded interstate highway, the highway lobby tapped into a popular perception among ordinary Americans that the Soviet Union wanted to “rule the world” and that a nuclear attack was imminent.44 In addition, “Eisenhower’s appointment of a general to head the advisory committee made plain the connection between highways, national defense, and the fear Americans had about their security.”45 Eisenhower’s own experience during and after World War II convinced him that railroad lines were much easier for invading armies to disrupt; a highway, such as the autobahn he witnessed in Germany after the war, “proved a harder target.”46 Despite Eisenhower’s conviction, and the popular sentiment of the American public, the interstate highway was arguably not necessary for improved national defense:
Even though about 80 percent of war materials in World War II had been moved by rail, the alleged strategic need for an interstate system for national defense became the main argument of the highway lobby. In 1956 the official name of the system became the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. National defense was the major justification for increasing the federal share of funding from the 60–40 ratio in the 1944 Federal Aid Highway Act to 90–10 in the 1956 Interstate Highway Act and for permitting federal funds from general tax revenues as well as special user taxes to be used for building the system. St. Clair and Leavitt both demonstrate convincingly that, contrary to the contention of the Road Gang, the Interstate System was never essential to national defense.47
The highway that ushered in a new automotive culture was couched in militaristic parlance but characterized by a different form of control than traditional hierarchical military authority. Instead this was a protocological road, a technicity wrapped in the flag but managed by a distributed and voluntary regulatory mode.
Americans who desired freedom in the form of automobility—and their government, which desired military advantage in the form of distributed networks—had to accept the rules of the road. At the turn of the twentieth century only seven percent of American roads were surfaced,48 and from 1900 to 1929 the number of registered automobiles in America increased from 8,000 to 23.1 million.49 An automobile culture existed, and even flourished among the middle class into the 1920s, but it was not until after the passing of the Interstate Highway Act in 1956 that driving became a pastime of working-class Americans.50 Following the passage of the Interstate Highway Act, “motor vehicle registrations in the United States . . . more than doubled, from 49.2 million in 1950 to 108.4 million in 1970.”51 This period also witnessed some of the most famous road movies, such as Catch Us If You Can (1965), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Easy Rider (1969), and Five Easy Pieces (1970). While the films themselves often embodied the outlaw spirit and the countercultural disaffection of the 1960s, the newly paved and marked interstate roads on which escape from societal conformity was made possible were the product of state-sanctioned technological regulations. The fatalism expressed in many of these films reflected the dawning awareness of the counterculture’s overall failure to transform American society, so eloquently and forcefully depicted in Hunter S. Thompson’s road reportage, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, later turned into a film directed by Terry Gilliam (1998); but at least part of the fatalism was derived from the material circumscription of the road as another form of control. Critics who focus on the liberatory quality of the roads optimistically foreground desire over material constraint: movement attempts to supersede technological control. But the birth of the interstate highway offered another form of voluntary submission to technical control: it offered only two evenly demarcated trajectories, only two directions for individuation. The limitations of this material reality made the highways cause for lamentation as much as celebration. As Thompson wrote, “Old elephants limp off to the hills to die; old Americans go out to the highway and drive themselves to death with huge cars.”52
The most famous American road movie precedes the period of interstate highway expansion and does not feature an automobile. The Wizard of Oz features a bicycle, a horse-drawn carriage, a hot air balloon, and a flying broomstick, but there is no car and thus no evidence of a modernist sensibility; and so, according to Laderman’s criteria, this is not a “road” movie. The movie opens with Dorothy following a dirt road back to her family’s Depression-era Kansas farm. Later, Miss Gulch arrives with her bicycle on the dirt road. After Miss Gulch takes Toto and rides away, he escapes and he too follows the road, this time back to Dorothy’s room. The next invocation of a road is the Technicolor phantasm of the Yellow Brick Road, which, unlike any interlocking meshwork of paved roads, has a beginning, a point of origin. As if to punctuate the emerging voluntary submission to the technicity of the surfaced road, Dorothy begins her journey by walking along the spiraling origin of the Yellow Brick Road, instead of simply walking (or skipping) directly to where the road expands and exits Munchkinland. The singsong directive to “follow the Yellow Brick Road” is the transformative moment in The Wizard of Oz, one of the great departures in the history of American leaving, and a recognition at the dawning of widespread surfaced roads that the impoverished dirt tracks in front of Dorothy’s Kansas farm are the sepia-toned engravings of the past and not the vibrant gold-bricked prosperity of the future. This movie is more about the coming of (surfaced) roads than any other American road movie.
Arriving as it does at the tail end of the Great Depression, The Wizard of Oz captures the longing to escape the desperate conditions of the Depression, and simultaneously captures the lack of automobility for most of the people attempting this escape. Many people hit the road during the 1930s “simply because there were no jobs or because their families were disintegrating around them.”53 This carless exodus produced the ultimate irony of the period: “in a world where so many took to the road, so few had any real mobility.”54 Dorothy’s experience embodies this contradiction. By imagining her trip to Oz, she leaves without moving. Her paradox exemplifies the “fantasy culture of the 1930s,” which “is all about movement, not the desperate simulation of movement we find in the road stories but movement that suggests genuine freedom.”55 The road symbolized a “thrust toward the future”56 in Depression-era culture, even without the mobility of an automobile.
Some have suggested Oz is an allegory of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, an idea promoted by The Wizard of Oz lyricist E. Y. Harburg, a dedicated socialist, in an interview with the Washington Post just before his death.57 Dorothy escapes the dust bowl of Kansas, but amidst the many perils of the land of Oz, such as the fascist threat of the Wicked Witch, the Yellow Brick Road leads assuredly to the Emerald City and the New Deal antidotes to Depression-era misery, with the Wizard himself “a good-natured satire of Franklin Roosevelt.”58 The “movement” of this road movie imbues the Yellow Brick Road with futurity, the promise of mobility and purpose without the mechanized means to establish “a sense of transcending the boundaries of scale.”59 It is the speed of later road movies that performs the disappearance of the road itself, and gives the impression that the central tension of the road movie is something immaterial: genre, classical trope, the act of reading. The sense of transcendence engendered by speed is, ultimately, as Aitken and Lukinbeal argue, “only a sense . . . a psychic freedom that offers emancipation but, in actuality, practices emasculation.”60 Perhaps this is why Dorothy’s dream does not proffer the same disillusionment as many post-1956 road movies, the feeling that once the tires stop spinning so too does the emancipatory buzz. Dorothy’s song and dance on the Yellow Brick Road never escapes the material technicity of passage, and everyone she meets in Oz, whether friend (the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion) or foe (the flying monkeys), engages her on or just off the road, a fantastic manifestation of America’s burgeoning road ecology.
The great irony of The Wizard of Oz is Dorothy’s conflicting desire both to find “a place where there isn’t any trouble” while she is in Kansas, and later, while in Oz, “to get out of Oz altogether,” what Pamela Robertson calls “the road movie’s contradiction between the desire for home and away,”61 and what Salman Rushdie calls “the purity of an archetype . . . the human dream of leaving, a dream at least as powerful as its countervailing dream of roots.”62 Dorothy wants to be nowhere and somewhere simultaneously. In addition to being an archetypal desire, her hysterical and hyperbolic inclination to leave in spatially expansive terms (“a place where there isn’t any trouble,” “over the rainbow,” “out of Oz altogether”) is only contracted by the protocological space of the road. While certainly Dorothy’s expansive gestures are the product of an adolescent penchant for exaggeration, they also reflect the changing complexion of Depression-era America as its growing road system enabled its citizens to imagine a more broadly striated country, in which hope and futurity were spatially arranged.
From the moment Dorothy begins her journey on the Yellow Brick Road and its originary spiral, she is tracing the outward movement of what Edward Dimendberg labels “centrifugal space.”63 Centrifugal space is a “determinant feature of the built environment of modernity,” and “largely defines the geographic arrangement of the United States after 1930.” The highway, with its propensity for speed and sprawl, “may well be the preeminent centrifugal space of the twentieth century,” replacing the centripetal navigation of the street and the railroad in pre-1930s cinema.64 As Dorothy prances away from the munchkins and the smoking carnage of the Witch of the East, she first walks in a spiraling motion, then heads for the centrifugal space of Oz with gathering speed, before stopping to wave goodbye to the munchkins. When next we see Dorothy, she has reached a crossroads. The efferent road becomes multitudinous assemblage. Eventually Dorothy and friends will enter the metropolis of the Emerald City, whose skyline resembles that of New York City. Dorothy travels from the dirt roads of Kansas, an engineering nowhere, to the sparkling modernity of somewhere. Instead of a romanticized modernity that celebrates “technology as a liberating force that can lead us into the future,”65 the Emerald City offers a vision of technology as a form of cunning magic, and the purveyor of progress as a charlatan. Also unlike Laderman’s road movie, The Wizard of Oz does not follow a mechanized escape from “choking industrialized stability”66 but instead echoes another classic theme of American film, the “portrait of hicks from the sticks arriving at the metropolis.”67 This trajectory of events in The Wizard of Oz is a consequence of the film depicting the burgeoning promise of roads prior to the ubiquitous ownership of cars, a brief moment in American car culture during which centrifugal space outstripped a pervasive capacity for sense-distorting velocity, and the protocological road was imposing technical control only on a relatively small and affluent segment of the population. Consider that the major transformation in American roads during the twentieth century was not quantitative but qualitative: “The U.S. road system has less than doubled in length since 1900. What has changed is the quality and capacity of that system.”68 The Yellow Brick Road is a reminder of the qualitative material transformation of America’s roads. By the end of the 1950s centrifugal space had thoroughly transformed American social life, and by the end of the 1970s the protocological road entered the American imaginary not as a golden-bricked futurity but as an asphalt scar of misshapen and abusive social planning.
By 1980, “some 87.2 percent of American households owned one or more motor vehicles, 51.5 percent owned more than one, and fully 95 percent of domestic sales were for replacement.”69 Road movies acquired a distinctively fatalistic tone in the 1960s and 1970s, and by the 1980s and 1990s, with almost every American household in possession of a motor vehicle, the fatalism of the outlaw journey frequently turned into ironic deadpan or postmodern pastiche. As Michael Atkinson wrote of this era, “lately, everybody is packing into the nearest stolen roadster, slapping an Elvis tape into the stereo and leaving their ruined lives behind.”70 The common critical consensus for years has been that the road movie became exhausted by the same postmodern aesthetics that proclaimed the “end” of everything. Atkinson expressed this consensus most famously in his review of the genre for Sight and Sound:
Today, there’s little frontier to speak of and little hope of national rediscovery, and the movies confirm the generational sense of Generation-X defeatism by transforming the travelled landscape into a bricolage of cinematic tropes—especially the omnipresent stench of burnt gunpowder and smoking bodies—and by being, with or without a helpful dollop of irony, unabashed Road Movies. Characters hit the road less for any concrete, plot-driven reason than because they’ve seen a lot of movies and that’s what you do. Objectively speaking, what could be more of a dead end?71
While clearly an epochal cultural discourse one might categorize as postmodern did have influence on the road movie genre, the material circumscription and central tension of the protocological road—by the 1980s a form of technicity experienced by most Americans—more centrally informed the aesthetic of the road. More frustrating than the loss of a frontier, to white settler publics, is the repeated experience of voluntary submission to technical control. Consider the quotidian experience of commuting to work as a measure of this repeated submission to technicity. The segment of workers who commuted across county lines in the United States in 1960 was about 15 percent; by 1980, about 20 percent of workers commuted; and by 2000, more than 25 percent, over 34 million workers, commuted.72 The expansion of centrifugal space in the postmodern era is matched by the proliferation and banality of carbound duties.
Typical of the road movie in this postmodern era is David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990), in which The Wizard of Oz acts as an archetypal icon of pop art self-fashioning, and the road trip is a journey into what Atkinson calls “the ragged outskirts of pop culture.”73 In Wild at Heart, the paradoxical push and pull of the road in Oz becomes an emblem of the futility of desire, couched in the cultural pastiche of Sailor and Lula. Sailor and Lula play the part of desperate outlaws on the lam, but their experience of the road is so completely hemmed in by four decades of centrifugal space that actions reverberate only as unconscious evocations of pop culture iconography, perhaps best illustrated by Sailor’s rehearsed declaration that his snakeskin jacket is a “symbol of [his] individuality and [his] belief in personal freedom.” Like Dorothy, Sailor and Lula did not have to leave in order to arrive at their destination; the destination was always a function of self-invention. Lynch explains the frequent allusions to The Wizard of Oz in Wild at Heart—“with Marietta’s picture disappearing at the end; when Bobby Peru is with Lula and she clicks the heels of her red shoes together; the Good Fairy at the end”74—as an expression of a central tension in The Wizard of Oz: “There’s a certain amount of fear in the picture,” he says, “as well as things to dream about. So it seems truthful in some way.” The “truth” of The Wizard of Oz is synonymous with how Galloway defines protocol: “protocol appeals to the body . . . it always operates at the level of desire, at the level of ‘what we want.’”75 With those “bumps” in the road, Galloway says, “the driver wants to drive more slowly.” For Lynch, desire is the bump in the road, the constraint that produces voluntary social organization, even if it is an organization that is “wild at heart and weird on top.” If the road movie lost some of its idealistic and naturalistic verve in the 1980s and 1990s, this is most likely because hitting the road became less of a conscious departure and more of an unconscious necessity in industrialized societies. Protocological technicities redounded with habitual frequency. In Wild at Heart, the Yellow Brick Road is depicted as the striation of the Symbolic order it always was, America looking at itself in a mirror after a long and strange love affair with the automobile.
Films that depict the protocological road, films that foreground the apparatus, often appear at the emergence of a new form of protocol. The Wizard of Oz appears before interstate highway expansion but captures the emergence of centrifugal space in distributed networks. The virtual reality movie is similarly “protocological,” in that its central tension derives from an increasing social organization at the level of computational rules. The distributed networks of the Internet, like the interstate highways, were born of Cold War logic but protocological instantiation. Of the different sources for the development of packet switching technology in the late 1950s, the forerunner of the ARPANET and later the Internet, RAND engineer Paul Baran’s proposal for the necessity of “survivable communications” in the event of a nuclear war led him to formulate “distributed communications.”76 Even if part of the communications system were downed by war, messages could be rerouted to arrive at their destinations. The now-familiar history of networked computing eventually merged with another technological trend that began in earnest in the late 1970s and early 1980s, personal computing: “By 1984 personal computer sales [in the United States] accounted for more revenue than IDC’s large, medium-sized, or small computer market segments, with shipments of 9.7 million personal computers for a total revenue of some $17 billion, bringing the installed base in 1984 to 23 million machines.”77 If by 1980 the hegemonic protocological road was the interstate, the emerging protocological road was that of the intertwining personal computer user and networked computing.
The dreamstate metaphorics of Oz find their late twentieth-century counterpart in the technocultural discourse of virtual reality films such as TRON (1982), Brainstorm (1983), The Thirteenth Floor (1999), eXistenz (1999), and the Matrix trilogy (1999, 2003, 2003). The mechanization of transportation cedes to the computerization of mobility, and the circuit is the road on which code rides. The vehicular extension of the body78 is replaced by its digital doppelganger, an elecTRONic Other that acts and is acted upon by the discursive forces of the mode of information. In films such as TRON and The Matrix, the quest for liberation from the panoptic power of the code is achieved by the ability of the hero to transform the virtual environment from a conventionally authoritarian one to a protocological one; however, like the road movie quest, this journey is haunted and ultimately contained by the paradoxical freedom of technical regulation. This central tension, depicted in The Wizard of Oz as the journey Dorothy takes while being motionless, occurs in the virtual reality film in the form of the often seated protagonist who ports with a computer by being plugged into or, in the case of TRON, interpellated by an extension of the computer.
In TRON, which appeared at the height of video arcade game’s popularity, the Oz-like centralized authority is the Master Control Program (MCP), an oppressive artificial intelligence that controls the virtual world of the film. Hacker Kevin Flynn is trying to access a file being hidden by the MCP when he is literally transported into the computer, in a scene reminiscent of Dorothy’s tornado vortex to the Land of Oz. In fact, virtual reality films often feature some form of kaleidoscopic flux that represents the transition from real world to virtual world; the visual precursor for these trippy transformations is the psychedelic monolith sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), but thematically The Wizard of Oz with its famous tornado-to-Technicolor transition is the primary cinematic referent for the beginning of many virtual reality journeys. Orgeron suggests that “changes in film stocks and a general consciousness about the effect of the ‘material’ of the cinema on the efficacy of the journey have become fundamental icons of the road genre,”79 citing examples such as Wild at Heart, Thelma and Louise (1991), and Natural Born Killers (1994). If Dorothy’s famous declaration that she’s “not in Kansas anymore” is the line that separates Depression-era dirt roads from surfaced roads, then the digital vortex that often represents real-to-VR transitions is visual shorthand for the same thing in postindustrial aesthetics. When Flynn tries to hack into the MCP in the real world, the MCP warns that it will “have to put [Flynn] in the game grid” to “see what [he] is made of.” The transition from real world to “game grid” is depicted at first as like looking into a kaleidoscope, which then turns into a vortex, which ends with a digital image of a circuit board, which transforms into a digitized globe and is hovered over as in the 2001 sequence, until the camera peers into one of the I/O towers and Flynn is deposited in VR form. From the drab colors of the real world, Flynn transforms into the neon articulations of the virtual reality world, an effect achieved by “backlight animation,” a visual differentiation of ontologies similar to The Wizard of Oz’s use of Technicolor.
Flynn’s database search is depicted as a literal war between the libertarian forces of Flynn’s “Users” and the panoptic power of the MCP’s “programs.” As in The Wizard of Oz, characters from the real world have their virtual counterparts. The programs created by Flynn and other Users are portrayed in the virtual world by the same actors who portray their Users. The journey to the MCP across the striated paths of the circuits uses virtual cars, tanks, and planes. These vehicles must follow the geometric striations of the digital world. Cars drive along gridlike digital planes. Some of the flying machines travel along beams of light. For a User like Flynn, the beams can be redirected, and at one point in the film he redirects a beam to avoid colliding with an enemy ship. On another occasion, he creates a flying machine called a Recognizer from the digital detritus of his environment, a manipulation of virtual space of which only Users are capable; Neo’s manipulation of time/space in The Matrix, both in the “bullet time” sequence and at the end of the film when confronting the Agents, offers a later exemplar of the same phenomenon. The goal of Flynn’s quest while he is “in” the computer is to make accessible a file that betrays the duplicity of his former employer. In the process, he hacks the MCP and disables its dictatorial control over the system. At the end of the film, the I/O towers of the virtual world light up, signaling that the system is now open and communicating with other networks. TRON ends, that is, with the triumph of computer protocols, of “survivable communication,” the openness of digital communication made possible by submission to reactionary regulations.
As a subset of the science fiction genre, VR films (often categorized as cyberpunk) foreground mobility as a narrative “structuring device.”80 The immensely popular Matrix films gave us a “representation of movement that has not previously been possible.”81 And yet the same dynamic or central tension that haunts the road movie can be found in the VR movie. “The impossible bodily movement of The Matrix,” as Anne Cranny-Francis says, “enacts the perceived (conceptual) freedom of post-industrial information societies, while also signifying its dependence on the technologies it deploys—the immobile body of the operator jacked into the machine.”82 The information society practice of Web interface “navigation” elicits a similar practice of imagining movement while stationary. TRON, The Matrix, and other VR movies participate in this assemblage of popular culture and neoliberal practices. Perhaps TRON is also an appropriate exemplar of the protocological road because it features an actual road race, albeit a digital approximation without dirt, dust, or even a proper road. The “light cycle” race, in which digitized motorcycles crisscross a matrix while making 90-degree turns and attempting to enclose or block their opponents with the solidified trace of their passage, foregrounds simultaneously the act of movement and the “high degrees of technical organization” typical of protocol. The light cycles cannot make diagonal movements; they are restricted to perpendicularity. Winning the race involves using the protocological restrictions against your opponent. And still, even within the enclosure of the geometric grid, Flynn finds a way out. The promise of liberation glimpsed in his escape is rescinded somewhat by the realization that escaping the technical control of protocol only leads to another protocological construct. Mostly, however, the light cycle sequence reminds viewers of the speed that characterizes contemporary road movies, the speed that provides a sense of transcending scale, the speed that momentarily releases identity from technicity even as it fuses the two. Ultimately, there is no escaping the rules of the road, and, as witnessed by the conclusion of TRON, the liberation found in a road movie is a compromised freedom at best, a communicative freedom that owes its potential to reactionary technical standards. Most road movie scholarship focuses intently on the speed of mechanized transport—cars, trucks, motorcycles—and its delirious phenomenological effect: the road movie liberates by obliterating, the motor outpaces the material forms of constraint and frees the body from itself, as imaginary exile, unconscious invocation of a pop culture icon, or cyberspace avatar. But whatever the road movie promises, the reality is that you can only go where protocol will allow. No map is required.
For many young people, the racing video game has replaced the road movie and VR film as the defining protocological experience. Game franchises such as Gran Turismo, Forza Motorsport, Need for Speed, Burnout, and countless others have proliferated into multiple subgenres. Psychological studies suggest a “racing-game effect,” the notion that playing racing games “can trigger risk-supportive cognitions and emotions” and thus increase “risk-taking behavior, both within and beyond the driving context.”83 Correlations have been established between the tens of thousands of illegal street-racing incidents in California alone and playing racing video games.84 The study of road movie and VR genre films should consider whether video games, in their frequent attempts to approach realistic physics with game play, might be sources of imagining metatechnical possibilities for the reactionary technicities of industrial life, hopefully possibilities more liberatory than street racing. Such metatechnical possibilities, as Jeremy Packer reminds us, should be aligned with communication and transportation mobilities:
What I want to call for, then, is a renewed importance placed upon the function of transportation as a cultural and communicative practice that defines relationships between the two as complicit. The two need to be thought of in the same terms, especially with the increasingly mobile capabilities of nearly all communications technologies. At the same time, transportation and the forms of mobility produced by its various modes need to be analyzed as key sites of culture and communication. Struggles over mobility and access thus need to be examined in both the virtual and the material realms. Many of the debates over the control of these networks of mobility follow the same logic.85
As digital communications become mobile and globally networked, the projection of protocol enters new habits, spaces, and logics. Simultaneously, the depletion of resources globally, especially oil, may foreshadow a generation whose primary experience of the road is in the form of a game.
Perhaps the subgenre that best elicits a sense of the materiality of the road is the existential road movie, which includes Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), Vanishing Point (1971), Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry (1974), and others. In this subgenre, characters are not so much in transit as they are in transition; drivers are what they are. The setting shifts from inside a car to the pumps at a gas station, a table at a roadside restaurant, or the occasional drag race. Often these films have minimal plot and characters with Brechtian designations such as The Driver or The Mechanic. While the road is foregrounded as more than simply a quotidian presence, the type of gearhead nihilism that propels these narratives typically includes a blindness to certain inequalities of the paved paradigm; in particular, existential road movies tend to efface the racist and classist historical and material alignments of the highways on which their white heroes ride. Even a film such as Easy Rider, which exhibits bigotry of the Deep South, invokes the experiences of two white hippies who “head out on the highway” as emblematic of American crises of the late sixties, a limited focal point especially for a film in which infrastructure plays such a central role. The classics of this subgenre were produced in the immediate aftermath of interstate highway construction and “urban renewal” programs that overwhelmingly and negatively impacted the poor and people of color, the outcome of which included urban riots in major cities such as Detroit, Chicago, Newark, and Washington, D.C. in the late 1960s. Existential road movies register very little of this massive infrastructural displacement and segregation of largely black and poor communities. By foregrounding white nihilism, these films ignore the fact that “the battle against the freeway juggernaut for the soul of the American city was also a new chapter in the nation’s history of racial conflict, a chapter where Jim Crow stepped behind the curtain and emerged in a new guise: infrastructure.”86 Transportation racism shifted resources to the suburbs, allowed urban transit programs to decline, and constructed forms of automobility that would disadvantage communities of color by subjecting them to most of the toxic legacies of the interstate system.87 In other words, while classic road movies occasionally foreground the materiality of the road, they typically do so by erasing the sociohistorical circumstances of its construction and instead articulating what Jason Henderson calls the “essentialization of automobility,”88 as something inevitable into which the antihero abandons himself and his hope for the future. If roads are seen as “a universal given”89 and not as sites of struggle, then those who master the road can only embody its contours of hegemony in a race toward oblivion.90
In Two-Lane Blacktop, for example, The Driver, The Mechanic, and The Girl are drifting across America looking for drag racing competition when they cross paths with GTO, a talkative yuppie and former TV producer in cashmere sweaters so enthralled with his new direction in life—driving a fast car—that he bores his hitchhiking passengers into catching a ride with someone else. Eventually and reluctantly, The Girl sets off with GTO. While she sleeps in the passenger seat of his car, GTO speaks desperately of the life he imagines them sharing:
We’re gonna go to Florida. And we’re gonna lie around that beach, and we’re just gonna get healthy. Let all the scars heal. Maybe we’ll run over to Arizona. The nights are warm, and the roads are straight. And we’ll build a house. Yeah, we’ll build a house. ’Cause if I’m not grounded pretty soon, I’m gonna go into orbit.
Florida might be an arbitrary southern destination for GTO’s fantasy, but it is a destination particularly emblematic of the infrastructural Jim Crow emerging in the postwar United States. N. D. B. Connolly begins his book A World More Concrete with a portrait of “one of America’s first underexpressway parks” being opened in July 1969 beneath Interstate 95 in Miami’s Central Negro District.91 The interstate had displaced houses and apartments, and with the construction of a playground underneath the interstate the “future of black Miami looked up at a concrete sky.”92 Connolly describes the postwar infrastructural brutalization of oppressed communities as “investments in racial apartheid, largely in an effort to govern growing cities and to unleash the value of land as real estate.”93 The modern infrastructure of American white supremacy, which began in the late nineteenth century, extended into the 1960s.94
Even before the end of World War II, it remained clear that infrastructural power would mostly protect and extend the reach and longevity of white power. . . . Infrastructural power over real estate, in particular, proved instrumental to maintaining the racial peace, to holding the color line, and to monitoring South Florida’s, and indeed America’s, economic growth.95
When GTO dreams of Florida, he imagines a privileged white retreat. None of his dream will come to pass, of course, but GTO’s fantasy of warm nights and straight roads captures the central tension of the road movie, discussed above—to be “grounded” but also freed by speed—and foregrounds the contradiction. GTO, unlike our heroes The Driver and The Mechanic, does not arrive at gearhead nihilism authentically: he buys an expensive new car, tries to impress everyone he meets with the car’s particulars, and ultimately cannot overcome the bourgeois dream of settling down, being “grounded” by domesticated fantasies. GTO does not possess the “emotional alienation” favored by early seventies road movies.96 The Driver, played by James Taylor, almost never breaks his expression of sullen stoicism, and this marker of authenticity—in addition to the fact that his car, a custom-built 1955 Chevy, is not an off-the-shelf expensive new car like GTO’s—ensures that The Driver cannot survive for long in a world of grounded domestication. The film literally dissolves in the final drag race, after The Driver briefly glimpses through his driver’s side window horses frolicking on a farm. The Driver knows the road is a death sentence, but he follows it anyway. In Easy Rider, horses were juxtaposed with motorcycles for an obvious metaphor of motorized mobility and the new nomadism; but in Two-Lane Blacktop the horses represent a world that The Driver has left behind, a settler ethos abandoned in favor of nihilistic drift.
The opening scene of Vanishing Point, another classic of the existential road movie subgenre, depicts two bulldozers being positioned in the middle of a road that runs through a small town. The locals silently observe police cars anxiously in pursuit, and next we see the road approaching town from the perspective of a helicopter. This is the end of the line for the driver being pursued, Kowalski, played by Barry Newman. Kowalski is a caricature of hetero white machismo—an ex-soldier, ex-cop, and former stunt driver who drives a white 1970 Dodge Challenger; he saved a woman from being raped by a fellow police officer; his romantic partner died in a surfing accident. Super Soul, the blind African DJ played by Cleavon Little, connects Kowalski to the countercultural community, but ultimately suffers a racist beating for helping Kowalski avoid the police. Super Soul’s preternatural capacity to communicate with Kowalski over the radio aligns him with the racist cinema cliché of the “magical negro,” a common anti-Black stereotype that glorifies racially subservient characters by endowing them with the extraordinary ability to rescue and perpetuate whiteness.97 While Laderman considers the racist assault on Super Soul a “potent critique of white racism,”98 the scene is diminished by Super Soul’s passive position in the road movie narrative—white cops and outlaws get to drive, while the principal Black man in the story sits and observes—and by his articulation as a “magical negro,” which has since the time of Vanishing Point become an established racist trope. If Easy Rider and Two-Lane Blacktop mourn the passing of white hippie culture post-Altamont and post-Woodstock, then Vanishing Point laments the passing of white libertarian individualism. Kowalski might have fans in the counterculture of the film, but his biography—ex-cop, ex-stunt driver, ex-soldier—aligns him with a rejection of institutional whiteness that does not point to affiliation or solidarity with antiracist action. Kowalski turns his back on violent forms of whiteness only to engage in a drug-fueled bet and cross-country race that ends in self-destruction. If, as Super Soul claims, Kowalski is the “last American hero to whom speed means freedom of the soul,” then his annihilation posits the futility of collective resistance in the context of racist transportation policies and the new segregationist contours of post-interstate America. Kowalski’s self-destruction is a privilege of whiteness that refuses collectivity, a nihilism predicated on repeated embraces of institutionalized whiteness (the military, the police) that end in disillusionment for a figure of distended machismo.
Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2011 film Drive exploits many of the generic qualities found in Two-Lane Blacktop and Vanishing Point, while appropriating narrative elements of Walter Hill’s The Driver (1978) through the aesthetic prism of 1980s Euro synth-pop and a neon noir filter of opening title fonts from Risky Business (1983) and To Live and Die in L.A. (1985). This aesthetic attempts to generate nihilistic cool from the antithetical components of eighties artifice and moody noir intensity, and Refn received the 2011 Cannes Film Festival Director Award for his efforts. Ryan Gosling plays The Driver in Drive, a Hollywood stunt driver who works as a getaway-car driver on the side. He makes a deal with Albert Brooks’s mobster character, Bernie Rose, trying to protect the woman with whom he has fallen in love and her son. Bernie explains to The Driver that he “used to produce movies. In the ’80s. Kind of like action films. Sexy stuff. One critic called them European.” The reflexive dialogue positions Rose as a Refn surrogate, someone who makes violent art house pictures with an eighties aesthetic, a self-aware gesture that frames Drive as a postmodern road movie that layers self-referential genre critique onto the already-barren narrative mode of neon noir such as Blade Runner (1982), To Live and Die in L.A., and Manhunter (1986). Neon noir is possessed of a brittleness not common to film noir, because the black-and-white existential smog of classical noir is replaced with reflective, colorful urban surfaces and high-fashion hairstyles. The sincerity of classical noir succumbs to violent vaporwave sarcasm. In addition to synth musical scores and stylized credits, neon noir often costumes characters in cutting-edge fashions instead of the nostalgic trench coats and fedoras of classic noir. The Driver wears a silver satin racing jacket with a scorpion embroidered on the back, a symbol that refers to the fable of the scorpion and the frog. The Driver cannot deny his nature, even if it means propelling himself into a void. Drive reproduces gearhead nihilism (The Driver actually works at a garage) and noir plotting with a visual and aural aesthetic that uses noir composition with eighties action film colors and music. The result is nostalgia as understood by a generation raised on violent video games, MTV music videos, and a climate-denying return of muscle car fetishization.99
The concrete channeled waterway of the Los Angeles River often features in Hollywood films as a space of automobility instead of a carrier of water: in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), the shapeshifting T-1000 is introduced in the dry waterway driving a Freightliner truck in a high-speed pursuit of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 model on a motorcycle; in Grease (1978), the L.A. River is the location of a famous drag race; in To Live and Die in L.A., a car chase through the streets of L.A. also incorporates the river basin. The list of films using this location is extensive and includes Drive.100 Unlike most films that use the location, however, Drive does not use the setting for a car chase (in this film about car chases). Instead, the concrete banks of the Los Angeles River are where The Driver, his romantic interest Irene, and her son Benicio spend an afternoon near a pond and some trees, a landscape that is real but looks artificial, located at the end of a concrete waterway. The scene is notably accompanied by the song “A Real Hero” by College, the project of French electronica musician David Grellier. This synthpop soundtrack with the refrain “A real human being / And a real hero” accentuates artifice and banal affect: it performs aural epiphany for a character incapable of change. The L.A. River basin in effect “ends” in an ironic revelation for The Driver and the existential road movie. By lingering in this liminal space, the scene reveals what gearhead nihilism usually avoids: that there is life beyond the concrete, that at some point concrete roads become organic landscapes. There is an outside to the road. Of course, The Driver will return to the road and its headlong rush into violent despair, but for a moment the film reveals urban boundaries. The scene by the pond on the L.A. waterway enacts an infrastructural transformation similar to Dorothy’s Technicolor transition in Wizard of Oz or Flynn’s transubstantiation in TRON: a barren world of concrete roads and aqueducts suddenly transforms into a bucolic cul-de-sac; the ontological implications of infrastructure briefly intrude in a landscape of otherwise bleak, concrete consistency. Typical of Refn, the scene functions primarily to evoke powerful emotions; plotting is secondary. In this subgenre such emotions are usually generated by car chases, not a rustic hiatus. But this is what gives the scene its protocological affect: even The Driver needs a respite from the road and its attendant nihilism.
Simultaneous with the maturation of the road movie is the emergence of the postapocalyptic road movie. In films such as Panic in the Year Zero! (1962), A Boy and His Dog (1975), the original Mad Max trilogy (1979, 1982, 1985), The Road (2009), and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), the primary transformation of automobility involves the erasure or displacement of governmentality in the wake of some catastrophic event. The postapocalyptic road movie typically engages viewers with a world in which the road has been destroyed, or the apparatus of automobility no longer includes the state form, or both. This subgenre often represents the right-wing libertarian perspective of a poststatist world: an existence that is at once brutal and short-lived but also somehow desirable because of the alleged freedom it contains for the individual no longer overshadowed by Leviathan. Here, once again, this infrastructure-inspired genre of film contains a tension: the appeal of the postapocalyptic road movie—the open spaces and sense of discovery that accompany the end of the megamachine—also contains within it an extremely reactionary, often white supremacist narrative of survivalist bravado. Ironically, then—but likely in support of what has thus far been argued about the road movie and governmentality—even when the infrastructural society disappears, popular cinema often cannot imagine a better world without it; that is, the road movie genre is so suffused with the fatalism of protocological control that its absence produces a longing for its return. The affective connection to roads—part of what Stephanie LeMenager calls “petromelancholia”—does not always produce the same politics in genre film, but the materiality of the road itself overshadows the liberatory potential of mobility.
The original Mad Max film might be the most reactionary of the postapocalytpic road movies, channeling the vigilante chic of 1974’s Death Wish into a story about the Australian outback just a few years after a catastrophic event. Mel Gibson plays Max Rockatansky, a member of the Main Force Patrol (MFP), the only visible residue of the State. Even though Max goes rogue after his family is killed by a biker gang, the film clearly invokes nostalgia for the bourgeois order to which Max belonged when he was a cop. Indeed, as Jon Stratton reminds us, “The second orienting shot of Mad Max (literally orienting, for it is a road sign) points down Anarchie Road. Mad Mad and Mad Max 2 utilise and reinforce the ideological understanding of the Australian environment as being inimical to civilization—by which is meant Western-orientated industrialized, capitalist society.”101 The frustration suffered by Max, and presumably by most of the viewers who enjoy the film, is based on the inability of Max and his fellow police to enforce the law, and the subsequent collapse of industrial civilization into roving gangs. Throughout the Max trilogy, the dissolution of social order is measured by the decay or inoperability of grid infrastructure, especially the roads:
In Mad Max (1979), set a “few years in the future” on the outskirts of a decaying city, the policeman Max battles biker gangs on Anarchie Road. In Mad Max 2 (1982), which takes place after a devastating oil war, these asphalt roads have been replaced by dirt tracks as Max, now an embittered wanderer, comes unwillingly to the aid of a commune of desert dwellers. In the third film of the trilogy, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), in which Max helps a group of feral children find their way home, even these dirt roads have disappeared into a trackless landscape of desert dunes, fertile gorges, and post-nuclear dust.102
While Delia Falconer argues that the disappearance of the road “represents both the road’s liberation from colonial narratives of empire and its absorption into a deregulated postcolonial spatiality,” and that theoretical narratives that privilege the “cultural logic” of the road over the possibility of “change within postmodernity”103 are misguided, the trajectory in these films from roads dominated by biker gangs to the disappearance of roads actually mimics a very modernist sensibility, what Paul N. Edwards calls “a condition of systemic vulnerability.”104 The principal narrative form of increasing the dramatic tension in the Max films is the escalating vulnerability of the road: from asphalt to dirt to dust in the wind, in the first three films. The psychological thrill of these films resides in the way they confront viewers in the infrastructural society with the “systemic vulnerability” of engineering megastructures, the fact that at some point they will break down (and, indeed, that their very functioning is what caused the catastrophic conditions in the first place). The Max films register the vulnerability of contemporary industrial capitalist subjects by gradually erasing the infrastructure that enables subjectivity. Central to this subjectivity, of course, is the road.
In the most recent Max film, Mad Max: Fury Road, the title belies the absence of a road structure in most of the film. The titular road connects The Citadel, a mountain of life in a postnuclear wasteland controlled by the patriarch Immortan Joe and his car-worshipping War Boys, with Gastown. While the Fury Road is the most direct access to gasoline, it is not actually important to the film except as the striation of patriarchal authority from which the film’s hero, Imperator Furiosa, departs in favor of a plan to return to her birthplace, a matriarchal society she remembers as The Green Place, with The Five Wives, women enslaved by Joe to become his prized Breeders. Joe’s dictatorial power emanates from his control of a water aquifer inside The Citadel, and his symbolic control of his War Boys and The Wretched who followed him to The Citadel implicates both patriarchal domination and automobility in the form of a death cult devoted to the V8 engine and a chrome-plated afterlife called Valhalla. As such, the depiction of authoritarian power in Fury Road shares many obvious connections with contemporary biopower. When the defecting Five Wives paint the message “Who killed the world?” on the wall of their prison before escaping, the question becomes rhetorical as the film articulates an obvious allegory: the world was killed by patriarchy and its technosocial apparatus (petrocapitalism and militarism). To defeat Immortan Joe, or at least to save herself and some of Joe’s slaves, Furiosa must go off-road in a war rig designed to transport oil. This detour is very significant in the Mad Max universe, because it suggests a departure from the vengeance-seeking nihilism of the original film into an ecofeminist fable. To stay on the road would represent a repetition of the same nihilism that drove Max insane (or, allegorically: petrocapitalism cannot save the world from the disaster it created). Of course, Furiosa is not aware of Max’s past; however, as symbolic figures of resistance, Max and Furiosa embody the politics of libertarianism and an essentialist form of feminism. Max would rather live as an alienated individual trapped in the madness of his personal suffering than engage with collective forms of resistance, and Furiosa prefers to save some of the women enslaved by patriarchy rather than die on the road transporting Joe’s gasoline.
Postapocalytpic road movies such as Mad Max: Fury Road reduce the political imaginary to a matter of survival, akin to Marc Abélès’s claim that capitalist globalization has produced, through the “interiorization of the neoliberal moment in the contemporary political imaginary,”105 a turn away from the utopian thinking central to Western political thought and toward the “politics of survival,” which he calls, after Reinhart Koselleck, a “new horizon of expectation.”106 Against his conception of survival, Abélès opposes the tradition of “convivance,” or “living harmoniously together.”107 The postapocalyptic road movie, a subgenre of the road movie and its protocological technicity, is an expression of this “new horizon” in the contemporary political imaginary. Whereas the road movie translates features of neoliberal governmentality into forms of protocological control, the postapocalyptic road movie articulates decades of “interiorization” of the neoliberal order. As Abélès argues: “Survival is inseparable from the neoliberal structure of governmentality; in the contemporary political imaginary, survival expresses its biopolitical dimension.”108 Specifically, postapocalyptic road movies foreground the systemic vulnerability of the infrastructural society (and therefore infrastructural brutalism) by portraying landscapes that once were striated by industrial infrastructure. The biopolitical dimension of these films substitutes the road movie’s aspirations of freedom through speed with more primitive controls over life and death: Immortan Joe, for example, controls water and oil, the most essential elements of an industrialized society. Survival trumps aspirations for a better world. Against the survivalist impulse of earlier postapocalyptic road movies, including the original Max films, Fury Road and other recent films of this subgenre, such as The Road (2009), depict a resurgence of convivance (in Furiosa’s triumphant return to The Citadel and the new collectivity that seems to emerge) or of the possible boundaries to the politics of survival (in The Road, the spectre of suicide haunts their journey). Instead of framing postapocalyptic road movies as frivolous entertainments for doomers, we should consider the ways in which these films press at the boundaries of the contemporary political imaginary in a dying world that will not stop driving.
While Fury Road dramatizes a postindustrial landscape with familiar human agencies in the aftermath of a relatively roadless governance structure, there is another political imaginary that the road movie genre has yet to explore: the ecology of nonhuman agencies of automobility. What does the road look like from the perspective of nonhuman agencies? For this speculative epilogue, I turn to Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s poem “Road Salt,” especially as it is interpreted by Deena Rymhs, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story “Direction of the Road.” “Road Salt” describes how Deer compulsively licks the road salt—indeed, “licking the road is its own humiliation”109—while being watched by “Aandeg,” or Crow. Road movies often posit speed as a central component of modernist eschatology, but for Deer, in the words of Rymhs, “the side of the road is a place of immobilizing despair and abandonment.”110 The human analogue might be those drive-by communities both dependent on and trapped by the highways that connect disparate populations at the expense of those in between. Deer licks the road salt like an addict trapped in repetitive action, “pacing the side of the highway / waiting for rhythm to break / sweating for one more hit.”111 The poem adopts the perspective of Deer, to comment on road ecologies from a nonhuman standpoint.112 By invoking Deer and Crow, characters common to Anishinaabe and Dene narratives, Simpson also situates her poem in the context of Indigenous storytelling and cosmologies, thus estranging “settler geographies and ontologies.”113 “Road Salt” narrates infrastructural brutalism in an anticolonial discourse of becoming-deer, depicting a milieu of passage that rarely captures the attention of road movie directors or protagonists.
Le Guin’s story “Direction of the Road” begins with an italicized epilogue from the perspective of humans, but then becomes a story told from the viewpoint of a 132-year-old oak tree. The tree recalls being visited by humans and the gallop of horses. But most of the story deals with the arrival of the paved road and automobiles. To the tree, the first car is “some kind of loose creature” that the tree quickly deduces is “no mortal creature, bound or loose or free.”114 Rapid urbanization transforms the oak tree’s environment:
Yearly then, weekly, daily, they became commoner. They became a major feature of the local Order of Things. The road was dug up and re-metalled, widened, finished off very smooth and nasty, like a slug’s trail, with no ruts, pools, rocks, flowers, or shadows on it. There used to be a lot of little loose creatures on the road. . . . Now the wise creatures took to avoiding the road, and the unwise ones got squashed. . . . I am thankful that I am an oak, and that though I may be wind-broken or uprooted, hewn or sawn, at least I cannot, under any circumstances, be squashed.115
The oak tree is aware of its place in the Order of Things, and occasionally thinks of escaping its “obligation” to that order.116 Since everything in this order is animated and possesses agency, the oak tree observes a car accident in which one car tries to pass another and swerves to avoid an oncoming vehicle as “a temporary slanting of the Direction of the Road and a displacement onto the far side, the side which normally runs the other direction,” and the tree admires the road for “its skill in executing such maneuvers, which must be difficult for an unliving creature, a mere making.”117 Instead of the car hitting the tree, the tree sees itself hitting the car: “The driver had no time to say anything; I killed him instantly.”118 Because the human driver does not believe the tree is animated, he dies in a moment of “false vision” in which the tree is caught “eternally.”119 “If the human creatures will not understand Relativity,” mourns the tree, “very well; but they must understand Relatedness.”120 Le Guin’s animism reimagines automobility and infrastructure in an ontological formation akin to distributed agency, a perspectival shift intended to foreground how unnatural it is for a tree to cause death; the tree thinks to itself, “For I am not death. I am life: I am mortal.”121 Indeed, the sociotechnical apparatus of automobility brings into being a collision of trees, cars, and humans that obscures the underlying “relatedness” of oak trees, apple orchards, beetles, and humans before the invention of the car and road, before the humanist caesura of ontological becoming. The road movie to come invites ontological wandering in a postindustrial fantasy of becoming-otherness.