You Can’t Go Home Again: Queer Disorientation and the Road Movie

写于台北。硕一春季学期Queer Media Histories课程论文，玩得很开心的side project，趁机重温了一批7080s buddy movies!

In Gregg Araki’s The Living End (1992), Jon and Luke, two HIV-positive gay lovers, drift through an aimless road journey that is as much a flight from the law as from the normative promises of social life. During one of their arguments, Jon finally can no longer bear the absurdity of life on the run with Luke, who has become, quite literally, a killer: “I just want to go home.” Luke’s answer, posed as a mocking question, directs us back to another famous journey, one whose trajectory is organized by the desire to return home: “So you and Toto can go back to Kansas and live happily ever after, right?” Yet for these two protagonists, the spell “there’s no place like home” can no longer transport them back to Dorothy’s familiar backyard and bedroom, as if they had merely awakened from a nightmare. While the road still requires the concept of home as a structuring absence (Pamela Robertson 1997, 271), this absence no longer points toward the recovery or restoration of an intact domestic space. Rather, it marks a place that has been irreversibly altered, or lost, once they have left home. On a beach, or perhaps in any unnamed place, these Dorothys without ruby slippers repeat a new spell of their own: “you can’t go home again.”

If the road movie is a genre obsessed with home and being away from home, then it is, in a deeper sense, about inhabiting a particular configuration of time and space. Sara Ahmed describes this as a migrant orientation: a way of living while facing two directions at once, “toward a home that has been lost, and to a place that is not yet home” (Sara Ahmed 2006, 10). A migrant body is always situated between past and future, between what has ended and what has not yet been completed, and between forms of familiarity and strangeness that continually turn into one another. Familiarity is not something already given and existing “in” the world. It is an effect of inhabitation, shaped by repeated actions that reach toward objects already within reach (Ahmed 2006, 7). When Dorothy lies in her bedroom, her body extends almost effortlessly into the surrounding space. Even with her eyes closed, she could move from the edge of the bed to the windowsill, because the repeated movement between these objects has taught her where they are in relation to her body and how to turn toward them in the right direction. Once she leaves home, however, and begins walking along the yellow brick road in Oz, Dorothy no longer knows what she is facing, nor can she predict what objects will come into view if she continues to move in that direction. This experience of displacement and incongruity reminds her what it means to feel at home, or how her body once moved through spaces of familiarity, as suggested by her much-quoted and much-parodied line: “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

Yet if feeling different and not at home can reaffirm the benefits of staying at home, what does it mean for the many road movie protagonists after Dorothy, who have no home to return to, to arrive somewhere over the rainbow? I argue that the road movie is concerned with the process by which a migrant body becomes disoriented and tries to regain orientation, only to find this effort rendered impossible by mobility itself. By self-consciously activating the queer potential already embedded in the road movie paradigm, Gregg Araki’s The Doom Generation (1995) playfully shows how remaining within the moment of getting lost can lead us toward new orientations, new routes, and the imagination of another future.

If becoming a subject is to “learn one’s place,” then the queer subject learns early that, because subjectivity is necessarily and fundamentally a spatial achievement, he has no secure place in the traditional family (Robert Lang 1997, 333). As the zero point of bodily orientation, the normative family presupposes a body that can naturally extend into heterosexual domestic space along the straight line of marriage and reproduction, leaving no place for other bodies (Ahmed 2006, 89). Bodies that cannot or refuse to follow a direction, or to be “directed” in this particular way, from birth, childhood, and adolescence to marriage, reproduction, and death, experience disorientation in Ahmed’s sense: because they fail to extend into spaces designed for normative social reproduction, they might feel “‘out of place’ where they have been given ‘a place’” (Ahmed 2006, 11). This feeling of being out of place, in turn, points toward other places that have not yet been inhabited. For such bodies, taking to the road is not a movement back toward home but a deviation from the straight path that home is supposed to secure. The new unofficial paths they leave behind help generate alternative lines that move cross the ground in unexpected, queer ways (Ahmed 2006, 19). When this deviation from the straight line is repeated over time, as road movie protagonists repeatedly leave, arrive, and fail to settle, disorientation itself can become a familiar way of inhabiting space. To be lost, in this sense, is to register the unfamiliar as a condition of movement, and to allow the surface of the body to take shape through this repeated exposure to spaces already occupied and defined by other bodies. The road of the road movie thus becomes a set of “desire lines” traced by bodies that continue to move otherwise (Lang 1997, 345).

This spatial deviation also produces a temporality different from straight time, a temporal logic that naturalizes the “here and now” of everyday life and presents the reproductive future of the heterosexual majority as the only imaginable future (José Esteban Muñoz 2009, 22). The road movie protagonist’s journey either has no stable goal, or its apparent goal proves illusory. “Florida” in Midnight Cowboy, for instance, is clearly not meant to signify resolution or fulfillment (Wood 2003, 203). This ongoing movement toward an uncertain future resonates with Muñoz’s account of queerness as ideality, as a mode of imagining and longing: “We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality” (Muñoz 2009, 1). The horizon that extends and renews itself at the edge of the road movie character’s vision is therefore not merely a recurring visual convention but the visualization of queer temporality. The destination, as horizon, does not function as something to be reached; it summons and organizes movement toward what is not yet available. If the objects within reach shape the body through repeated acts of tending toward them (Ahmed 2006, 2), then queer time, or road time, unsettles the field of reachable objects. By stepping out of the linearity of straight time, it refuses the ontological stillness of the here and now and turns the subject toward other, shifting objects, especially those that had previously been unavailable, thereby opening the body to what may still come into view (Muñoz 2009, 25).

This spatialization of time and the temporality of orientation meet in the road movie through a shared logic of “toward”: the body is drawn toward a space and time that is almost, but not quite, available in the present. As movement departs from prescribed directions and exceeds the given reality of the here and now, other possible modes of existence and relation begin to open. Sedgwick argues that, in any male-dominated society, male homosocial desire, understood as a continuum of male social relations ranging from friendship and mentorship to sexual desire, bears an “inherent and potentially active structural congruence” with the structures that sustain patriarchal power (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick 1985, 25). In modern Western society, however, the link between homosocial bonds and homosexual desire within this continuum has been forcibly severed, and homophobia functions as the internal mechanism that maintains this rupture (Sedgwick 1985, 20). The recurring male buddy relation in the road movie occupies precisely a position along this continuum. It is intimate enough and affectively charged enough to resist clear definition within existing social categories, yet it is repeatedly accompanied by disclaimer mechanisms that insist on the protagonists’ heterosexuality (Robin Wood 2003, 204). The boundary between the sexual and the nonsexual within the continuum of male homosocial desire is variable, but not arbitrary; its placement depends on specific historical and social conditions (Sedgwick 1985, 24). The temporal and spatial logic of the road movie, however, partially suspends those conditions. When disoriented subjects depart from straight lines and straight time, the normative straight social relations that support them, including heterosexual marriage, family bonds, and the carefully policed boundary between the sexual and the nonsexual, also begin to lose their force. The repressed homosocial-homosexual continuum can briefly take shape within the shelter of genre, or at least become available to perception and questioning. Across different historical moments, this queer potential within the road movie genre has surfaced, been negotiated, and been mobilized in markedly different ways.

Before the road movie had been consolidated as a mature genre, Kenneth Anger’s underground short Scorpio Rising (1963) had already forged a queer visual language out of postwar biker culture and Hollywood masculinity. Motorcycles, leather, and the road become eroticized surfaces on which rebellious male bodies are displayed, while icons such as Brando and Dean are recast as objects of homosexual desire (Katie Mills 2006, 114). Anger’s strategy is also exemplary as a mode of queer reception. Through a “deliberate misreading” of popular texts and their heterosexual address, Anger reveals that “a text cannot hold its meaning steady when a viewer invests it with desire” (Mills 2006, 131). Yet as this visual language moved from underground cinema through Roger Corman’s exploitation films and eventually into the mainstream with Easy Rider (1969), its queer references were largely stripped away. Easy Rider borrows heavily from the visual strategies of Scorpio Rising, including tracking shots of motorcycles, a pop-music soundtrack, and an ecstatic presentation of landscape, while transforming the social-critical context of underground cinema into a marketable sign of rebellion (Mills 2006, 128). Robin Wood’s analysis of the 1970s buddy movie cycle shows how these films manage the repressed homosocial-homosexual continuum through a carefully calibrated set of disclaimers. Explicitly homosexual characters often appear as clowns or villains, their presence serving less to acknowledge homosexuality than to contain and disavow it. Female characters, in turn, are brought in to secure the heterosexuality of the male protagonists. The death that closes so many of these films becomes the most effective means of preventing the central male relation from reaching consummation (Wood 2003, 203–205). As foundational texts of this cycle, Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy, both released in 1969, helped establish the road movie’s generic paradigm alongside its mechanisms of repression and disavowal. In Easy Rider, the recurrent but fleeting appearance of women, from the women in the commune to the prostitutes in New Orleans, helps displace any moment that might name the relation between Wyatt and Billy as desire. The diner scene makes this displacement especially visible: the other male customers’ blunt, stereotyped reading of the long-haired hippie protagonists as homosexuals is continually intercut with protagonists’ flirtatious exchange of looks with the young women at another table. In Midnight Cowboy, Joe Buck’s cowboy persona, a Cold War image of national and heterosexual rugged masculinity, is explicitly shown to be attractive to gay men (Kevin Floyd 2001, 115); yet the masculine gay stereotypes deployed in the film’s background seem designed to distract the viewer from asking too directly about the nature of the foregrounded male relation. Queer potential survives in these films not as visible content, but as a repressed possibility made perceptible by the very acts of suggestion and withholding, and left for the viewer to imagine.

Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) offers a particularly suggestive case of the buddy road movie. The film follows several days in the lives of two unnamed men, presenting them almost entirely through the functions they perform: the Driver, played by James Taylor, and the Mechanic, played by Dennis Wilson, move from race to race in their heavily modified 1955 Chevrolet. One morning, a girl, played by Laurie Bird, simply gets into the Chevy and begins traveling with them. They soon encounter “G.T.O.,” played by Warren Oates, an older driver behind the wheel of a 1970 Pontiac GTO, and the four enter a cross-country race from Santa Fe to Washington, D.C. Yet the race never quite feels like a pursuit. The rivals repeatedly exchange vehicles, stories, and imagined futures. G.T.O. becomes increasingly drawn to the two younger men, while the Girl drifts between different cars and different arms. Then, just as abruptly as she had climbed into the modified Chevy, she leaves the three men behind and rides off with a motorcyclist. The question repeatedly raised by the characters, and implicitly by the viewer, “Are we still racing or what?” reveals that the race and its supposed destination function less as a structure of competition than as a pretext for movement itself. As the cars move toward another time and place, they generate temporary, contingent, and noncommittal forms of attachment. The film’s relational dynamics remain difficult to fix. Racers who try to outmaneuver or sabotage one another in one moment may share a bottle on the roadside in the next. A moment of apparent heterosexual intimacy, in which G.T.O. and the Girl tenderly imagine settling down together in some future city, can dissolve almost immediately, as they drive away in different directions without saying goodbye. The only certainty is that no one truly arrives in D.C., a destination that exists only in speech and imagination.

Throughout the film, G.T.O. keeps picking up hitchhikers and tailoring a different story to each passenger. Yet each encounter exposes the instability of appearance and identity: the masculine cowboy turns out to be gay, while the hippie youth is frightened away by G.T.O.’s performance of coolness. The Driver’s desire for the Girl, whose identity remains obscure, does not lead him toward the conventional promise of stable domestic life, but toward death on the racetrack. The film nevertheless seems aware of its characters’ departure from straight lines and straight time. In a diner scene reminiscent of Easy Rider, customers again confront the protagonists’ hippie appearance with barely concealed hostility. G.T.O., with his usual improvisational ease, folds the people at the table into an unremarkable script of conventional family relations: the Driver and the Mechanic become his older and younger sons, and the Girl becomes his daughter-in-law. “We are a big family,” he says. This denial of non-normative life and relation works like many of the disclaimers in road films of the period that, instead of closing down the question, it redirects the viewer’s attention to the distance between these characters and the identities assigned to them.

Two decades later, as what B. Ruby Rich named New Queer Cinema emerged through “appropriation and pastiche, irony,” a reworking of history “with social constructionism very much in mind,” and an aesthetic at once “irreverent, energetic,” “alternately minimalist and excessive,” and “full of pleasure,” Gregg Araki, one of the movement’s most representative filmmakers, playfully exposes both the queer potential that the road movie had repressed and disavowed and the very operation of its disclaimers (B. Ruby Rich 1992, 31). His debut feature, The Living End (1992), had already begun to overturn the road movie’s fatalistic death sentence. As its title suggests, the film refuses to let its HIV-positive protagonists die, transforming the genre’s structural fatalism into a call for ongoing gay desire and political resistance (Mills 1997, 318). The Doom Generation (1995), cheekily subtitled “A Heterosexual Movie By Gregg Araki,” pushes this gesture further in a more self-conscious and openly provocative mode.

The opening credits color-code the three protagonists according to their surnames: Jordan White (James Duval), Amy Blue (Rose McGowan), and Xavier “X” Red (Johnathon Schaech). Drawing loosely on the outlaw mythology of Bonnie and Clyde, the film sends the trio on a nightmarish road trip after they accidentally kill the owner of a QuickieMart. Xavier first crashes into Amy and Jordan’s lives as an unwanted troublemaker, his body smashing against Amy’s windshield as he flees a Gang of Goons, played by Skinny Puppy, who pointedly use “cocksucker” as their insult of choice, situating Xavier, Amy, and Jordan within an explicitly homophobic social world. X is, quite literally, the film’s X factor. By repeatedly triggering violence, he pulls Jordan and Amy against their will into a life of crime and transgression, while also catalyzing a sexual experiment that derails the seemingly monogamous, heteronormative relationship of these two teenagers, who, despite their tattoos, piercings, and attraction to black leather and latex, remain more or less virginal. The further the trio moves down the road, the less stable their relations become. Before X enters the picture, Jordan occupies the position of a dutiful sub: he loves and cherishes Amy, but cannot provide the dominant dynamic she quietly desires. Amy’s relation to X is structured by a similar contradiction. Her disgust for him becomes part of his attraction, making him a kind of kink sounding board, a disreputable hookup through whom she can test desires that remain difficult to admit within the frame of a committed relationship. As X also begins to direct his desire toward Jordan, the triangle opens onto a more explicitly fluid arrangement. When Amy is with both men at once, her vers tendencies are brought to a climax, though one the film will violently interrupt.

The film reappropriates techniques of classical Hollywood cinema in the service of a queer narrative. Araki’s two-shots place Jordan and Xavier closer together than male characters are typically framed on screen, repeatedly making them appear on the verge of kissing. The film also eroticizes the male body as an object of visual pleasure. Although Amy’s breasts are exposed several times, the film balances this display with its sustained attention to Xavier’s muscular body. In the penultimate scene, Amy’s buttocks are briefly glimpsed through her transparent raincoat; Jordan, by contrast, bends over and exposes his naked ass twice, while Xavier exposes his own once. The film’s framing also repeatedly organizes the central relation as a triangle. Jordan often occupies the mediating position between Amy and X, soothing Amy’s anger and persuading her to accept, or at least forgive, an X who has “no guilt, no remorse” and “don’t care about anything” (Figure 1). After a shopping trip, X changes into a cowboy outfit and shows Jordan, seated in the front passenger seat, the riding-cowboy image on his belt buckle, inviting him to move the buckle up and down until the image appears animated. Amy, meanwhile, sits at the wheel in sunglasses, smoking and driving from the other side, detached from the exchange (Figure 2). The most charged scene, however, comes when Xavier secretly watches Jordan and Amy’s passionate bathtub sex while masturbating. In a series of sensual close-ups, Xavier pinches his erect nipple, and the camera lingers on the dark, coarse hair running down his abdomen. As he closes his eyes, leans back, and ejaculates, the image drifts dreamily out of focus, intensifying the dizzy ecstasy of release. The carnal sequence ends with Xavier raising his semen-covered hand to his face and licking it clean, a gesture that leaves the object of his desire impossible to stabilize or name. Sedgwick’s account of “the male traffic in women” within patriarchal heterosexual exchange is given a vivid, almost literal form in the film (Sedgwick 1985, 13). In one scene, after the three wake up in bed together and Amy leaves, Xavier teasingly invites Jordan to imagine having sex with two people at the same time: “your balls are slapping’ against the other guy’s, and you can actually feel his cock, through the girl’s inside.” The female body is imagined as exchangeable sexual property, yet what the fantasy foregrounds is its mediating function: it becomes the channel through which bodily contact between two men can be felt. This outrageous description turns the relation into an intensely self-conscious staging of the erotic triangle itself, undoing the politically imposed break within the male homosocial-homosexual continuum and allowing desire to circulate across it again.

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Amy’s unstable identity also points to the role of media in constructing both subjects and the spaces they inhabit. Throughout the trio’s journey, the three outlaws are repeatedly captured and reframed by mediated images. Their purchases of $6.66 at various stores, for instance, appear as grainy black-and-white surveillance footage. The only time we learn Amy’s full name and age, nearly all the background information the film gives us about her, is through an absurd television report on the QuickieMart killing. Watching themselves on screen, the protagonists confront versions of themselves produced by external images and public discourse. As Corrigan argues, “driving” involves a deeply subjective process of possessing and projecting images from within the frame of a moving body: “The vehicle now becomes a kind of capsule, its dashboard the brain, the surrounding landscape unfolding like a television screen” (Timothy Corrigan 1991, 158). The car window separates the subjects inside the vehicle from the landscape outside, while also reminding them that they are being absorbed into that external space. For the teenagers in The Doom Generation, whose identities are already being fashioned as media spectacle, what passes and happens outside the car window begins to resemble another mediated image, another screen of unstable pixels. The film’s surreal visual style further intensifies this sense of the constructedness of reality. In the motel rooms the protagonists inhabit, every piece of furniture is either hot pink or black-and-white checkered; a severed head, shot from its body, remains upright on the floor and continues to speak. The protagonists seem to inhabit the world of an adult-rated, blood-soaked crime video game, where every interaction with the environment feels mediated and unreal. This artificiality can be traced back to the aesthetic of 1960s gay underground films, marked by “the enjoyment of artifice, the embrace of seediness, the unremitting eroticism” (Richard Dyer 1990, 162). In Scorpio Rising, this constructedness is inseparable from Anger’s self-conscious imitation of popular texts. By appropriating the signs of heterosexual consumer culture, Anger turns them into materials for the oppositional and subversive production of queer “meanings, pleasures, and social identities,” to borrow Fiske’s terms (Juan Antonio Suárez 1996, 172). Araki similarly mobilizes, with willful playfulness, the viewer’s genre expectations of the road movie. He taps into the genre’s deep longing for rebellion and utopia, then redirects that longing toward the problems faced by society’s nonconforming groups, its “outlaws” (Mills 1997, 325). This mode of reception, which appears to reproduce mass culture while criticizing and dismantling it from within, resonates with Alexander Doty’s account of queer readings. For Doty, such readings are not “alternative” readings, but result from the recognition and articulation of the complex range of queerness that has been in popular culture texts and their audiences all along (Alexander Doty 1993, xii).

The Doom Generation’s dark ending returns to the violent death that has haunted the road movie as a genre. Jordan, Amy, and Xavier finally escape the relentless threats of the outside world and take shelter for the night in an abandoned warehouse. There, the harsh, saturated lighting that dominates much of the film gives way to the warm glow of a campfire. The sexual relation among the three is rendered with unusual tenderness: crossfades dissolve bodies and faces into one another, while the soundscape is stripped down to the undulating rhythm of sighs and breath. For a moment, a pansexual, polyamorous utopia seems possible, if only within the protective circle of firelight. Yet Amy’s fluid identity once again draws danger back into the scene. When she gets up to urinate, leaving Xavier and Jordan together on a dirty mattress, the leader of a group of skinheads, convinced that Amy is in fact his ex-lover Bambi, violently interrupts the sexual encounter beginning to unfold between the two men. The screen then cuts boldly to black for more than forty seconds, as a menacing, echoing male voice recites a homophobic rhyme. The disorienting strobe light recalls both the swinging naked bulb in the cellar reveal of Psycho and Laura Palmer’s strobe-lit murder in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, released three years earlier. The three intruders appear naked except for tube socks covering their genitals, swastikas painted across their chests. Heteronormative violence is brutally personified here by hypermasculine skinheads who seek to destroy anything perceived as deviating from gender and sexual binaries. Amy is raped on an American flag, fusing sexual violence with the iconography of nationhood and the brutality of heterosexual masculinity. Jordan is castrated with a pair of gardening shears, and his severed penis is shoved into Xavier’s mouth. The scene literalizes the punitive logic of the straightening device: bodies that refuse to move along the straight line are disciplined, corrected, and violently pushed into the status of “not a real man.” If the three colors in the protagonists’ names compose the American flag, with red and blue functioning respectively as masculine and feminine signs, then the white assigned to the dead Jordan suggests, like his position within the triangle, a body not yet given a determinate color, a body lingering at the crossroads. Jordan thus recalls Lightfoot in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974): gentle, unconstrained by normative gender roles, and marked by a pre-socialized, childlike quality, he becomes a figure whose threat to heteronormative culture must be eliminated through death (Wood 2003, 208).

Yet even within this brutality, the ending is not without hope. Amy and X survive. After killing their attackers, they appear once again on the road, driving toward the sunset, as Slowdive’s haunting “Blue Skied an’ Clear” rises on the soundtrack. As these lost migrants orient themselves once more toward the road and continue moving, survival itself becomes a revolutionary act. For, as Ahmed suggests, to live out a politics of disorientation might be to sustain wonder about the very forms of social gathering (Ahmed 2006, 24). When the many bodies that come after Araki’s protagonists, bodies that cannot naturally extend into the spaces assigned to them, continue to occupy places not intended for their inhabitation, what occurs is no longer merely the reproduction of reality. It is also the hope that new lines, new objects, and even new bodies may come into view.

In The Living End, the protagonists imagine the future toward which their own mortality presses them as somewhere “better than here.” To live under the prison-house tyranny of the here and now is to be compelled to think and feel toward a then and there. Perhaps this requires squinting into the distance and learning, like those disoriented protagonists of the road movie, to grip the steering wheel and keep one’s eyes fixed on the horizon as it stretches endlessly ahead.