A culture on the move: Contemporary representations of the United States in road movies of the nineteen nineties.

摘要

This dissertation provides a critical theory arguing the status of the road movie as a genre and providing a thorough account of its conventions. This theory is applied to a selection of representative U.S. road movies grouped in different topic areas with a view to examining the representation of our target sociocultural issues: gender, race, sexual identity and old age. This work analyses the historical evolution of the U.S. road movie, with a special emphasis on the 1990s, across the genre sphere but also other cultural factors in order to explore how the road has opened up its gender stance to the inclusion of any race, sex and social condition. It is especially those sectors in U.S. society which are more victimised by the traditional patriarchal system who constitute the real protagonists of this road genre. This analysis centres on the extent to which these cinematic representations mirror contemporary U.S. society.;Section One presents the theoretical framework which elaborates a theory of the road movie as a genre including a definition and an explanatory record of the genre's conventions and its problematic hybridisation.;In the analytical framework in Section Two a selected group of road movies have been classified in different topic areas so as to examine the representation of our target sociocultural factors: gender, romance, race, sexual identity and aging in the road movie. Chapter One explores female road movies like Thelma & Louise, exhibiting the genre's evolution from an originally male-biased genre to a genre opened to the representation of women. Chapter Two presents heterosexuality in romantic road movies like True Romance and Flirting with Disaster. Chapter Three shows the genre's opening up from a biased white, heterosexual perspective to the inclusion of racial minorities (Love Field) and alternative sexualities (The Living End). The last chapter will discuss the representation of old age in the road movie through the analysis of The Straight Story.;Finally, this dissertation explores the condition of the road movie after the turn of the century: the current trends of road horror, road teenpics and the exportation of this genre to Europe and beyond.