PIEN HUANG, HOST:
It is summer, and that’s the time of the year when the open road beckons – and the road movie. There’s “Grapes Of Wrath.”
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “GRAPES OF WRATH”)
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) How about a lift, Mister?
HUANG: There’s “Easy Rider”…
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “EASY RIDER”)
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Oh, I’ve got a helmet.
HUANG: …Even “Dumb And Dumber.”
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “DUMB AND DUMBER”)
JEFF DANIELS: (As Harry Dunne) According to the map, we’ve only gone about 4 inches.
HUANG: You might be noticing a pattern here. It’s not just the lines in the center of the road. Road movies have often been centered on men. So today, we’re going to talk about women on screen and in the driver’s seat, and we’re joined on the journey by NPR film critic Bob Mondello and ALL THINGS CONSIDERED producer and film fanatic Avery Keatley. Welcome to you both.
BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: Hey. Good to be here.
AVERY KEATLEY, BYLINE: Hey, Pien. Thanks.
HUANG: OK, so Bob, I’m going to start with you because you are the discussion’s resident male. And why don’t you mansplain to us why road trip movies are usually centered on men.
MONDELLO: (Laughter) Ouch. But fair enough. Well, blame it on the ancient Greeks. They sort of invented the road trip story and also gave it a name with “The Odyssey.” A great hero of the Trojan Wars took 10 years to get home and had all kinds of adventures on the way. So the form has deep roots in literature, but it took movies a really long time to develop a variation. The first really well-known road movie is probably the 1934 comedy “It Happened One Night,” and happily, for this conversation, it centered on a woman…
HUANG: (Laughter) Finally.
MONDELLO: …Claudette Colbert, who plays a pampered heiress trying to run away from her father, and reporter Clark Gable helps her when all her money gets stolen.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT”)
CLAUDETTE COLBERT: (As Ellie Andrews) I’ll stop a car, and I won’t use my thumb.
CLARK GABLE: (As Peter Warne) What are you going to do?
COLBERT: (As Ellie Andrews) It’s a system all my own.
MONDELLO: It won all five major Oscars that year – picture, director, actor, actress and screenplay – the first film ever to manage that.
HUANG: Amazing. So that’s one. Avery, what are some other women-centered road trip movies that you can think of?
KEATLEY: Yeah. Well, we really can’t talk about women on the road without mentioning “Thelma & Louise.”
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “THELMA & LOUISE”)
GEENA DAVIS: (As Thelma, shouting) Drive, Louise. Drive. Drive the car.
KEATLEY: This was really seen as groundbreaking – right? – for putting women at the center of a road trip film. And, you know, other films kind of followed in the footsteps of “Thelma & Louise.” And, you know, these films really run the gamut from the, like, totally outrageous to the stunningly profound. You know, as a millennial, one that comes to mind for me is “Crossroads”…
HUANG: Same.
KEATLEY: …The 2002 Britney Spears vehicle, if you will. Three childhood friends get together, take a road trip across the country, get into all kinds of very cliched tangles and scrapes before basically recommitting to their friendship.
HUANG: By the way, that’s also an early Shonda Rhimes. She wrote the screenplay for that.
KEATLEY: Yes, she did.
MONDELLO: Did not know that – how interesting.
HUANG: Yeah.
KEATLEY: Yes.
HUANG: Way back when.
KEATLEY: Yeah, a lot of people were in that movie who now have very wonderful and successful careers, and we’re happy for all of them.
(LAUGHTER)
HUANG: Love this for them.
KEATLEY: But on the complete other end of the spectrum, one of my favorite women on the road films is 2013’s “Ida.” That’s spelled I-D-A.
MONDELLO: Ooh, yeah.
KEATLEY: Yeah, so it’s not something that I initially thought of as a road trip film, but then I remembered, you know, the story really begins with this young Polish woman. She is considering becoming a nun in 1960s Poland. But before she’s allowed to join the convent, you know, the head of the convent orders her to visit her only remaining relative, her Aunt Wanda. Wanda is a hard-drinking state prosecutor who earned the nickname Red Wanda by sending enemies of the state to their deaths in Communist Poland.
HUANG: OK.
KEATLEY: So Wanda and Ida really couldn’t be more different, and it’s kind of a perfect recipe to get them in a car together and send them on a really introspective journey.
HUANG: I’m thinking about the examples that you guys both brought up. You know, a road movie with women at the center is going to be a little bit different than one with men at the center, right? So what do you guys think distinguishes a movie with a woman behind the wheel?
KEATLEY: Yeah, I mean, I think what always stands out to me is this, like, really radical sense of freedom, right? And that to me is, like, kind of what the road itself represents. You know, being on the road, you’re on the fringes of society, and you’re sort of out of its grasp. And I don’t think it’s surprising that when women are at the center of these films, that is really kind of, like, an escapist sort of theme that we see because – right? – society so often tries to constrain women, and here they are in a place where they can be totally free and have a lot of possibility in front of them.
MONDELLO: Yeah, in fairness, women are essential and men kind of aren’t most of the time.
(LAUGHTER)
MONDELLO: So the fact that they go out and are just ridiculous out there and doing kind of crazy things doesn’t strike people as eccentric. It is shocking sometimes when a woman leaves the hearth and home, and…
KEATLEY: Yeah.
MONDELLO: …I guess it shouldn’t be. I mean, it really shouldn’t. My mother would kill me for even saying it out loud that it was. But the idea for the longest time, that a woman would leave the center of society, would – she was the rock on which the place was built. And if she left, then everything would go to hell. And so a road trip movie with men doesn’t really matter, but a woman doing the same thing was suddenly shocking. And it was a very big deal. And what that was what was so startling. I remember being really surprised that screenwriter Callie Khouri managed to get so much women’s liberation into “Thelma & Louise.”
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “THELMA & LOUISE”)
DAVIS: (As Thelma) Yeah, we think you have really bad manners.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character, laughing).
SUSAN SARANDON: (As Louise) Yeah, where do you get off behaving like that with women you don’t even know? How’d you feel if somebody did that to your mother or your sister or your wife?
HUANG: Avery, are there certain women or road movie storylines that stand out to you, especially?
KEATLEY: Yeah, there’s one that I really love. You know, road movies – right? – they really mirror the trajectory of all narratives – right? – when we think about it. The characters are literally on a journey. They are going to run into problems and obstacles. They’re probably going to have to change and grow, and they’re going to wind up somewhere different than where they started, right? So it mirrors kind of how we tell stories to begin with. And one movie that I think just traces this trajectory in a really beautiful way is “Nomadland.” That was the 2020 film…
MONDELLO: Oh, yeah.
KEATLEY: …Directed by Chloe Zhao.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “NOMADLAND”)
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #4: (As character) What the nomads are doing is not that different than what the pioneers did.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #5: (As character) Hey, Fern.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #6: (As character) You’ve got to make the hole bigger.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #7: (As character) I think Fern’s part of an American tradition.
KEATLEY: It tells the story of Fern, who’s played by Frances McDormand, who sets out to live her life on the road after she loses her job, loses her husband. She sells most of what she owns. She packs up her van, and she stops in places where she can, you know, pick up seasonal work. She meets up with these other people who are living a similar life on the road. She gets, like, lessons and tips from them for how to stay safe and how to keep her van working. Really, the story is about how she forms these deep connections, even though these people are always moving, right? With all these other nomads, she’s still able to create a sense of home and a sense of family.
HUANG: So we’re talking about a lot of movies that run the gamut, you know, some older ones, some newer ones. I’m wondering if you can think about any ways that these movies have changed over the years. Are there any threads that we can kind of pull there?
KEATLEY: Yeah, I mean, I think one thing that I noticed, even from something like “Thelma & Louise” to “Nomadland,” it seems to me that there is less of a focus on spectacle, and we are moving more towards that introspective sort of quiet focus on the characters who are at the heart of the films. You know, “Thelma & Louise” is a fantastic film. It’s tons of fun, right? There are – there’s shooting. There’s explosion. There’s an FBI chase. Harvey Keitel swoops up in a helicopter out of the Grand Canyon. I mean, like, what more can you ask for? It’s just a ton of fun. But it – right? It does have sort of all these, like, kind of large Hollywood elements I guess is what I would call them.
On the other hand – right? – something like “Nomadland,” remarkably quiet. There’s scenes in this movie where there’s just very little dialogue because it’s just her driving or her kind of living her life, doing very everyday things, like trying to, you know, bathe in a stream or, like, clean out her van, and we just, you know, see her doing these things quietly. So I feel like what I have noticed as a change is this really, like, honing in on the emotional reality of what it means for these characters to go through this experience.
MONDELLO: I think that’s lovely. That’s very nice. I was trying to think historically why it would have taken so long for these movies to show up in Hollywood. And it occurred to me at some point that there wasn’t an interstate highway system until after World War II.
HUANG: Yeah.
MONDELLO: That’s when Eisenhower decided to build the thing. And for the average person, I mean, though there was a car culture, it was predominantly in big cities, right? And the notion of traveling to someplace else by your car didn’t occur to people until there were, you know, smooth highways for people to do it on. So as a logical thing, you wouldn’t get a whole lot of road movies until the 1950s.
HUANG: That was Avery Keatley and Bob Mondello from NPR. Thank you so much both.
MONDELLO: Hey. It’s great fun.
HUANG: Thank you.
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