ABSTRACT
Reviewing Rain Man, John Simon writes: “There ensues a typical comic road movie cum mismatched buddy movie (are those still two genres or have they become irrevocably fused?)” (“Rain All Over”: 52). With the three films just discussed having appeared in so short a period of time, it’s no wonder that Simon thought a new genre hybrid had blossomed. But the hybrid would fail to propagate its next generation. Partially this involved the demise of the yuppie as a target of critique even as corporate profits and the stock market recovered (Ehrenreich: 241-3) but recession and downsizing insured no return to yuppie arrogance. More so it related to a growing incompatibility between the reintegrative goals of road comedy and the dismantling of hegemonic masculinity inherent in the post-Kerouac road. As this perception seeped into the general cultural consciousness, the reluctance in both 1970s and 1980s Hollywood buddy-road movies featuring a white, heterosexual male duo to keep the buddies together at the end of the film would translate in the 1990s into a
reluctance to start such a pair down the road in the first place.14 Certainly few figures resembling the high flyers scrutinized in this essay have headed
down the road together with a buddy during the current decade. In the 1990s the road movie revival would take off either from the postmodern landscape and heterosexual outlaw couple of 1990’s Wild at Heart or from the displacement of the straight male buddies as road protagonists inaugurated by 1991’s Thelma and Louise and subsequently coming to encompass a whole range of gender, sexual, and racial Others. Many of the decade’s reintegrative buddy-road comedies, like The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), Boys on the Side (1995), or To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995), featured same-sex buddy trios, one or all of whose members were openly gay. If on the one hand the historical interest of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, Midnight Run, and Rain Man resides in their recuperation of capitalist patriarchy while critiquing yuppie lifestyle excesses, on the other they mark the historical endpoint for the straight man, in all his connotations (law-abiding, not comically neurotic, heterosexual), on the road; for the
