From the Road Movie to Wilderness Travel: The Quest for Adventure on the Road and the Myth of the Heroic Traveller

Abstract

The conceptions of ‘wild’, as addressed in fictional travel diary films, question our relationship with space and the form of travel that gives rise to self-transcendence through a confrontation with the environment. The lived experience of the journey of discovery (adventure, exploration, expedition) defines the travel diary genre, which has become an off-the-beaten-track tourism medium. The reference points for two American travel diary films Into the Wild (2007), written and directed by Sean Penn, and Wild (2014, directed by Jean-Marc Vallee, are Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and the American pioneer front. These films mark a generation of travel diarists in search of the dream and anti-travel. The return to the wild, as a cultural confrontation, formative journey and self-transcendence, is said to shape the travel diary genre, which takes the form of either a piece of self writing or an autobiographical film (sometimes called a biopic) on the experience of travelling. We thus extend the road movie genre to robinsonades and films on the experience of a natural environment. The aesthetics of the image, panoramic landscape and grandeur of nature are thought to be a legacy of the notions of ‘picturesqueness’ and the ‘pioneer front’, while the renewed myths of both the wandering hero (Benoliel, 2011) and the quest for a new world seem to have developed from the literary references of On the Road and the Beat Generation’s ‘Beat ethos’.