A World Beyond Space and Time
Elsa Court, The American Roadside in Émigré Literature, Film and Photography, 1955-1985
Plagrave Macmillan, 194pp, £59.99, ISBN 9783030367336
reviewed by Neil Archer
While ‘the road’ has long been recognised as an important motif in American culture, from the Beats to the Hollywood road movie, those places along or between the highways – the gas stations, roadside diners and motels – have not always had the critical attention they deserve. This is the argument at the heart of Elsa Court’s engaging and illuminating study. Taking us through case studies of key works across literature and the visual arts – Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Robert Frank’s The Americans, Alfred Hitchcock’s film of Psycho, and Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas – Court makes a convincing case for significance of these erstwhile ‘non-places’ to these authors’ and artists’ takes on America.
From one viewpoint, the book’s emphasis on the ‘émigré’ vision uniting these works begs the question what, in America, is ever really ‘native’. What makes these roadside spaces so fascinating to these artists, Court suggests, is in fact their alienness: a quality captured, respectively, by the ironies of Nabokov’s prose, or the stark, estranging eye of Frank and Wenders. A point running through Court’s study is that the roadside is already an alienated space in American society and culture by the time, in the mid-1950s, both Lolita and Frank’s book of photographs were being put together. It is nevertheless the émigré’s outsider perspective, argues Court, that unlocks this aspect of the American road, and its stopping points in particular: its operation at the margins of American life.
As noted in the book’s introduction, sites such as the gas station, neon-lit and emblazoned with the signs and symbols of America’s car-and-petroleum complex, is an icon of 20th-century automobility, and in that respect, ‘an alternative emblem of Americanness . . . a synecdoche for the whole of America’. By the 1950s, however, the dreams of abundance and optimism associated with the building of American highways (including the famous Route 66), celebrated even in Depression-set films such as The Grapes of Wrath, had started to turn sour. For example, Court uses the second half of Lolita (the part mostly ignored in Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film adaptation), alongside an analysis of its author’s own road diary, to show how Nabokov’s duplicitous narrator sees in America’s motels an echo of the Old Continent; but at the same time, a site of ersatz pastoral charm in which to conceal his own clandestine perversions.
As shown, in turn, in her study of Psycho, Court’s book plots a steady journey through the progressive socio-economic sidelining of the private motel; and in this case, towards even more troubling spaces of exclusion. Most interesting here, though, beyond Psycho’s obvious role in establishing the horror-movie trope of the American roadside killer, is Court’s reminder that Hitchcock’s film, after Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel, is also a story of the transformed topographies of the American road. The fates of both the Bates Motel and its unfortunate visitors are as much tied up with the 1956 Interstate Act – which, connecting major cities via highway, left many older routes and their roadside trade effectively redundant – than they are with the twisted psyche of its manager. Like the fading mansion that overlooks the motel, Psycho becomes a figure for a once more prosperous world now being passed over by ever-accelerating automotive culture and infrastructures.
As suggested subsequently in Court’s final chapter, focusing on the 1984 film Paris, Texas, the American road has by now been passed over almost altogether, superseded by the domestic airline, or cities that, in effect, encourage you never to get out of the car. Situating the film within Wenders’ wider film oeuvre and writing, Court illustrates the way Paris, Texas summarises its German director’s distinctive relationship to an America that exists mainly in the imagination, as a series of evocative, other-worldly images. Linking the film to Jean Baudrillard’s America, itself written around the same time as Wenders’ film was being shot, the chapter highlights the extent to which ‘America’, at this juncture, and suitably captured in the imagery of Wenders’ film, already resembles its own ‘simulacrum’; a world beyond space and time. The old trains in this American West do not run anymore; while Route 66 remains more a memory retained in the same-titled song.
Emerging powerfully out of Court’s argument is the idea that, for these foreign writers, photographers and filmmakers, ‘America’ is constructed as a place of their own imagination and fascination with the New World. The irony they all explore, though, is that their more idealised view, like the heyday of the roadside stations and motels itself, is already passed. Just as Wenders’ imagination of America already derives from a culture exported to post-war Germany, the eventual experience of America itself always feels too late. But in the process, in this mostly melancholy engagement with the continent, these émigré artists capture the illusory quality of the American road – if not the American Dream itself, tied as it is to original frontier philosophies of expansion, mobility and self-betterment.
Perhaps more than this, though, the really engaging aspect of The American Roadside is its capacity to return the reader to texts they might have thought exhausted of new analytical possibilities. Court’s decision to focus mainly on a small set of quite canonical texts is not without its risks, but her study more than justifies this approach. In taking a turn away from some of the more familiar critical frameworks, and bringing a wider concern with spatial studies to bear on these works, Court opens up new inroads for looking at American literary and film history. Any book that gives as much attention to the details of motel-room décor in Psycho as other studies have to its more hoary, over-exposed horror tropes is well on the right track. The achievement of this highly readable book is to send us back to these otherwise familiar artworks with refreshed, more inquisitive eyes.
From one viewpoint, the book’s emphasis on the ‘émigré’ vision uniting these works begs the question what, in America, is ever really ‘native’. What makes these roadside spaces so fascinating to these artists, Court suggests, is in fact their alienness: a quality captured, respectively, by the ironies of Nabokov’s prose, or the stark, estranging eye of Frank and Wenders. A point running through Court’s study is that the roadside is already an alienated space in American society and culture by the time, in the mid-1950s, both Lolita and Frank’s book of photographs were being put together. It is nevertheless the émigré’s outsider perspective, argues Court, that unlocks this aspect of the American road, and its stopping points in particular: its operation at the margins of American life.
As noted in the book’s introduction, sites such as the gas station, neon-lit and emblazoned with the signs and symbols of America’s car-and-petroleum complex, is an icon of 20th-century automobility, and in that respect, ‘an alternative emblem of Americanness . . . a synecdoche for the whole of America’. By the 1950s, however, the dreams of abundance and optimism associated with the building of American highways (including the famous Route 66), celebrated even in Depression-set films such as The Grapes of Wrath, had started to turn sour. For example, Court uses the second half of Lolita (the part mostly ignored in Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film adaptation), alongside an analysis of its author’s own road diary, to show how Nabokov’s duplicitous narrator sees in America’s motels an echo of the Old Continent; but at the same time, a site of ersatz pastoral charm in which to conceal his own clandestine perversions.
As shown, in turn, in her study of Psycho, Court’s book plots a steady journey through the progressive socio-economic sidelining of the private motel; and in this case, towards even more troubling spaces of exclusion. Most interesting here, though, beyond Psycho’s obvious role in establishing the horror-movie trope of the American roadside killer, is Court’s reminder that Hitchcock’s film, after Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel, is also a story of the transformed topographies of the American road. The fates of both the Bates Motel and its unfortunate visitors are as much tied up with the 1956 Interstate Act – which, connecting major cities via highway, left many older routes and their roadside trade effectively redundant – than they are with the twisted psyche of its manager. Like the fading mansion that overlooks the motel, Psycho becomes a figure for a once more prosperous world now being passed over by ever-accelerating automotive culture and infrastructures.
As suggested subsequently in Court’s final chapter, focusing on the 1984 film Paris, Texas, the American road has by now been passed over almost altogether, superseded by the domestic airline, or cities that, in effect, encourage you never to get out of the car. Situating the film within Wenders’ wider film oeuvre and writing, Court illustrates the way Paris, Texas summarises its German director’s distinctive relationship to an America that exists mainly in the imagination, as a series of evocative, other-worldly images. Linking the film to Jean Baudrillard’s America, itself written around the same time as Wenders’ film was being shot, the chapter highlights the extent to which ‘America’, at this juncture, and suitably captured in the imagery of Wenders’ film, already resembles its own ‘simulacrum’; a world beyond space and time. The old trains in this American West do not run anymore; while Route 66 remains more a memory retained in the same-titled song.
Emerging powerfully out of Court’s argument is the idea that, for these foreign writers, photographers and filmmakers, ‘America’ is constructed as a place of their own imagination and fascination with the New World. The irony they all explore, though, is that their more idealised view, like the heyday of the roadside stations and motels itself, is already passed. Just as Wenders’ imagination of America already derives from a culture exported to post-war Germany, the eventual experience of America itself always feels too late. But in the process, in this mostly melancholy engagement with the continent, these émigré artists capture the illusory quality of the American road – if not the American Dream itself, tied as it is to original frontier philosophies of expansion, mobility and self-betterment.
Perhaps more than this, though, the really engaging aspect of The American Roadside is its capacity to return the reader to texts they might have thought exhausted of new analytical possibilities. Court’s decision to focus mainly on a small set of quite canonical texts is not without its risks, but her study more than justifies this approach. In taking a turn away from some of the more familiar critical frameworks, and bringing a wider concern with spatial studies to bear on these works, Court opens up new inroads for looking at American literary and film history. Any book that gives as much attention to the details of motel-room décor in Psycho as other studies have to its more hoary, over-exposed horror tropes is well on the right track. The achievement of this highly readable book is to send us back to these otherwise familiar artworks with refreshed, more inquisitive eyes.