Where Hollywood ends and America begins

Posted by Tara Lohan at 1:44 PM on March 5, 2007.

We've been needing a good women's road-trip adventure since Thelma and Louise -- and finally we have one -- and it doesn't involved Thunderbirds and deep canyons.

Alicia's Rebensdorf's just released first book, Chick Flick Road Kill: A Behind the Scenes Odyssey into Movie-Made America (Seal Press:2007), takes readers on a cross-country trek to explore the places in America that she saw on the big and little screen growing up in the 80s. We get to revisit Stand By Me, Twin Peaks, A River Runs Through It, Purple Rain, Field of Dreams, Cheers, Rocky, The Truman Show, Thelma and Louise, and others as Rebensdorf heads from California east and back again.

The best part of the book is Rebensdorf's honesty -- her characterizations of the people she meets, her own fears of traveling as a solo woman, her drunken outings, and TV indulgences. Along the way we also get poetic descriptions, insightful musings, and an unscheduled trip to the Ronald Reagan museum.

If you like driving or even the mythology of the road -- and if you've ever wondered where Hollywood ends and America begins, then this book is a must read.

Here's the Intro:

Introduction

Portraits on book covers and big screens paint the road as an icon of freedom: endless, unhindered, and devastatingly open. It is a well-cut car ad: two lanes, oozing vistas, and no traffic, unless it's a potential sex partner stopped at the same red light. The road is Easy Rider. It's Kerouac. A roving backdrop for high-armed Harleys. A world of quarters for public phones, beer in cans, breakfast in the kind of diners that barely exist, and gas stations where you can't pay at the pump. It's Thelma and Louise and it's Rain Man. Unkempt hair and perpetually good music. The road is where the act of driving solves things. Like America's yellow brick road, it promises heart, courage, brains, new friends, killed demons, and discovering something you had all along. Like the promise of a high school makeover, it makes us wiser, realer, cooler.

The road, like Mr. Right and Cosmic Fate, is one of the great romances in American media. Except I've taken road trips before, and the American road I've seen is less a sexy two-lane blacktop than an eight-lane monster cut through sprawling cities and suburban growth. It's run not by those Cadillac-finned classics, but by luxury vehicles with none of the personality and all the lousy gas mileage. I know the days of hitchhiking are dead, and though the road might still look endless, I suspect that's because you can no longer tell the difference between start and finish: Freeway distances are less a line from point A to B than a loop from one Arby's to another.

Me, I don't identify as a romantic. Born to a scientific dad and a feminist mom, I've always figured that romanticism is no more than a nice way to say "delusion." And since the entertainment industry is one of the biggest perpetrators of such delusion, I've always made a point of distinguishing its version of the real world from mine. Contrary to the standards on the set, I'm generally comfortable with my size 11 frame. I don't think my singleness is a condition that necessarily needs repair, and though I've occasionally wished for the movies' blissful fade-outs and neat endings, I know life is more work than that. Whether I'm mocking the ease with which TV characters find dates and parking spaces or I'm leaving a theater, critiquing the disparity between a heroine's occupa- tion and her apartment size, I'm comforted to think I'm not a sucker. Recently, however, I had to question the confidence of this self- image. I had to consider that maybe my media savvy does not nullify its influence. That maybe knowing movies are make-believe is rather different from believing it.

It was the summer of 2001. The spectacle of the winter's election had faded, replaced by the more appropriate warm-weather fare of shark scares and a missing-intern sex scam. Networks were releasing an off- season influx of "reality" programming, and too many movies spun themselves in self-referential satire. Newspapers and magazines rode the trend with worried essays on the media-saturated state of today's youth. That summer, at twenty-six, I was precisely the age the trends spoke so badly for, and though I enjoyed a trashy reality show as much as the next person, I found I was doing okay. I was single. I was waitress- ing. My life had settled into a fine rhythm. I suffered the occasional day- dream of telling a customer to piss off and a fatigue of conversations that kept stumbling into boy-talk clichés, but I also had an adequate social life and enough random flirtations and hobbies to excite me. I loved my schedule, my freedom, and the conversations I'd have with my friends at the bar next door after work. I also heard enough gripes from my more established peers to know that they were not in a place I wanted to be. Then again, I was single. I was waitressing.

Though I knew life was hard and dull, I couldn't help but feel mine lacked oomph. As my friends' relationships became more time consuming, I found my free- dom feeling more like loneliness. Months passed more quickly than I was comfortable with, and the confidence with which I carried myself didn't always permeate as deeply as I thought it should. Being practical and unromantic, I understood that what I felt was probably nothing more significant or dramatic than a midtwenties slump. But still, being practical and unromantic, I wanted to solve it. If I didn't pine for the relationship or the career-which I honestly didn't think I did-what did I want? Why did I often feel let down? Living in the San Francisco Bay Area, I couldn't say I was pressured by any singular model of success. Neither could I blame my family (although it would have been convenient); they were hardly perfect.

Certainly, none of my friends had their shit together. It seemed a cop-out to blame television-I, after all, was smarter than that-and yet when I stepped back, I couldn't deny many of my expectations held a remarkable resemblance to images I saw on-screen. When people told me of places-say, they'd recently gone to the hospital or the Bahamas-I pictured Noah Wyle in scrubs or Tom Cruise spinning cocktails in the background. Other images had a deeper effect; while I usually scoffed at those credit-rolling kisses, in my weaker moments many of them made me weepy. During a night off watching TV, I couldn't help thinking my life was short of weekly dramas. Its plot development was shoddy and its action and sex scenes far too sporadic.

Still, I resisted. I didn't actually think of myself as so susceptible. Yet if there were any doubt about the strength of my romantic notions, if I needed any further proof I was as gullible as all that, it was no more evident than in the way I hoped to solve it. I wanted to get away. I wanted to take a road trip. Now, I knew the popular image of the road trip was a farce. It was too Hollywood, too macho, too hippie, too escapist, and too nostalgic; a picture pursued by young, toned boys expecting it to provide them with answers, or at least reckless sex; an ancient photo America preened itself by, convinced it was a mirror rather than a long-past version of itself; and a portrait whose few female road models were inherently false: buffed out in black, wearing mean shoes, and carting phallic weapons as in some kind of Game Boy porn.

Me? I'd never chucked an empty Bud in the back seat. Never got or gave head at the wheel. Never forgot I was a woman and the necessary precautions this entailed: the defensiveness of being alone, the dangers of night, the fallibility of my physical strength. And yet here I was, stalking car ads and leering at road maps. As if in syndication, scrolling yellow road dividers ran through my head. I harbored images of me-weathered, windblown, and dressed in leather-staring down a two-lane blacktop in some rusty gaping space.

That settled it. I was tired of my every image being the refuse from some since-forgotten flick. I figured I had a choice: I could go to therapy, or I could think of another way to confront my inner romanticism. Therapy really wasn't my style, but what, I wondered, if I went to the places where my Hollywood images were made, to confront and debunk the images they had fostered in me? I thought of place- specific films that had influenced me growing up, such as Stand by Me, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Purple Rain. Shows and movies that stuck in my head, that might have colored my idea of certain regions and cultures in America: Northern Exposure. Deliverance, and Cheers. A River Runs Through It. Fargo.

I knew, of course, the places would not be like the movies filmed there, but I wanted to learn exactly how. I knew I wouldn't find the "real" America, but maybe I'd find a more three- dimensional one. Maybe by correcting my physical impressions of these places, I'd be able to right the other movie myths in my head, help myself see outside the cinematic frames I'd grown so used to. So I bought a road map and researched famous filming locations until I had a matrix of points that circled the United States.

I gave notice at my job, sublet my room, and told my friends about my trip until I had myself convinced. Damn, I thought, it was a clever plan. It gave me a sense of direction. A physical path to follow. And it gave me a sense of purpose to justify a road trip, an activity that otherwise would have been too romantic and too frightening for me to indulge in. I left that summer of 2001 with a guide to U.S. hostels, money I'd saved in four years of waiting tables, and a heap of warnings. I left with a thousand images of what awaited me and no real idea of what did.

Tagged as: books, women, travel, alicia rebensdorf, chick flick road kill

Tara Lohan is a managing editor at AlterNet.