Framing the Non-human: American Honey as Eco-Road Movie

Abstract

This article approaches Andrea Arnold's American Honey (2016) as a contemporary manifestation of an eco-road movie. Although the film's expansive interest in the ‘natural’ environment and its non-human inhabitants aligns it with Arnold's earlier work, American Honey is unique for its complex engagement with the cinematic traditions of Hollywood genre films. I argue that Arnold's eco-aesthetics work to conflate the distinctions between human and non-human worlds, offering a de-romanticisation of the American picturesque vistas and exploring the intersections of human speciesism, masculinity and whiteness, as well as narratives of conquest and ownership. I focus on the ways in which the film both participates in and exceeds Arnold's previous ecocinematic approach in filming British landscape, while at the same time highlighting her distinctive contribution to the tradition of the road movie. If the conventional road movie tends to offer a sense of escape from the capitalist dystopia, American Honey displaces such a promise. In its complex treatment of the supposedly distinct realms of nature and culture, the film does not endorse a return to the mythical wild but, rather, draws attention to the messiness of ecological, social and economic entanglements, exposing both neoliberal and anthropocentric power structures. Ultimately, it is through the intertwining of the film's ecological orientation and its engagement with the conventions of the road movie and its antecedent, the Western, that such a critique is possible.