I. BUILDING A ROAD TO NOWHERE: THE MYTH OF THE AMERICAN ROAD

In numerous literary and cinematic texts produced in the United States in the latter half of the twentieth century, the road in its myriad forms evokes utopian ideas of escape and liberation, offering the promise of release from certain socially determined constraints or lives of quiet desperation.Footnote ⁷ The potholed highways that course beneath Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957), to take a paradigmatic example, represent a conduit for the expression of a countercultural ethos within the proscribed territory of conservative 1950s society. In perhaps the most famous contemporary instance of the genre, Kerouac's narrator combines a freewheeling countercultural narrative with improvised jazz bebop rhythms, producing a modern hagiography of itinerant life on the highway:

Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty's movement in cars, on the road across the United States, is persistently romanticized and correlated with the legendary American pioneer's expeditions west, and images of the untamed American frontier proliferate.Footnote ⁹ The road, in this well-known example, bestows freedom of movement and a corresponding freedom to constitute new settlements and new social identities, uninhibited by previous, sclerotic forms.

Even for writers like Joan Didion, antipathetic to the radicalism of Kerouac and the beat generation, the road – and the freeway in particular – nevertheless symbolized a similar kind of freedom: the heroines of her works find in the metallic currents and eddies of the blacktop a vitality and unpredictability absent from their own lives as weary middle-class housewives and divorcees. Maria, one of Didion's typically etherized, affluent female protagonists from 1970's Play It as It Lays, spends her days on the freeway, driving from San Diego to the Harbour, through Hollywood to the Golden State. The incestuous environs of the Hollywood movie business that determines her life, the unwanted intrusions of an ex-husband, the anxiety attendant to a forthcoming abortion, “she never thought about that on the freeway”:Footnote ¹⁰

This incessant motility exemplifies what Alexandra Ganser calls a para-nomadic road story: a tale of fictionalized mobility “that privilege[s] a sense of movement for movement's sake. In these narratives, the creation of a moveable home on the road can be empowering [for its female characters],”Footnote ¹² and Play It as It Lays repeatedly acclaims the notion of the free-freeway.

Taking it as the ever-present ground of freedom and mobility, writers like Kerouac and Didion uphold and extend a vision of the road which finds its roots in Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1856): in “The Song of the Open Road,” Whitman uses the road as a cypher, which cuts across the vastness of the United States in land and legend. Upon this very American territory, he conjoins the liberty, mobility, and equality representative of America's idealized, democratic virtues. “Allons! the road is before us!” he exclaims, “It is safe – I have tried it – my own feet have tried it well – be not detain'd!”:

Whitman's visionary poem renders the matter of the road transcendent, allowing it to obtain an exalted symbolic status beyond mere dirt and rubble: here, the road symbolizes an equitable relationship between individuals, freedom from constraint, and even the process of poetic composition. For Whitman, life itself is a road: “Of the progress of the souls of men and women along the grand roads of the universe,” he writes, “all other progress is the needed emblem and sustenance.”Footnote ¹⁴ Leaves of Grass’s idealization of the road within an American context combines the road's imagined potential with a vision of the United States as the land of liberty. Anticipating numerous other instances, Whitman represents the road as a seam of freedom that courses through American life.

In these examples I would suggest that roads are made to represent tarmacadamed Deleuzoguattarian lines of flight that seep or leak out between the sedentary planes that make up the socius. Conducting their passengers towards affective experiences of liberation, these lines curve inexorably towards deterritorialization and release: “as if something carried us away, across our segments, but also across our thresholds, towards a destination which is unknown, not foreseeable, not pre-existent.”Footnote ¹⁵ However, with regard to actual highways rather than their mythological facsimiles, Deleuze was rather more apprehensive about any supposed association between them and freedom or personal liberty. In “Having an Idea in Cinema” (1991), a late essay that reiterates some of the concerns of his famous “Postscript on Control Societies” (1990), Deleuze takes highways to be characteristic of modern society's tendency toward generalized control rather than a conduit of unfettered liberty. Following Michel Foucault and William S. Burroughs, he argues:

Other American road narratives reflect Deleuze's scepticism about the kinds of freedom offered by the highway. In road movies like Bonnie and Clyde,Footnote ¹⁷ Easy Rider,Footnote ¹⁸ and Thelma & Louise,Footnote ¹⁹ roads function as paths for countercultural resistance, self-definition, or the expression of nonnormative desire, but their bathetic conclusions resist an uncritical affirmation of life on the road. In his influential critique, David Laderman argues that “road movies generally aim beyond the borders of cultural familiarity, seeking the unfamiliar for revelation, or at least for the thrill of the unknown. Such traveling, coded as defamiliarization, likewise suggests a mobile refuge from social circumstances felt to be lacking or oppressive in some way.”Footnote ²⁰ Bonnie and Clyde, for instance, obliquely addresses social and political debates of the 1960s through its Depression-era setting; its insistence upon an antithesis between road and settlement, outlaw and social order dramatizes a radical critique of contemporary mainstream ideology in the wake of the New Left's obsolescence.Footnote ²¹ Meanwhile, Easy Rider is a version of On the Road for the 1960s, trading jazz in for rock ’n’ roll, cars for motorcycles and beats for hippies, exaggerating the countercultural antagonism of Kerouac's work. As an heir to this tradition, which pits a duo's dynamic quest against the staid contrivances of the social and political order, Thelma & Louise also subverts convention by situating its rebellion within the context of sexual and gender politics. However, the downbeat endings of these films find their rebellious protagonists and their subversive causes suffering death and dissolution at the hands of established or ad hoc forces of American society: following its momentary dislocation, social order is restored. With the premature termination of the journeys undertaken on the road by Bonnie and Clyde, Wyatt and Billy, and Thelma and Louise, the “thrill of the unknown” gives way to disappointment and the “mobile refuge” of the road is revealed as a quick fix that ends in failure.Footnote ²²

Kelly Reichardt's films participate in this lineage of road narratives which offer an ambivalent response towards the promise of the road. Most often praised for its realism and an unsensationalized portrait of emotional vulnerability, her modest oeuvre, which to date comprises six full-length films and a handful of shorts, also subtly insists upon an interrogation of the symbolic landscape of the United States in which the road reigns supreme. Her work amplifies the implied doubts of preceding road narratives such that her films resonate with the rather more emphatic criticisms espoused by America's anti-freeway and anti-automobile movements of the 1970s. Reichardt's camera frames the mythological road and its various constituent ideas (freedom, the blacktop, the gleaming hood of an American automobile, exit), undermining its aura of excitement and escape.

II. “A WHOLE OTHER ZONE”: OLD JOY

Midway through Reichardt's breakthrough River of Grass (1994), her female protagonist Cozy (Lisa Bowman) is framed in a mid-shot, stopped on the hard shoulder of an unremarkable highway, standing alongside a station wagon filled with screaming kids. Peering up longingly at the raised, distant expressway which lattices the outskirts of town, she wonders out loud what it's for, where it goes. Cozy quietly yearns to escape her dreary life as a lower-middle-class suburban housewife and, in this moment, the expressway appears to represent release – as it does for Didion's Maria. Fleeing domesticity, Cozy meets the thirty-something stoner Lee (Larry Fessenden), seizing the shining hope that his blue Malibu seems to thrust before her when he almost runs her down. On the lam for a crime that never took place and breaking for the state line, the exhilaration of flight quickly gives way to yet more sedentary tedium as the couple are ensnared by increasingly slender means and suburban avenues that lead only in circles. A pathetic lo-fi imitation of Bonnie and Clyde, one last, wild attempt to reach the expressway and freedom fails miserably when they can't pay the toll and are returned, once again, to the streets that wind through the wastes of this nondescript Florida town.

Reichardt's debut identifies a constellation of issues that orbit the symbol of the road, which are then unpacked and investigated in her subsequent work: the road as a locus of restriction, not emancipation; the road as a symptom of social inequality instead of its cure; the coercive and pernicious psychological effect of the road's idealization. Her later features, most of which were filmed in the Pacific Northwest and include the so-called Oregon trilogy, each offer understated critiques of the road and together constitute a remarkably refined vision of its function in the American cultural imaginary. In Old Joy, the first part of the trilogy, spaces crisscrossed by roads inhibit intimacy between its protagonists and roads are synonymous with constraint rather than freedom.

The film opens on the silent, cross-legged Mark (Daniel London) meditating in a garden. With the camera trained upon him, one would expect the scene to sound as peaceful as he is, but instead the soundtrack is dominated by an interminable bass-trebly drone of nearby traffic. A gong sounds occasionally but fails to disperse the pervasive noise as vehicles pass incessantly and police sirens scream out, intruding upon the auricular space of this meditative scene. A telephone message, a barely intelligible conversation between Mark and his pregnant partner, and he is in his car, bound for a secluded hot springs in central Oregon. He picks up his friend, Kurt (Will Oldham); they stop to collect some pot, and drive out of town. On the road, they talk about people they used to know, their families, some recent news: conversation is stilted and punctuated with what would be silence, if not for the oppressive thrum of nearby traffic. More than twenty-seven minutes of screen time elapse before the film or its soundtrack are finally rid of cars or roads. During this time, Reichardt repeatedly manoeuvres the road (and its vehicles) between the bodies of her characters, subtly, symbolically implicating it into the dislocation between these once-intimate friends. In one poignantly composed over-the-shoulder shot, the slash of a highway across the middle of the frame separates Mark in the foreground from Kurt in the distance. Later, this shot is replicated but inverted as the dashboard of Mark's station wagon cuts a grey-brown ditch through the middle ground between Kurt, before the camera, inside the car, and Mark, outside, walking away.

Unable to find the hot springs, Mark and Kurt resolve to make camp in a clearing and continue their search the next day. “The sign up there is literally blank,” Mark comments; “We've entered a whole other zone.” Once the road is out of shot, exchanges between the two men become demonstrably more fluid, their conversation oriented toward the present and the near future rather than tired subjects of their shared past. Off the road and in front of a crackling campfire, the previously taciturn Mark turns loquacious and speaks at length about his becoming a father. Later, in the scene's emotional climax, Kurt exclaims, “I miss you, Mark. I miss you really, really bad. I want us to be real friends again, there's something between us and I don't like it. I want it to go away.” Attempting to soothe his troubled friend, Mark reaches for Kurt's shoulder and rubs it reassuringly (“We're fine,” he repeats: “we're totally fine”).

Such unexpected physical and emotional directness is extended the following day when they reach the hot springs deep in the Oregon woods: unembarrassed by their nudity, they strip and bathe together side by side. Old Joy’s viewers and protagonists have most certainly entered a “whole other zone” here: the mechanized drone of automobiles is replaced by the spring-water's noisy burbling and, rather than watch powerlessly as green trees blur past a moving car, Reichardt's static camera now meditatively observes its surroundings – lingering, for instance, on a slug almost imperceptibly inching over a mossy stone. Kurt rubs Mark's naked shoulders, returning the reassuring caress from the previous night with a sustained, even sensual, massage whose true significance seems unclear but which nonetheless seems to be accepted by both as a rare instance of tactile intimacy. Reichardt's suggestion in this scene appears to be that, in the absence of the road's striated space and its ubiquitous metal boxes – which puts something “between” Mark and Kurt – emotional engagement and the freedom to participate in such uncodified intimacy is finally possible for her characters. Once they return to the car, therefore, the spell is broken and the men drive back to town in apparent silence as the neon lights of suburban shopping malls drift past; the two friends parting finally with platitudes that indicate a renewed separation (Mark: “Alrighty …” Kurt: “Yup …”).

Old Joy is adapted from a story by Portland-based writer Jon Raymond, which appears in his 2008 collection Livability – a title that echoes the rallying cries of American anti-freeway campaigners in the 1960s and 1970s and meant the freedom to live without automobiles. Drawing out an antagonism between the highway and the human, Reichardt's film likewise echoes (if subtly) the antipathy towards highways that marked Portland's anti-freeway movement. Roused to action in the wake of the celebrated and controversial Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 and coming to prominence with the Mount Hood Freeway controversy in particular, these activists attempted to oppose a prevailing tendency to value vehicular mobility over human “livability.”

Eisenhower's 1956 Highway Act, the largest endowment of federal funds ever offered for the construction of the nation's roads, aimed to create a state-of-the-art network of interstate highways across the United States, comprising 41,000 thousand miles of new roads. Under the extremely attractive terms of the act, the federal government pledged 90 percent of the costs of the new roads, while states themselves only needed to raise the outstanding 10 percent. Oregon, like every other state, planned, proposed and had approved a number of freeways designed to accommodate the vast increase in automobile ownership across the state, and alleviate congestion especially in its metropolitan regions. Two such projects were the Mount Hood Freeway, a six-mile stretch of freeway in southeast Portland that would connect Route 26 in the east with I-80N in the north and the smaller I-505 freeway spur in northwest Portland. Both routes, proposed by the Oregon Highway Commission's highway engineers without local consultation, carved straight through historic Portland neighbourhoods, businesses, churches, and even grade schools.Footnote ²³

Faced with impending destruction, neighbourhood groups in southeast and northwest Portland such as the Southeast Legal Defense Fund (SLDF), the Woodlawn Neighborhood Association, Sensible Transportation Options for People (STOP), and other groups formed in Portland around the Model Cities programme began to mobilize against these freeways. The SLDF in particular launched a legal campaign against the proposed freeway, arguing that, if built, the Mount Hood Freeway “would cut a five-and-a-half-mile swath through older residential districts that developed around the streetcar, southeast of the central business district, during the early twentieth century, obliterating seventeen hundred homes and many businesses.”Footnote ²⁴ Such groups drew strength from the successes of a nationwide anti-freeway revolt centred on San Francisco, Boston and Cleveland and joined the ranks of what political scientist James Dunn would later term the “vanguard” of an anti-freeway movement.Footnote ²⁵ Together with Portland's political power brokers that included progressive mayor Neil Goldschmidt and chairman of the Oregon Transport Commission Glenn Jackson, these neighbourhood associations successfully laboured for the cancellation of the Mount Hood and I-505 freeways and the diversion of federal funding towards public works such as mass transit. Most significantly, however, their efforts ensured that city planning and traffic engineering would henceforth proceed only with citizens’ approval.

Although Portland's anti-freeway revolt is not explicitly evoked in Old Joy, Reichardt's film embodies the ethos of the movement – challenging an uncritical affirmation of the road's supposed potential to connect the nation and subtly addressing the drawbacks that accompany its overly mythologized advantages. While acknowledging that the road permits Mark and Kurt initially to take flight and find their rural idyll, the film also seems to suggest that only off-the-grid and out of sight of it can free, unfettered verbal and somatic communication take place.

III. THE CULT OF THE AUTO: WENDY AND LUCY

In the first part of the Oregon trilogy, although the road may seem ubiquitous, escape is possible – provisional, precarious, and paradoxical though it may be. The next instalment, however, limns a more complicated and cynical vision of our contemporary moment and seems to disperse any residual optimism evoked by the previous film. In Wendy and Lucy, Reichardt asks how escape can be achieved and by whom and she teases out the irony that underscores Old Joy: freedom from a life webbed by roads is only possible by taking to the road in a car. Improvising upon a motif that initially surfaced in River of Grass, in Wendy and Lucy Reichardt seems to suggest that if you wish to withdraw from the cross-hatched Futurama of contemporary America, your ability to do so will very much depend on who you are and whether or not you can afford it.

Like all of Reichardt's films, the plot of Wendy and Lucy is deceptively simple: Wendy (Michelle Williams) and her dog Lucy break down in an Oregon town on their way to a better life in Alaska. Wendy finds herself jailed for shoplifting, Lucy gets lost, and the money soon runs out. Worst of all, the car costs too much to fix and leaves a miserable Wendy alone, jumping a train to anywhere at all. The pastoral scene that opens the film, which sees a young woman in a blue sweater and cutoff jeans happily playing fetch with a spirited dog as the camera tracks them through the trees, serves as the emotional degree zero of the piece – an idyllic pause before a vertiginous spiral, prompted in the film by Wendy's coming into contact with a car.

In Wendy and Lucy the automobile stands as a cypher for the road, indexing the same range of abstract concerns and aspirations attendant to the road's status as a mythological trope. There is nonetheless a certain immediacy involved when viewing the road through the relationship between a car and the money necessary for its upkeep: here Reichardt undermines the myth of the liberatory road by articulating her vision in terms that anyone who has ever owned a car can immediately comprehend. In other words, by foregrounding the constraints of its financial cost, the director subtly undermines the correlation of freedom and the car and the road by proxy.

The first shot of the vehicle finds Wendy in the driver seat, counting her remaining money and marking her passage to Alaska in a notebook filled with childish doodles. This scene immediately establishes a conceptual equation that recurs throughout the film: car + cash = freedom. Exacerbating Old Joy’s opening and closing aesthetic, Wendy and Lucy never strays very far from the road, and action incessantly circles highways, parking lots, garages, and roadside cafes. Money is also an omnipresent concern and, with each dollar extracted from Wendy's wallet, the film's viewer involuntarily calculates how bad things are and if escape might ever be achieved. Conscious of the money she needs to complete her escape, Wendy resorts to shoplifting dog food. On her first attempt she is caught by a self-righteous store clerk who, when the manager appears to vacillate over her prosecution, loudly declaims, “The rules apply to everyone equally.” It's a cruel motto that seems to hang over the film; an egalitarian rhetoric callously indifferent to the material differences between characters that pass before the camera: wheelchair-bound veterans trade in beverage cans for change while, at the fringes of town, Lucy's new, well-off owner presides over a large house and acres of neatly kept lawns. Following a fifty-dollar fine for shoplifting and mounting garage costs, Wendy's funds begin to dwindle. Consequently, the car that was previously her home and her sanctuary quickly becomes a burden or a threat to the very freedom she thought it would offer.

While the first instalment of the Oregon trilogy echoes elements of Portland's anti-freeway movement of the 1970s, the second may be productively read alongside the anti-freeway movement's radical anti-auto wing. Intensifying anti-freeway arguments, anti-auto activists targeted the automobile itself as the root cause of innumerable social ills: freeways were a mere symptom of a more disastrous automobile obsession. Ronald Buel's 1972 polemic Dead End: The Automobile in Mass Transportation, is exemplary in this regard. Later chief of staff for Mayor Goldschmidt and instrumental in Portland's deletion of the Mount Hood Freeway and subsequent implementation of rapid transit, in Dead End Buel finds the automobile responsible for accelerating subjective alienation and the dehumanization of modern America. Taking to task the “cult of the auto,” he writes,

Paraphrasing renowned urban activist Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Buel argues for the need for urban spaces “in which there is real diversity, in which there is vitality and interaction, even (non-violent) conflict”; in which, therefore, car use is curbed.Footnote ²⁷ Reichardt's film appears to draw upon similar sentiments: the automobile is often framed as a burden and a threat, and without her car, Wendy is also more exposed to the possibility of interactions with other people (her friendship with the mall's security guard which develops over the course of the film is an important and affecting through-line). However, if, like Buel, Reichardt is critical of the “cult of the auto” and of the car's capacity to limit human interaction, then, unlike him, she is also cognizant of the advantages a car offers to those in need of protection (from conflict, violent or nonviolent). Without a car Wendy is open to encounters, certainly, but as a penniless young woman in a strange environment such encounters may not always be welcome.

This is addressed in Wendy and Lucy’s darkest scene, whose menace derives from a gendered power imbalance and the intimation of a sexualized threat. Her car locked in the garage, Wendy retreats to the woods overlooking the railway line, and curls up for the night on some cardboard. Out of the darkness there later emerges a dimly lit male figure (Larry Fessenden) who, upon seeing Wendy, mutters “Oh man, oh man …” before pausing for some moments to observe her sleeping. A gendered vulnerability alights upon the recumbent, unconscious woman surveyed by the upright man, cloaked in shadow and towering above her. Awoken by the sound of his rummaging through her belongings, she is warned not to look at him and reminded (or threatened) that she is lying on a very steep hill. Fessenden draws out the breaks in his lines to almost unbearable lengths, amplifying the tension of the scene, and leading the audience to fear the worst: that Wendy may suffer violence at the hands of the drifter. Thankfully this is not to be and, grumbling curses, he moves on, leaving Wendy terrified and running for the nearest sign of civilization (a Shell gas station).

Finally out of the car, away from the road and surrounded by the natural environment, the setting of this scene resembles Mark and Kurt's campsite in Old Joy, and it is instructive to read these scenes together as a recto–verso that pivots on the gender of their respective characters. The latter, as we have seen, forms a comfortable diegetic space for its male protagonists to temporarily heal the rift between them and allows them to safely regress to an almost childlike state (the pump pellet gun and tin can game in particular connotes a popular image of boyhood). The former, however, is diametrically opposed to this: a space that was once safe, salubrious and, in some ways, innocent, when inhabited by a lone female character, turns hostile, claustrophobic and sexualized. The freedom found and felt by the men of Old Joy is minor and fleeting but nonetheless palpable; no such freedom is available to Wendy, who occupies spaces overcoded by gendered discrimination and social disadvantage, from which neither road nor car departs. While Wendy and Lucy is sceptical about cars and the freedoms they purportedly offer, in this powerful scene Reichardt appears to concede that for those most vulnerable to the predations and inequalities of American society, the car may also represent a much-needed source of protection.

IV. LOST: MEEK'S CUTOFF

Set during the nineteenth century's mass migration west and focussing in particular on the trials of a small group of pioneers that made the trip from Missouri to Oregon in 1845, the visual aesthetic of Meek's Cutoff has very little in common with Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy. Scrubbed of the coordinates of the contemporary world, here we find a frugal assortment of period detail in place of modern contrivances and technological obtrusions. Most noticeably, there are no roads. As Reichardt traces the progress of her eight protagonists and their three covered wagons across central Oregon, the frame fills with enormous expanses of pristine country: no highways mark its plains; no bridges span its rivers. This is a notable omission that feels particularly striking in light of the fact that the film takes its name and narrative from the history of one of Oregon's pioneer trails: the Meek Cutoff is the name given to an ill-fated route taken through Oregon by emigrants during the autumn of 1845.

In its title and subject alone, then, Meek's Cutoff would seem to put the matter of the American road and its nineteenth-century beginnings front and centre: as Karina Longworth of the San Franscisco Weekly astutely remarked upon its release, “like all of director Kelly Reichardt's previous features (River of Grass, Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy), [it] is essentially a road movie about both the unequal distribution of power and resources and the frustrations of the disenfranchised.”Footnote ²⁸ It's a strange road movie that features no roads, however, and if this is a Reichardtian road movie – and I would argue with Longworth that it is – then the director's continued exploration of the mythology of the American road proceeds in this film without a referent on screen. More precisely, it is the very absence of such a physical locus that propels her investigations. Whereas her previous films criticize America's mythology of the road, this film finds Reichardt in a rather more reflective mood, patiently excavating the historical or human substrate that underpins the myth and from which it draws its strength. Meek's Cutoff is a meditation on the origins of the road, what it means, and why the American people, in particular, cleave to it with such desperation.

Reichardt's film sticks quite closely to the story of the Meek Cutoff, one of the lesser-known but more intriguing adventures associated with the great western movements of the 1800s. Encouraged by the reports of explorers like Lewis and Clark and emboldened by the provisional government of Oregon's law that allowed white settlers to claim up to 640 acres of land,Footnote ²⁹ mass migrations to the Oregon area were common by the mid-1840s. Gripped by “Oregon fever,” thousands of families trekked across the continent to settle the fertile land in the west of the territory, but to get there they first had to pass through the Blue Mountains via the difficult and dangerous path later known as the Oregon trail. In August 1845, however, the trapper and mountain man Steven Meek came to a group of emigrants with welcome news of a shortcut, which would not only be quicker and easier, but also circumvent dangerous American Indian territory. As William Goulder, one of those approached by Meek, notes in his Reminiscences (1909),

Persuaded by Meek's brash self-confidence and having received reassurances of his familiarity with the area, the party employed him to lead the convoy consisting of two hundred wagons and about a thousand migrants.

Not long into the trip, however, it became clear that Meek was clueless about the terrain and had no idea how to get the party to the Dalles: as Goulder remarks, “It was somewhat amusing to think how diligently and persistently Meek had tried to play guide to the last; though a very few days from the start sufficed to prove that he was as badly lost as the rest.”Footnote ³¹ For forty-five arduous days, including long periods without water or any hope of arriving at their destination, the party meandered through the mountains and canyons of central Oregon. Their misery and desperation during this time was, according to pioneer Samuel Parker, beyond reckoning: “I will just say pen and tong[ue] will both fall short when they gow [sic] to tell the suffering the company went through.”Footnote ³² Once the party reached the Dalles mission in October, more than twenty-four people had died en route and more would follow due to thirst and exhaustion.

Meek's Cutoff adapts its storyline (such as it is) from the experience of one of the Meek migration's groups (though the film features far fewer settlers than were part of the original expedition). Led by Meek (played here by Bruce Greenwood) and comprising a train of wagons with Solomon Tetherow (Will Patton) at its head, this unfortunate group wandered about for days, lost in the Oregon desert with little water or provisions. According to Tetherow's letters, the party was fortunate enough to meet a Cayuse guide (played in the film by Rod Rondeaux) who brought them to safety in exchange for a blanket,Footnote ³³ but Reichardt's film concludes before the party is rescued, leaving the emigrants and the audience alike unsure where the Indian guide is leading them and if they will ever find their way.

Within the first few minutes of the film's opening shots, Reichardt establishes the principal features of a visual and aural pattern that recurs throughout the film's ninety-eight minutes. As mentioned above, the shots that make up Meek's Cutoff contain no roads. Given that it is a period piece located mostly in the unforgiving desert of central Oregon, this is no doubt to be expected. However, Reichardt appears to subtly, intractably insist upon this, amplifying the unmarkedness of the territory to a conspicuous degree. In one instance, as a lone female protagonist desperately chases her windswept bonnet across a massive cracked expanse, Reichardt's camera lingers on the immense stretch of undifferentiated space absorbed by the frame. Like Old Joy, the soundtrack is also dominated for long periods by ambient noise; human voices, at least to begin with, surface only occasionally. Unlike Old Joy’s opening, however, the sound here is not the mechanized drone of traffic but the roar of running water, as small figures in period attire slowly unload their covered wagons and inch across a waist-high river. Once across and on their way again, the sound of water is replaced by the slow, deliberate squeak of wagon wheels that counts a metronomic rhythm throughout much of the film. From the outset, then, there is an aural insistence on the absence of automobiles that matches a visual insistence on the absence of roads: the automotive context that marked the previous films of the Oregon trilogy has been excised from landscape and soundscape alike.

Into this entirely smooth and uninterrupted aural and visual plane Reichardt deposits her protagonists. Given the antagonism toward the road that marks her previous films, one might imagine that the filmic space of Meek's Cutoff would represent a kind of prelapsarian idyll, unmarked by the restraints of roads and cars, where her characters could be happy and free. But instead we find them drifting without coordinates, desperate, frightened, and forever in search of an elusive path or a road that will lead them to safety. When the heroine of the piece, Emily Tetherow (Michelle Williams), first comes upon the Cayuse Indian, she flees, terrified, back to the sanctuary of the camp. Finding the captured Cayuse marking stones with unknown cyphers and reading them as signals to hidden hostiles, a panicked Thomas Gately (Paul Dano) begs the camp to hang their prisoner from a wagon before it's too late. Later, spying more such strange stones protruding from the plains, Gately's wife Millie (Zoe Kazan) is beside herself, crazed by terror and paranoia: “A sign!” she screams, “They made it – they're giving him orders! Do you see? We all see! Please – Thomas please … I want to go home!”

Such paroxysms of action and emotion are remarkable in the characteristically muted palette of Reichardt's film and the windbag trailblazer Meek quickly capitalizes upon them. Having interrogated Emily about her encounter with the Cayuse, for instance, he responds,

“Is he ignorant, or just plain evil?” a distressed Emily asks her husband following Meek's rant. I would suggest that he is neither: such remarks, though apparently spoken without heed to the listener's anxieties or with a sadistic glee, instead comprise an attempt by him to amplify the camp's fear of the unknown in order to have it submit to his authority. Frightened, they are easily convinced to follow the experienced mountain man blindly; frightened, they will walk a path of his making: as William Goulder's comments above attest, the real Meek came to lead the unfortunate convoy to the Dalles in just this way.

Steven Meek's renown (or infamy) as the trailblazing pioneer of the Meek Cutoff immediately associates him with the history of nineteenth-century trails across America and a prehistory of road building in the United States. Reichardt uses this association to imbue her Meek and his interactions with the emigrants with a broad cultural significance and to elevate the isolated incident represented here to an exemplary status. Meek's opportunistic attempts to manipulate the frightened settlers, to persuade them to place their trust in his authoritative guidance and in the trail that he will show them, thus speak metonymically for the impulses and exploitations that, for Reichardt, form the bedrock of the American road.

To put this another way, I would suggest that in Meek's Cutoff Reichardt more meditatively considers the question that surfaces in her previous work: if the road constrains individual freedom and individual expression, why do the American people in particular seem so emotionally attached to it? Why are they so ready to believe the tired myth that the road bestows freedom? Here Reichardt ventures a hypothesis on the basis of an historical example and suggests that the reason Americans cleave to the road so desperately is fear: as a Steinian space “filled with moving,” the shifting motility of America engenders a fear of being forever lost. The road, by contrast, offers comfort and relative safety, direction and purpose. Proscribing the frightening experience of existence, with each fast-approaching signpost the road fulfils an expectation: viewed existentially, the road is a manifestation of something like Sartrean bad faith, in which individual agency is sacrificed for the security of an environment without fear. The road, in effect, runs on normativity – creating a pattern that need only be followed without question, in order to be followed without fear.

Defined primarily by their preoccupation with the road, Reichardt's three Oregon films are road narratives that nonetheless resist the utopian tendencies of the genre and avoid exalting the road's capacity to bestow thrills, spills, and occasional spiritual enlightenment on its travellers. Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, and Meek's Cutoff draw out the often muted critical tones of previous road narratives (e.g. Thelma & Louise, Easy Rider) and expose modern America's complicated relationship with the road and the automobiles that traverse it. Of driving in the US Reichardt has said, “It's not exciting. It's not an adventure now. It's really just more of a chore … It used to be this inspiring thing that I would do, and now I find it just really depressing,” and she brings that negativity to bear on the Oregon trilogy, which undermines the optimism of traditional road movies that emphasize the “freedom and new horizons” the road is supposed to offer.Footnote ³⁴ Yet if her films are critical of the American road and yearn for freedom beyond the freeway, they also acknowledge the concessions and compromises that mark the pursuit of livability: roads can be simultaneously a means of bringing people together and the cause of their dissociation (Old Joy); cars offer society's most vulnerable both the chance of escape and the danger of financial ruin (Wendy and Lucy); the road can free Americans from fear and uncertainty but leave them vulnerable to exploitation (Meek's Cutoff). As sinuous as the roads that run through it, Reichardt's Oregon trilogy is a multifaceted examination of a singular American obsession.