Article: Learning, or not learning, from the road movie
It’s summer … let’s road trip!
Wait – hold that thought – New York City has been non-stop rain this June, and most of us in the Big Apple don’t have cars anyway, so road-tripping is reserved for road movies.
I saw one last night, AWAY WE GO, more accurately a plane/train/road movie from Sam Mendes, that engages some classic tenants of the genre: protagonists searching for something (in this case, a new home town in which to raise a child), wide open American landscapes (Colorado and Arizona, in particular here), and, as expected, personal growth.
I started to wonder – do road movies always include such traditional character arcs? Do the drivers on the road in the road movie simply have to learn about themselves?