Odology from Shaun Huston on Vimeo.
My production of “Odology” was guided by two quotes from Jackson’s “Roads Belong in the Landscape”:
We do not always give credit to how the motorized American - commuter, tourist, truck driver - has accepted the new odology, how docile we have been in complying with the scientific definition of the highway as a managed authoritarian system of steady, uninterrupted flow for economic benefits (252).
And
But odologists seem to forget - and we ourselves sometimes forget - that the road serves other needs. For untold thousands of years we traveled on foot over rough paths and dangerously unpredictable roads, not simply as peddlers or tourists, but as men and women for whom the path and road stood for some intense experience: freedom, new human relationships, a new awareness of the landscape (253).
These passages articulate a two-sided thesis: on the one hand, modern roads are heavily controlled and regulated to ensure capitalist efficiencies. On the other hand, “the road,” historically, has also been a space of freedom and transformation.
This thesis is clearly reflected in the commentary volunteered by the film’s subject, who, like Jackson, associates streets/roads with both capitalistic social controls and humanistic freedoms. His comments - “I can go wherever the hell I want” even if “they” don’t want me to - also draw out the implicit promise of agency in the second passage I took from Jackson’s essay; simply, what we “sometimes forget” about roads, we can also remember.
While Jackson mentions both men and women when arguing for the transformative possibilities of roads, he does not explore how such experiences are, in practice, unevenly available. Ultimately, my film, like Jackson’s essay, leaves open this question of difference. Specifically, how does the intersection of who, when, and where affect how different people experience “the road,” both as a site of social control and a space of freedom?
In her critical history of American road narratives, Ann Brigham notes that the popular image of hitting the open road as a way to free oneself became prominent after World War II and this image centers “men on the move,” especially white, heterosexual men (2015, 53, 67-68). At the same time, different other people at different times - people of color, recent immigrants, women, Native peoples - have produced stories that challenge and complicate the equation of roads with liberation:
The so-called freedom often associated with mobility always occurs in relation to conflict around the introduction of spatial and social otherness. We must consider how a traveler’s liberation occurs through a process of incorporating otherness or consolidating identity through the shoring up of sameness and exclusion of difference. And we must see how other travelers critique such processes by making them visible with their own movements (2015, 9-10).
Notably, such critiques do not reduce to a simplistic inequality where white, straight, cis-gendered men are free to go where they want, while everyone else has their mobility circumscribed. Rather, the stories of “other travelers” point to a more nuanced series of differences that depend on the particular intersections of identity with the landscape. Brigham’s book offers a wealth of texts that center a variety of figures, from Jack Kerouac to Thelma and Louise, but her text does not tell a straight linear history of inclusion. For example, before World War II, and the centering of men, many prominent road stories centered on women, and women return as central figures starting in the 1980s.
Rebecca Solnit’s history of walking, Wanderlust (2000), provides a broader field of references for the dualistic and complicated nature of the road. For example, in recounting Dorothy and William Wordsworth’s walking trips, Solnit notes that William is credited with innovating the pursuit of walking, on public roads, cross-country, “as part of an aesthetic experience” (82). In contrast, Dorothy was subjected to veiled opprobrium for being “un-ladylike” (84). In this case, her social class, and relationship to her brother, affords her license to be “un-ladylike,” but not without also being judged for taking that license.
Katherine McKittrick, writing about The Underground Railroad in Demonic Grounds (2006), provides another example of the dualistic nature of the road. Like the Wordsworths, this example predates Brigham’s 20th century history, but also brings the discussion back to the U.S.
Following McKittrick, for enslaved black people, The Underground was, “an emancipatory lifeline if untold/unwritten, and site of violence/death if told/written” (18). Here, the road was a space of freedom so long as the route, and the use of it for emancipatory ends, remained “secret knowledge.” This contingency meant that the road was also a space of grave risk for those seeking, and needing, to use it for refuge and escape. In both of these additional examples, the road promises varying degrees of both liberation and oppression.
The subject of my film demonstrates a further paradox in narratives of the road and freedom. My informant is white and male, but also self-identifies as homeless. This is important because, following Cresswell (2006), Brigham argues that the freedom gained via the road is temporary. The ultimate purpose of the journey is to find, or re-find, one’s place in the world, and in America in particular. Brigham refers to this as a process of “incorporation” (2015, 8). Those who don’t “incorporate,” by failing to (re)find their place, unsettle the social order of modern nation-states, which, in Cresswell’s terms, is dominated by a “sedentarist metaphysics” (2006, 26). In a cultural world defined by such a metaphysics, it is possible to be too free, or too mobile. A road trip is one thing. Living on the road is another (see Brigham 2015, 7, and Cresswell 2006, 27).
This paradox underlies the sense that while I can, in principle, go where I want, I am also always aware that I shouldn’t. The images I selected for the film are meant, in part, to show this paradox - roads in the landscape as simultaneously ordered by lines and signs that direct and channel traffic, but are also subverted by how people actually use them (“We were created to meander”) and by how people may choose to ignore roads altogether by cutting their own pathways (desire lines, following railroad tracks).
This tension, between the ideal of freedom and the realities of control and regulation, both formal and informal, both social and individual, is, I think, embedded in the two sides of Jackson’s thesis. Like the cultural landscape more broadly, roads are contested spaces. “Roads Belong in the Landscape” is an intervention in that contest. Jackson is not simply analyzing the state of roads, but wants to persuade readers to encounter roads not simply in their roles as workers and consumers, but as free subjects.
Cited work from J.B. Jackson, Landscape in Sight, ed. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz (Yale University Press, 1997):
- "Roads Belong in the Landscape" (1994).
Other cited works:
- Brigham, Ann. 2015. American Road Narratives: Re-imagning Mobility in Literature and Film (University of Virginia Press).
- Cresswell, Tim. 2006. On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (Routledge).
- McKittrick, Katherine. 2006. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (University of Minnesota Press).
- Solnit, Rebecca. 2000. Wanderlust: A History of Walking (Penguin Books).
