I set out to watch two
very different films in a row today and through a strange coincidence both of
them used the same seemingly innocent urban location as a sinister and lonely
area of uncanny danger and fear. They
both used motorway petrol stations.
The first was Michael
Winterbottom’s Butterfly Kiss, which is a
British film about a troubled and violent women named Eunice who travels around
motorway service stations in the north of England trying to find her lover
Judith. The second was Sluizer’s Spoorloos, a Dutch film
about a troubled and violent man named Raymond who uses service stations in the
south of France in order to kidnap women.
It was only after I had watched them both did I consider how they
connected thematically and started to think of other films that used petrol
stations and motorways as symbols for danger.
The obvious answers lie
in the (incredibly hit or miss) genre that best explores the aspect of the
human condition that yearns for travel and freedom: the road
movie. The road movie works by
introducing (usually) a pair of characters on a literal, and spiritual, journey
across a vast countryside. Along the way
their mission creeps towards another goal and they always learn something about
themselves as they reach their destination.
The motorways in these films represent the best of human progress and
always symbolically lead to ‘a better place’.
Motorways are the
manifestation of modernism and capitalism, linking cities together for the benefit
of trade and the movement of industry.
They are both empowering and represent freedom (‘the open road’), as
well as being cold and lonely stretches of concrete and darkness. The areas that punctuate these lonely expanses
are petrol stations – places that offer sanity and human interaction. For a film to represent these places as
dangerous and absurd destroys the positive symbolism of the motorway as
progressive and empowering and replaces it with the more understated experience
that they are unsettling and threatening hubs of strange lunatics. These areas are highlighted as absurd instead
of functional, uncanny instead of familiar and lonely instead of friendly.
 |
| Spoorloos |
In Spoorloos, the petrol station is at first a space of relief and
somewhere where Rex and Saskia can relax after an argument. It is a happy, sunny environment at first but
over the duration of the narrative it becomes more and more sinister as the
anonymity of the area becomes the cause of the film’s tragedy.
In Butterfly Kiss, the
petrol station is a strange place where all of the attendants use the same
language in response to bizarre questions from Eunice. The experience of visiting such a place is
reductive and surreal. The characters
travel from petrol stations, to cafés, to truck stops – each time being
antisocial and committing acts of extreme violence.
 |
| Butterfly Kiss |
What does these films
say about motorways and how we interact with them? How do they manage to present a purely
functional space and then represent them as uncanny and sinister?
There are other films
that explore similar ideas: 28
days later and the road blockade; Cabin in the Woods and
the postmodern gas-station weirdo… There is no surprise that in
post-apocalyptic movies there is always an emphasis on using motorways to
navigate the terrain – my favourite example being Wristcutters:
A love Story and the desolate apocalyptic-but-not highway… (as well as The
Road, Book
of Eli, Mad
Max etc.)
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