Explicación del flujo de fondos

The Road to series does not narrativize its projection of home onto the road but instead reproduces the effects of their condensation through ongoing extradiegetic references to showbiz, which take for granted the entertainment industry’s position as the mediator of American culture. The series, moreover, illuminates the utopian value of show business in the era’s more straightforward road narratives. For when the more classically structured road films of the 1940s show more directly – that is, through their actual plotting of transcontinental travel – how all US roads followed Route 66 in leading straight to or from Hollywood, they condense America with its popular culture by evoking the same trope of showbiz that characterizes the Hope and Crosby road pictures.

Made right before the United States’ entrance into the war, Sullivan’s Travels (1941) similarly glosses the road through a mythology of national coherence that draws on popular entertainment for its rationale. A film director seeking first-hand knowledge of “real” American life that will allow his new film to overcome the escapism connoted by Hollywood entertainment, John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea) tours the road in disguise as a hobo only to discover right away that he cannot escape Hollywood, his own home town. “It’s a funny thing,” he observes midway through the film:

How everything keeps shoving me back to Hollywood and Beverly Hills. . . . Almost like, like gravity. As if some force were saying, get back where you belong. You don’t belong out here in the real world, you phony you. . . . Maybe there’s a universal law that says, stay put. As you are so shall you remain. Maybe that’s why tramps are always in so much trouble.

That Hollywood keeps pulling him back appears to oppose the safety of home, its “gravity” arising from the economic power of show business, which supports the materiality of Sullivan’s home life in Beverly Hills, and the danger of the road, which may be more “real” but only promises “trouble.” Thus, when Sullivan finally does confront the “real world” of the road – economic privation and transience – he finds “trouble” enough. He loses his identity and is presumed dead, is arrested, convicted, and sentenced to six years on a chain- gang for vagrancy and assault, and returns home only through Hollywood’s intervention.

Sullivan’s road trip through America moves him to embrace popular entertainment, its value exemplified for him when he witnesses the laughter of fellow convicts and African- Americans as they watch a Walt Disney cartoon together. If a metaphoric death is the end of the “real” road for him, that road also validates Hollywood, not as a dead weight, but as a genuine force of culture, a healing mechanism uniting and giving coherence to the disparate, unempowered sectors of US society. After his rescue, Sullivan refuses to do the serious film

he had originally wanted to research and instead returns to Hollywood to make the kind of comedy that propels a Hope and Crosby picture.6 _{“There’s a lot to be said for making people} laugh,” Sullivan tells the startled studio heads on the plane back to Hollywood. “Did you know that’s all some people have? It isn’t much. But it’s better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan. Boy!”

Ultimately, then, Sullivan’s Travels does not oppose home and the road. Sullivan’s final remark indicates their conflation, since he describes the lives of ordinary Americans everywhere as a road journey, “this cockeyed caravan.” In his own effort to leave what appears to be the hermetically sealed world of Hollywood and join that caravan, Sullivan’s travels demonstrate how home overtakes the road; the director can never escape the presence of Hollywood since its product – which he helps to manufacture – permeates the culture. Initially, since the studio does not want to jeopardize its investment in the director, Sullivan’s producers try to prevent him from leaving but finally relent on condition that a well-furnished land-yacht follow him, with a doctor, cook, secretary, PR man, and the like. Sullivan sabotages the entourage to show the folly of their expedition, makes an agreement to meet them in Las Vegas some time later, and returns to the road alone. He picks up work as a handy man at the home of two middle-aged sisters, goes to the movies with them after they give him supper, and, when one of the women indicates her lascivious interest in him, flees from their house in the middle of the night. Hitching a ride from the first vehicle that comes along, it turns out the truck is going west, not east, right back to Hollywood. Stopping for breakfast, he meets a girl (Veronica Lake), an unsuccessful actress who herself has trouble leaving Hollywood, and the two eventually set out to tramp by train only to welcome the studio’s rescue when hunger gets the best of them and they discover the lucky coincidence that the land-yacht is parked nearby. Refreshed, Sullivan and the girl start out again, and a montage recounts their successful integration in tramp life this time – sleeping on floors, taking public showers, eating in missions – until hunger once more drives them back to the comforts of studio-financed shelter in a Kansas City hotel. Finally, in a show of gratitude and patronage, Sullivan returns to the city’s skid row to pass out five-dollar bills and is mugged by a greedy hobo, who is then hit by an oncoming train while trying to get away. The thief’s death causes the series of events bringing Sullivan’s tour of the nation’s road life to an unexpected destination: a prison camp in the backwaters of Missouri.

Taken together, these journeys identify two different trajectories for the road, although both in fact acquire their meaning via reference to Hollywood. Sullivan’s inability to escape the movie capital indicates that it follows and defines him wherever he goes. This road is the utopian path linking popular culture and the nation through Hollywood, which provides the comforts of home, literally so in the land-yacht that follows the director on the road when he

first sets out. And to be sure, Preston Sturges’s screenplay takes care to expose the class privilege that ensures this comforting view of America. Sullivan’s valet and butler, for instance, not only have to teach the director and the Girl how to catch a free ride on a freight train, they themselves don’t know and must telephone the railroad company to learn how it is done!

On the other hand, freed from that protective support when he loses his identity, Sullivan ends up traveling the more dystopic road of privation and alienation. Once he forgets who he is and cannot speak in his own defense at his trial, Sullivan loses his social privilege along with his famous name; nevertheless, the director is rightfully convicted of breaking the law since he has in fact committed a crime, striking a railroad official, a point the film somewhat glosses over. When he discovers how to signal his presence by getting his photograph in the papers to show that he is still alive, Hollywood quickly rushes to his rescue, and the film refrains from depicting exactly how the studio arranges for his freedom to bring him back home. More importantly, Sullivan’s cathartic revelation while watching the Disney cartoon proves how Hollywood also redeems this more “real” road through popular entertainment, which, as Dyer observes, substitutes a utopian feeling (laughter) for a dystopic place (the prison camp and the otherwise segregated church of an African-American community in the South). Rather than recognize the irresolvable difference between these two different routes across America – which manifest themselves in the screwball comedy of the first hour and the sobering melodrama of the second – the closure of Sullivan’s Travels reconciles its protagonist to the ideological value of Hollywood product, leading him to see how the popular entertainment he will continue to produce has value for the entire culture because it ensures that every stop on the “cockeyed caravan” of life can seem like home. But while the utopian road paves over the dystopic road it cannot efface its presence entirely, as a final montage of the laughing faces recognizes, resulting in the film’s ambivalence about American culture: for, despite Hollywood’s mediation, tramps not only get into trouble, and represent the nation’s socio-economic troubles, they cause trouble, too. After all, it is a tramp who greedily steals the wad of bills that Sullivan, in his gesture of beneficence to America’s homeless, is doling out in Kansas City’s skid row district. Clearly, making movies is less condescending – and less risky.

The two versions of the road in Sullivan’s Travels mark out the territory of the 1940s road narrative: on one hand, the utopian road across the nation from Los Angeles to New York that Barry Kane (Robert Cummings) follows in Saboteur (1942), respecting the wartime urgency to imagine the nation as a unified and comforting homeland, and on the other, the dystopic road that Al Roberts (Tom Stern) travels in Detour (1945), which turns that earlier film’s wartime ideology of home inside out, just as it reverses the direction of Kane’s road trip. What is worth noting about these two very different road films, though, is the compara-

ble significance of popular entertainment in texturing their representations of the nation through such diametrically opposed journeys.

Saboteur puts Kane on the road when he is falsely accused of setting fire to a defense plant. As he follows the trail of this conspiracy across the continent, he also discovers how the road reveals the nation’s unity as a homeland. As the blind man Philip Martin points out about hitch-hiking when helping Kane: “I’ve always thought that was the best way to learn about this country, and the surest test of the American heart.” The head spy, Charles Tobin (Otto Kruger), by contrast, calls Americans “small, anonymous, soft,” deriding “the great masses, the moronic millions” who “live small, complacent lives.” In a speech that does not need to be underscored by “The Star Spangled Banner” to make its point, Kane challenges Tobin’s fascist politics by summarizing what he has learned while on the road: “I’ve met guys like you and others – people that are helpful and eager to do the right thing. People that get a kick out of helping each other fight the bad guys. . . . We’ll win if it takes from now until the cows come home.”

Though he hails from Los Angeles, Kane is himself not affiliated with showbiz, but his partner on the road is. Patricia Martin (Priscilla Lane) is a model – indeed, her face instantly

Plate 5.2 Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake pose as tramps in Sullivan’s Travels

and meet the real thing.

catches Kane’s eye as soon as he takes to the road – and the billboards she adorns, her uncle Philip comments, “would reach across the continent if placed end to end”, mapping a path across the nation just as the spy ring does. The centerpiece of the film’s ideological agenda also occurs in a setting associated with showbiz, when a group of six sideshow freaks temporarily shelter Kane and Pat Martin in a circus caravan. The entertainers themselves disagree about allowing the couple to remain, so the leader takes an unofficial vote because he believes their differences parallel “the world situation,” and they must, as in any democracy, stand by “the will of the majority.” Other references to entertainment culture appear as a seeming matter of course when the film depicts the uniform Americanness of the people Kane and Martin encounter, from a trucker who complains about his wife spending money on “moving pictures and hats,” to one of the spies, who hopes the planned sabotage of the Brooklyn Navy Yard will go on schedule, because “I promised to take my sister to the Philharmonic.” The spies themselves use a truck bearing the sign “American Newsreel, Inc.” as their cover to get onto the dock; and the famous climax of the film at the top of the Statue of Liberty, the icon of America as everybody’s home in the 1940s, actually begins with a chase through Rockefeller Center, disrupting the screening of the film showing at Radio City Music Hall. Such references to America establish the nation’s unity as a people through their relation to popular entertainment, all the while (this is Hitchcock, after all) registering an unmistakable sense of menace – of hidden political subversion – lurking beneath ordinary, normal American life. Entertainment offers the same utopian pleasure to patriots and spies alike, giving a more sinister twist to the road than appears on the surface. In Detour, contrary to the optimism that Philip Martin expresses and that Barry Kane confirms, hitch-hiking turns out to be the worst possible way to travel. Thumbing his way from New York to Hollywood to rejoin his fiancée, Sue (Claudia Drake), who has gone there hoping to make a career as a singer, pianist Roberts is picked up in Arizona by Charles Haskell, who dies unexpectedly while on the road. Panicked, Roberts assumes that the police would never believe it was not foul play because of the circumstances, so he takes Haskell’s name, car, and money, puts his own identification papers on the corpse, and drives on, only to pick up, in turn, the one hitch-hiker who knows the deceased: Vera (Ann Savage). Vera blackmails Roberts into staying with her until they can sell the car, then ups the ante of their scheme by insisting that he pose as Haskell in order to get the dead man’s inheritance. Roberts refuses but also cannot get away from Vera and, in a quarrel heated by her drinking, he accidentally kills her. Again circumstances seem to be pushing him towards the gas chamber, and he flees, a nameless, homeless fugitive caught on a road with no beginning or end, since he cannot return to New York, where Al Roberts is presumed dead, or to Los Angeles, where Charles Haskell is wanted for Vera’s murder. The road in this film traces the fatal wrong turn – or as Roberts puts it, “Fate sticks out its foot and trips you.” The only

possible means of bringing such as circuitous road to closure is through the Production Code Administration’s enforced ending: arrest the piano player.

Detour marks the absence of home on the road for Roberts through references to showbiz. In the opening scene, a popular song playing on the jukebox, “I Can’t Believe That You’re in Love With Me,” prompts his voice-over account of his road trip, locating his origin in show culture: he remembers not only that Sue sang this song but also that he played it at the Break O’Dawn club in New York City. “That tune, that tune,” he moans, “why is it always that rotten tune, following me around, beating me up?” The flashback narrative begins with Sue and him temporarily breaking up so that she can try her luck in Hollywood, and from this point on “I Can’t Believe . . . ” alternates with “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” on the film’s soundtrack as haunting traces of what forever eludes Roberts – Hollywood – in effect inverting the recuperative function of popular music in a USO show, where such songs comforted the audience as reminders of home. When Roberts finally arrives in Hollywood, it is with Vera, and he can see only the irony: “Far from being the end of my trip there was greater distance between me and Sue than when I started out.” He never gets back to Sue and he never achieves the musical career he aspired to in the opening of the flashback; all the same, while the film gives the impression that he fails to reach his intended destination because of fate’s “detour,” Hollywood envelopes this dystopic road and film noir story. Roberts and Vera go out looking for a used-car dealer in order to sell Haskell’s convertible, and, while her dialogue indicates they are driving away from Hollywood Boulevard (“Look, after the deal’s closed, let go back to that place on Hollywood Boulevard where I saw that fur jacket”), the rear projection footage shows the boulevard still behind them. The marquee of the old Iris movie theatre at the Wilcox Avenue intersection stands out quite visibly in the background, so Vera’s remark seems oddly incongruent. In a reversal of Sullivan’s appreciation of Hollywood as a source of comfort for the spiritually homeless, the full dystopic effect of Roberts’s road trip in Detour is that he can reach Los Angeles but not see it as “Hollywood.”