ABSTRACT
As these final essays point out, the 1990s have once again revealed the endless permutations and combinations available on the road for the cinematic imagination. Even mainstream road films with heterosexual protagonists have changed markedly during this decade. The outlaw-couple film productively reinvented itself through the lens of postmodernism (Wild at Heart, Kalifornia, True Romance, Natural Born Killers). And, just when the buddy movie might seem to have exhausted its resources, late-1996 releases in the US feature a man-elephant buddy pair (Larger than Life) and feuding former presidents (My Fellow Americans), as well as a more familiar coupling of mismatched road men (Good Luck). The essays in The Road Movie Book remind us just how varied and adaptable the genre has always been and, we hope, will prevent in the future the ahistorical pronouncements that have too often underestimated the genre in the act of describing it.
