Four Field Guides to BAM’s Massive “Indie 80s” Series
Indie 80s: The Road Movie
By Jeremy Polacek
As the car rose far and wide in American life, national palm readers emerged with it—painters, musicians, authors, and filmmakers divining fortune, tragedy, and existential ache in our long, winding interstates. John Steinbeck’s 1939 mainstay of high school English, The Grapes of Wrath, immortalized the struggle of Okies seeking salvation and their flight out west, giving US Route 66 its poetic sobriquet: the mother road. Decades later, films like Easy Rider and Two-Lane Blacktop and Kerouac’s On the Road viewed the sprawling highway system more existentially: a drifting, personal course to discovering themselves and the soul of America.
But by 1985, US 66 and other old guard routes were gone, replaced by newer highways and byways. The road movie changed too. Or at least a singular trio within Indie 80s might have you think. In Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise (1984), Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March (1986), and Robert Kramer’s Route One/USA (1989), hitting the road is an idle affair, full of deadpan drag and nonadventure. The nurturing mother no more, the road of these films is often fruitless and alone.
Certainly this is the case in Sherman’s March, a would-be documentary about the Union general’s devastating March to the Sea-cum-chronicle of failed romances. Armed with a camera and a nine thousand dollar grant, McElwee set out to make a historical film, but all that changed when the director, southward bound from Boston, stopped in New York to visit his girlfriend and ended up dumped. Prompted by his sister to use the camera as a conversation starter, what ensured was a sadsack anthology of short-lived dalliances. Forever filming, McElwee made his own scorched tour of the South and self, ruminating on subjects from romantic love to atomic war.
He at least meets people and goes on dates, which is almost more than Stranger Than Paradise’s Willie, Eddie, and Willie’s visiting Hungarian cousin, Eva, can say. Leaving New York to visit Eva in Cleveland, the two do the same old thing they did in NYC. “It’s funny,” Eddie says “you come to someplace new… and everything looks just the same.” The same goes for their excursion to Florida. Underneath their minimalist stasis, however, is an abiding, subtle affection, the almost too-cool glue that keeps them dramatically doing little, sometimes nothing, together.
Route One/USA also ends up in Florida. Starting in Maine, the road moves down the east coast, and Kramer plus his alter-ego “Doc” (Paul McIsaac) move along with it; along the way the two visit witch covens, clothing factories, police stations, and “friends.” For the radical filmmaker (Ice, Milestones), fiction and nonfiction were not simply difficult to separate, they were inseparably combined: scripted moments mingle into documentary ones much the way the film’s cities and stopovers merge, creating an unshapely, gracious collage of America. Connections, though sometimes difficult and painful to forge, were crucial to Kramer. In the end, he saw his films as “one day or other […] mak[ing] up a single long film, a ‘story’ that is always developing.” One step melded into the next, which might be a way of describing the road.