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Highway to Hell? Images of the American Road in Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, and Meek's Cutoff

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2017

DIARMUID HESTER
DIARMUID HESTER*
Affiliation:
School of English, University of Sussex. Email: diarmuidhester@icloud.com.
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Abstract

This article examines representations of the road in the work of independent Florida-born film director Kelly Reichardt. Reading Reichardt's so-called Oregon trilogy, Old Joy (2006), Wendy and Lucy (2008), and Meek's Cutoff (2010), alongside radical anti-freeway and anti-automobile movements from the Pacific Northwest, I argue that Reichardt's films offer critical engagements with the subject of the American road, interrogating the freedom and emancipation from social constraint it purportedly offers.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 3 , August 2018 , pp. 810 - 827
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2017 

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References

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7 This section is not intended as an exhaustive survey of the road's appearance in American postwar culture: such an enormous undertaking, which would have to include an examination of the significance of roads in American music – most notably country music and hard rock – is beyond the scope of the present article. Here instead I take examples of American culture's tendency to mythologize the road and argue for parallels between respective instances.

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