Roadside America

This week, we look at some real counterculture figures on the American road: bikers and outlaws. Our reading includes two articles that provide cultural critiques of road films as well as one day discussing Hunter S. Thompson‘s 1967 (non?)fiction/memoir “saga,” Hell’s Angels, which takes us straight into some of the nation’s roughest motorcycle gangs in the mid-1960s. It’s long, gritty, rambling, and occasionally outright offensive – and Thompson wrote it that way on purpose, to shock his readers and establish his own uniquely authentic voice. His style came to be called “gonzo journalism.” Although it began as a profile of “outsider culture” in America, ironically, over the course of his research for Hell’s Angels, Thompson himself became something of an insider to the outsider culture of motorcycle gangs.

Tues 11/10 Reading: Laderman, “What a Trip: The Road Film and American Culture” and Eraso, “Thelma and Louise: ‘Easy Riders’ in a Male Genre” (PDFs on Blackboard). We’ll screen some clips from The Wild One (1953), Easy Rider (1969), and Thelma and Louise (1991). We’ll be looking at how to read a film as a historic text, analyzing film sequences and filmic storytelling and how this differs from storytelling in print. How do films establish narrative? What kinds of history can we get from films? What can we learn about road culture, fears about violence and lawlessness, or rootlessness of the same generation as Kerouac but taken in a very different direction?

Thurs 11/12 Reading: Hell’s Angels, everyone read “Roll ‘Em Boys” and Postscript, and then remember to read the chapters on either side of your assigned chapter.

Image credit: Leonard Smalls, the “Lone Biker of the Apocalypse,” from Raising Arizona