From the Oscar-winning Drive My Car to festival favourite Hit the Road, audiences and critics are relishing the recent wave of road movies. Here, Geoff Dyer delves into the roots of the genre
Wherever there is an actual physical journey there is inherent narrative interest. It doesn’t matter whether the journey is on foot through the Australian outback (Walkabout) or in the Antarctic (Scott of the…), on horseback (Lonesome Dove) or covered wagon (um, Wagon Train), by boat (Apocalypse Now, Deliverance), train (Von Ryan’s Express), aircraft or spaceship (take your pick), car, or some permutation of any of the above: Planes, Trains and Automobiles. With jour, journey and journal(ism) sharing the same root, we’re linguistically programmed to follow day-by-day accounts of journeys. Writing in 1849, Thomas De Quincey celebrated the unprecedented “velocity” of English mail coaches that revealed to him, first “the glory of motion: suggesting, at the same time, an under-sense, not unpleasurable, of possible though indefinite danger; second, through grand effects for the eye between lamp-light and the darkness upon solitary roads”. De Quincey used that phrase “The Glory of Motion” as a subtitle for his essay, but one is tempted to insert “Pictures” at the end, for these 50 thrilled and thrilling pages are like a trailer (“Coming soon…”) for the invention of the aptly named movies. One of the first of which showed a train arriving at a station in 1895, though this arrival actually heralded a medium of departures, sending us into transports of delight as it whisked us off us to multiple elsewheres, real and imagined.