Women In Road Films

The lure of the road is an integral part of American myth, mobility, and freedom. From Kerouac's On The Road to a variety of "road" films portraying men and women, the road represents the possibility of new beginnings and freedom from the shackles of the past. Historically, road movies like those featuring Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, Easy Rider, and Cannonball associate the values of the road with the male gender. Most heroes in road movies are men, with women taken along for the ride if they are fortunate. As Mark Williams (8) writes in Road Movies, "The women are essentially along for the ride, and are not part of what is constantly being redefined as an exclusive male enclave."

While the above may have been true in road movies of the past, ones where women often represented the same type of female stock characters found in westerns (the whore with a heart of gold, the prim proper innocent who discovers fun and loses her virginity, etc.), today's road movies have expanded the role of women. In modern road films women are the heroines. If we look at three contemporary road movies, we see that the words of Williams no longer apply to today's cinema. In Thelma & Louise, Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, and Boys on the Side, we see that even though the road typically leads to a dead end the women in these road films are heroines.

One of the conventions of the road film is that the road often represents the chance fo

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e she wants to put some distance between them and their last crime. Louise knows they are running out of road..."Besides, what are we gonna say about the robbery? There's no excuse for that, there's no such thing as justifiable robbery." We also see sexual innuendo and reference to male domination of women's sexuality when Louise asks a girl, "Is he your husband or your father?" In the end the women will experience being alive and free more than they ever did in their petty existences under male domination at home, but they take a wrong turn on the route to freedom. Louise's statement about their killing of the rapist is rife with patriarchal overtones, "You shoot off a guy's head with his pants down, believe me, Texas ain't the place you want to get caught." One could argue that Even Cowgirls Get the Blues is a combination road movie and western. Despite this, it blurs the distinctions of gender and demonstrates how the roles we assign to males and females are typically socially constructed and reinforced values. Sissy Hankshaw's journey begins in Virginia, makes a stop in New York, and ends in the Dakota Badlands. She has oversized thumbs and learns early on that despite this making her unable to fit in most places, it

Category: Film - W