ABSTRACT
If the road movie is in some deep sense about the road itself, and the journey taken, more than about any particular destination, it is still a genre obsessed with home. Typically, the road takes the traveler away from home. Sometimes, the road leads to a new home, as in frontier narratives or tales of emigration. As often, in various kinds of escape or travel narratives, the road just leads away – away from boredom, or danger, or family, or whatever it is that produces the desire or need for something called “away” as opposed to the place called “home.” While it provides an escape from and alternative to home, and home can be “anywhere, and everywhere” on the road (or, in another formulation, “anyplace I hang my hat”), the trope of the road still requires the concept of home as a structuring absence: Very often, as Corey Creekmur suggests elsewhere in this volume, from the perspective of the road, either “you can’t go home again” or “there’s no place like home.”
