00:03:16.040As depicts it in Midnight Cowboy and Dennis Johnson's Angels.
00:03:19.480I would also argue that there is a little bit of, at least by now, a little bit of a directionlessness to it.
00:03:25.140The destination cannot be the whole point, even though it often is the point.
00:03:29.080But like the ability to get lost, to slow down, to take detours and those detours being becoming like weirdly significant, I think is part of it.
00:03:38.420Right. Like there's a kind of if I get on the freeway now and drive down I-5 to L.A., is that a road trip or is it am I just driving to L.A.?
00:03:47.520Can I feel like if I find myself in a honky tonk in Bakersfield being like, how the fuck did I get here?
00:03:52.780Like, well, then I've road tripped probably in the same space, but I've done something slightly different.
00:04:04.560Not just in terms of like it will take you longer to get from San Francisco to L.A. on Highway 1, which hugs the Pacific coast of California, but it will also be more scenic.
00:04:17.280I think, like, part of the content of a road trip is encountering different, like, physical environments and different vistas than the one that you live in and possibly different than the one that you're going to, right?
00:04:30.580Like part of the idea of the road trip in the American imagination, or at least in my American imagination, is that it like serves to instruct the Voyager in just how big this fucking country is and in how like vast its landscapes are and how many different like scenes and climates it goes through.
00:05:20.300The least sneaky woman in the world.1.00
00:05:21.920Yeah. And just kind of finding, you know, this whole other world around the old highway, which if she had driven efficiently and if the storm hadn't happened.
00:05:33.120Which is like a thing that we've all seen, like where you like you get off the highway and you're like, oh, shit, there was a whole world here and it's disappeared because of the interstate.0.82
00:05:41.240Or it's like still there for some fucking reason. And you're like, OK, this feels out of time.0.99
00:05:45.720Like I've just driven back into the 70s by exiting the freeway where I did.
00:05:49.580I think we're all dancing around the reality that the road trip can't just be a physical transformation.
00:05:55.340It also has to be like a personal and psychic transformation, right?
00:05:57.780That's what really makes it different than like commuting or just merely getting somewhere.
00:06:03.660It's a journey by road that is instructive and transformative for the person who is conducting it.
00:06:11.880Yeah. And if it's too familiar, like if it's a commute, even if it's very long commute, then you're not open to experience in that same way.
00:07:33.880I mean, possibly road games for me because I love a road trip and find it to be such a safe place for me
00:07:40.860because different road trips to different parts of North America, like, are familiar to me in a general way.
00:07:47.460but then unfamiliar in a specific way. And I just did take a trip from LA back to Portland,
00:07:53.280basically up one and 101 along the California coast. And it was like a very transformative
00:07:59.280experience in terms of, you know, both the experiences and the conversations and their
00:08:04.540ability to go on for that amount of time. But I also, you know, think of a lot of horror media
00:08:09.640because I feel like that's what you're shown is that road trips are especially dangerous for women.
00:08:15.600And I think that part of my relationship to them in real life was trying to prove to myself that they didn't have to result in, like, my death or crime spree.
00:08:24.760A year or two ago, you had dinner at my house and indicated that you were driving back to Portland that night.
00:08:31.340And you're almost going to find a motel along the way.
00:08:33.880And I was like, as a true crime podcaster, I think she knows what she's doing.
00:08:40.160But I was like, oh, my God, girl, make sure it's the largest La Quinta Inn you can find.
00:08:45.600But Adrian, you've never just like pointed your car, the nose of your car, west or south.
00:08:52.040And those do tend to be, I think, the primary directions.
00:08:55.780My quintessential road trip is driving from New York to Los Angeles in that direction, right?
00:09:01.700Going west, mimicking the expansion of the nation, sort of discovering its expanse.
00:09:06.640This seems like the sort of prescribed road trip, right?
00:09:10.400It also is like for, in my mind, like really like people in their 20s sort of discovering who they are going to be as adults through this process of transport.
00:09:21.380It has to go through a desert to be a proper road trip plot.
00:09:25.440Like it can't all be temperate environments.
00:09:27.920There has to be a moment when it's totally straight like roads so that people can just goof off.
00:10:05.480But, like, that is part of the joy of it, is discovering danger or proximity to danger is, I think, actually, like, part of the appeal of a road trip.
00:14:04.080But you're like, you're confronted with your world.
00:14:06.920The relationship to space and time is very different, right?
00:14:09.460The horizon can, like, hurdle towards you in this way that feels almost otherworldly.
00:14:16.520And you are just put into much more direct contact with your landscape and forced to sort of confront and think about it.
00:14:23.220In this way, it's very easy to avoid if you're in, like, A, an urban environment where, like, just the amount of space between you and the furthest thing in your line of vision is a lot smaller, right?
00:14:40.240Yeah, I'm going to get in my car, my terrible, like, thousand-year-old Prius.
00:14:44.400But I think, am I wrong, guys, to think that this sort of, like, genre of American trip, like, A, it's different than the way it exists in other countries.
00:14:55.860But partly just because I'm a Philistine, it's not as familiar with these countries.
00:14:58.760I don't know that a trip across the national territory is as formative in those countries as it is here.
00:15:05.920I don't know if it's considered, like, a standard, like, rite of passage.
00:15:08.680And I also am wondering if I'm right that this is, like, a product of westward expansion, right?
00:15:12.700It's, like, a product of, like, okay, this continent belongs to us in this kind of, like, possessive way.
00:15:19.060And we have, as Americans, like, an entitlement to, like, traverse across it and change who we are.
00:15:25.300Yeah, and to be safe traversing it, right?
00:15:27.640This is sort of the Pax Americana, right?
00:15:30.160You can make the trip without being molested in some way.
00:15:33.420That's your birthright as an American, quote-unquote, right?
00:15:35.920So I looked into this a little bit. So the very first road trip was in fact not in the United States, which makes sense because, of course, the car wasn't invented here. It's actually from where I'm from. It appears to be in the 1880s, relatives of Gottlieb Daimler, the inventor of the car, took a trip from the city of Fotsheim to the city of Mannheim, which I can't tell you exactly how far that is, but it's definitely less than 30 miles.
00:16:00.740But I bet it was a really loud, bumpy 30 miles.
00:18:43.660It's really not replicated in public transit, right?
00:18:46.020Like, you decide when you stop and when you go in the road trip.
00:18:48.660Yeah. And you decide who you go on the trip with, right? There are a lot of sort of road stories where people do it as a family, but I feel like most famous road narratives I can think of are either about chosen family or people who become closer as they go, right? I mean, like, As I Lay Dying, the Faulkner novel, like, they don't have a car, the Bundren family. The Bundren family has like a horse-drawn cart, I think, where they're trying to transport their dead mother to her burial plot.
00:19:15.020But it's a family moving. And then I think around the Depression, there are a lot of narratives of families moving together. But later, it's often an individual driver or two mismatched people, you know, let's say Tom Cruise and the brother he didn't know he had, discovering the world and discovering each other as they sort of are forced into this small car together.
00:19:38.380Whereas like public transit is public, right?
00:19:40.820It is something where you meet people who are different from you and there's something uncanny and scary about that, right?
00:19:47.260Like you might meet a stranger on a train who's like, what if we swap murders?
00:20:09.860But what about, like, the question of gender?
00:20:12.300Because, Adrienne, you mentioned earlier, and Sarah, you also touched on this,
00:20:15.960the notion of the road trip as, like, a masculine prerogative
00:20:18.920that is tempered for women by the threat of violence, right?
00:20:25.400Like, I, too, have done that thing that shocked Adrienne so much
00:20:28.160where I just sort of, like, point the nose of my car in some direction
00:20:31.280and then I find a Motel 6 or a Super 8 off the side of the highway
00:20:35.040when I'm too tired to keep going, right?
00:20:36.880And I don't think Adrian is like crazy that there's a degree of risk there, but I also think...
00:20:45.040Yeah, do we clear? I have done it, but I've also done it with a Y chromosome.
00:20:48.500Yeah, yeah. And it's risk that can get sort of like exaggerated or distorted.
00:20:53.200Yeah, that's the thing is to compare the reality to the legend, I think, and have the chance to see how that feels.
00:20:59.020But like, what is the journeying woman? What is a road trip to a woman that it is not to a man?
00:21:06.540I think, like, one thing it is is a sense of, like, confrontation with danger and with the vulnerabilities imposed on you because of your gender.
00:21:14.300I think that's a part of being on the road trip is sort of, like, defying the sort of life-limiting fear that those kinds of dangers can instill.
00:21:33.540The idea I grew up with was that anytime you went out into the world, you were opening yourself up to the threat of sexual violence.0.94
00:21:41.840And what I came to believe is that although that is true, it's also, I think that the daily lives of women are generally more dangerous.0.80
00:21:50.480And that the men who are in our lives pose a greater threat to us often than the chances that we'll run into somebody scary.0.93
00:21:58.300which of course like still can and does happen to a worrying degree especially in this country
00:22:04.300but yeah in terms of seeing the road trip as a rite of passage into sort of a sense of freedom
00:22:11.400of movement around the country like that was very important to me in terms of proving to myself that
00:22:18.240you know although there was like a level of danger out there for me it wasn't a level of danger
00:22:23.520of the sort of like superstitious variety
00:25:59.120I would imagine that like the number of men
00:26:01.480who did it vastly outnumbered the number of women,
00:26:03.980which is because driving yourself was a class marker, was a status marker.0.98
00:26:08.540And you didn't mess with people, not because of their gender,
00:26:10.900you didn't mess with them because you assumed they were rich as hell and powerful.
00:26:14.620And there was a kind of residual kind of respect for that.
00:26:17.560And I think what we get to see sort of in the 50s and 60s,
00:26:20.340where you start getting women hitchhikers, like in large numbers,
00:26:24.760is that that becomes more of a middle class thing.0.96
00:26:26.940It becomes diffused across the class spectrum,1.00
00:26:29.860and then the gendered aspects of it become far more visible.1.00
00:26:33.140I just Googled her and it definitely helps to look like that.1.00
00:26:39.760Anne-Marie Schwarzenbach, absolute smoke show, like looks like she's chiseled out of marble.0.98
00:26:47.080And I wonder how much of her detection of the deference that she received on the road wasn't just about her whiteness and the sort of like legacies of white colonial womanhood in these environments, but also just like the way that hot people think everybody's really nice.0.65
00:27:29.420They're trying to go to L.A. to become an actor or actress, or they come to San Francisco in order to be there in time for the summer of love.
00:28:27.040Well, I bet the price of cars is coming down for the consumer and it's becoming more accessible and I assume they're becoming more reliable and less prone to fall apart, which is always helpful.
00:28:40.080Yeah, and it's like really a voyage of self-discovery more than a voyage of discovery at that point, it seems to me.
00:28:44.460Well, I feel like that's kind of the dream of the Western, you know, because that's such a durable narrative type that I think people can and do get a lot of different things from it.
00:28:55.140And I think one of the sort of mid-century things we see in the American Western, which plays out, you know, in terms of cowboy movies and stuff like that, and also in terms of stuff like On the Road, I think, arguably, is the idea of going out and being changed by America rather than changing it.
00:29:14.200Yeah, and I think it's also by the 1950s and 60s is the moment when you start getting road movies where people have cinematic antecedents they can look to as they have their own road trip.
00:29:26.560They kind of know the kinds of experiences to look out for, these stereotypical things to do, the reasons they might do them, right?
00:29:34.140Yeah, because it does become such as it feels like a movie kind of a thing pretty quickly.
00:29:38.240Yeah. And I mean, at the same time, it is funny because it's, of course, the road movie is sort of filmmaking at its most literary, right? Like a lot of early road movies are actually novel adaptations, I would say. Like the Grapes of Wrath, there's a 1940 Grapes of Wrath. And some of them are early Westerns, right? Like Stagecoach is essentially a road movie, except without a car.
00:34:45.260But people sort of lose interest in that.
00:34:46.660And people start being interested in the images of actual roads, actual landscapes, right?
00:34:53.120Like you actually start having shots out the door or out the window of a car, which we don't get in a lot of early cinema, where it's like about the people who are going to be doing the talking.
00:36:13.360We've talked a little bit about road trips as countercultural.
00:36:15.620And obviously, like, Kerouac is so important there.
00:36:18.100I looked at this wonderful book about hitchhiking called Roadside Americans by Jack Reed.
00:36:23.740He points out that this is like a long fraying of a kind of post-war consensus about Americans and hitchhiking, which is really the fraying of the New Deal kind of liberalism.
00:36:34.140And what he points out is that, like, it really took time for people to assume that a hitchhiker was up to no good.
00:36:39.820But you can see the beginnings of that in Psycho because Marion, of course, is on the road because she's a bit unsavory.0.86
00:36:45.440Like, that's not the coolest thing to do, what she did.1.00
00:36:47.860She just defrauded her very nice employer.
00:37:00.700And similarly, a lot of the movies we've been thinking about, so not Hitchcock, but the cinema right after, the new Hollywood, is, of course, influenced by the French New Wave, where there's tons of cars.
00:37:11.280And they're almost always part of the commission of a crime, right?
00:41:39.640It might be a worthwhile podcast episode in its own right.
00:41:42.040But that guy basically presented as a fellow hitchhiker or a fellow traveler on this trail
00:41:50.300and would help people out of jams that he had invariably caused, right?
00:41:54.120Like, oh, your tire blew out when, in fact, he had slashed it and be like, oh, come move in with me.
00:41:58.720And then he would, like, basically get people drugged up and then, like, basically use their accounts to drain them.
00:42:05.720And then as new people came into his net, he had to dispose of them.
00:42:10.560And he ended up, like, I think mostly dumping them on Thai beaches and that kind of thing.
00:42:14.460But it is this interesting thing where, like, these countries basically play host to these crimes, but the crime does not come from these countries themselves.
00:42:22.420the participants in this particular form of mobility
00:42:26.040are actually sort of preying on each other.
00:42:28.140And then kind of the killer hitchhiker is,
00:43:28.900Right. There's something about the road trip in general that is like a suspended, almost like carnival style, like suspension of social rules, right?
00:43:39.480Like this is a play space. This is like a spatially and temporally bounded suspension of, yeah, the social order.
00:43:49.740And sometimes that means somebody might take advantage of it to murder a little bit.0.71
00:43:54.700That's so key that you say that, Moira, because I think that's why we haven't talked about race yet.
00:43:59.680Because the dangers that attend the African-American road trip in the United States are not carnivalesque inversions of the normal order.0.92
00:44:07.520They're expressions of the normal order.
00:44:09.560James Baldwin has a really nice piece about this where he talks about, like, traveling along great distances in the South,
00:44:16.480where he's like, it's almost designed for violence.
00:44:18.940And it's a violence that comes largely from the powerful, right?
00:44:22.820And it comes, it is very intensely local.
00:45:11.540And it was basically an index with like maps and lists of commercial establishments like motels, gas stations, restaurants along the road that would serve black people, like places where black people could go and be safe and get what they needed.
00:45:30.140So that a black traveler didn't just pull into, you know, the parking lot of a random gas station or a random diner and experience like violence at worst and like humiliation at best when the segregationist ownership like refused to serve them.
00:45:48.480I looked into the history of this as well.
00:45:51.400So yeah, they're created by Victor Green of Harlem.
00:45:54.220And they're available, you're right, at gas stations, but at only very specific kinds
00:45:58.200because most gas stations, in fact, did not serve African-Americans, but ESO did.
00:46:02.880So this was also a marketing technique.
00:46:05.240It's like, hello, like black consumer, we will accept your money without lynching you.
00:46:16.740It's one of those things where like ownership and clientele sort of predicate each other, but where there's also kind of a market share that you're grabbing by being like, well, everyone's going to know that they can come here.
00:46:27.380And so, you know, a lot of black families at the time would travel with canisters of gas in their car, which meant that like if you did see an SO station, I'm guessing everyone would refill everything they could, meaning these gas stations were making a killing on these motorists.
00:46:44.700One of the things, I don't know, have you ever read or like looked through one of these in detail?
00:47:22.340Unlike the Whisper Network that Maura and I sort of deal with on the daily, right, where we think about a lot, where it's, like, about warning people.
00:47:29.400There's no warning in the Green Books.
00:47:30.880It's just pointing people positively where to go.0.98
00:47:34.180It still tells like a really depressing story because for some states, the Green Book lists like one or two locations where you're like, holy fucking shit, this has got to be rough to get through.0.97
00:47:44.220But the guide is sort of relentlessly upbeat.0.98
00:47:46.980It's saying like this is to enable your mobility, to promote your dignity and to promote your comfort, right?
00:47:53.060Sometimes like very, very literal comfort, right?
00:47:55.160Like part of the way to travel as an African-American family in the 1940s and 50s would have been to bring a portable toilet, right?
00:48:04.500Because like you weren't sure where you were going to be able to use it.
00:48:07.040So like the dignity is quite literal here.
00:48:09.140This is the guide that allows you to avoid having to pop a squat.
00:48:14.940But, you know, I think that's also like part of, you know, we're talking about the dangers of the road, right?
00:48:21.140And I think it is true that those dangers are asymmetrical, even if, as like I think Sarah has been articulating really beautifully, like they do get deployed to sort of like limit movement, right?
00:48:31.740But like not everybody does have the same experience of, you know, traversing these spaces.
00:48:41.060And there are drivers and subjects for whom like the mastery of or the illusion of mastery over this landscape is going to be a lot more steady and complete.
00:48:53.320And there are other drivers and subjects for whom.
00:51:20.120But it is also a record of people being, I think, quite brave and probably challenging these things as well.
00:51:25.200But I do also think it's so fascinating to think about the fact that, like, cars and road tripping and being mobile in this way isn't for everyone, but everyone gets to do it.
00:51:36.520And there is a weird way in which you can sort of assume power by just sticking your thumb out, getting in your car, buying a car for the first time, right?
00:51:47.500And until it goes wrong, you get to be like everyone else.
00:51:51.280Like you get to enjoy all the supposed privileges and supposed rights that come with being an American.
00:51:56.960But at the same time, that sort of sits in a weird kind of oblique angle to the fracturing of the kind of liberal consensus, right?
00:52:05.240Like a lot of things that involved cars became a problem when gendered categories around it started to fracture.
00:52:11.600And there, I think it's so important to note that, like, the two groups that people freaked out about hitchhiking in the 60s were women and long-haired men, right?0.83
00:52:22.140It's a form of gendered dissidence that, once it goes on the road, it's like, oh, shit, we got to do something about this, right?0.96
00:52:28.840What does, I think, Jack Nicholson say to Dennis Hopper, an easy rider before they all get killed?0.97
00:52:33.600He says, like, we represent something to them.
00:52:35.660It's like, what do I represent to them other than somebody who needs a haircut, is what he says, right?
00:52:40.400And Hopper says, no, we represent freedom, and they can't have that.
00:53:10.400What the hell's wrong with freedom, man? That's what it's all about.
00:53:13.780The long hair is, it's important to emphasize, is a form of gender dissidence, right?0.78
00:53:17.680They're not masculine in the right way, and they're driving around just having fun and dropping acid, and that makes them a target, right?
00:53:26.260Right. And this idea of representing something that has to be hemmed in.
00:53:30.720Well, it's interesting to me that we're talking a lot about the coastal road trippers' experience of Middle America.
00:53:39.180But there's also Middle America's experience of the coast being imported and like shuffling through or in like the case of the hippie trail, like the post-colonial subjects of these like former colonizing populations like coming through.
00:53:53.440The metropolitan other being imported into this like more authentic, supposedly territory is its own sort of threat.
00:54:04.360Right. There's a lot of like hierarchies of not just race and gender, but also like, you know, class and colonialism that are being sort of reconfigured when the road tripper or the hitchhiker appears along their journey in a place that's not native to them.
00:54:24.060Yeah. We had an allusion earlier to Midnight Cowboy, which is like a pretty classic case of like, you know, country boy getting off the Greyhound in New York, right? Like that's another kind of standard trope of the road trip that delivers someone out of their sort of own comfort zone and their own very confined world into the coast or the metropole, et cetera, right?
00:54:45.580I keep going with Simon Garfunkel stuff
00:57:38.220Yeah, improvisation and surprise are really core in our algorithmically narrowed field of vision and possibility. The road trip does, you know, with all the caveats we've issued on this claim, I do think the road trip still offers a lot of opportunities to find yourself in places that have not been prescribed for you.
00:58:01.280To find yourself encountering people you would not have been exposed to otherwise to find yourself in a landscape that is not familiar or predictable.