Bennet Schaber, ‘“Hitler Can’t Keep ‘Em That Long”: The road, the people’, in Steven Cohan & Ina Rae Hark (eds), The Road Movie Book (London: Routledge, 1997), p.25.
watch Meet John Doe here
‘The road movie, then, takes as its specific project the aligning of event and meaning within the image of and as political geography. This is nowhere so powerfully signified as in the genre scene, prevalent in so many road films, of the cut between the map and its territory. Indeed, the road film forges an explicit connection between the map as political . representation (say, in the hands of the police as they track the progress of bodies in flight, or in the hands of hapless voyagers, trying to find, say, Pismo Beach) and place as the being of territory. In general, the two elude each other, usually to the benefit of the latter, but with widely differing results. Hence, we see in Ford the difference between the marking out of territory by the ubiquitous US 66 signs and the hands that grasp the dirt; or in Capra, between the flags on Edward Arnold's map which draws the nation into his fascist web of John Doe clubs and Cooper and Brennan fishing under a bridge, beneath the road and out of sight; or the unmappable position of the lost horizon, Shangri-la.’
Bennet Schaber, ‘“Hitler Can’t Keep ‘Em That Long”: The road, the people’, in Steven Cohan & Ina Rae Hark (eds), The Road Movie Book (London: Routledge, 1997), p.25. watch Meet John Doe here
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
|