Road Movie

The thesis devotes itself to the analysis of the road movie film genre, restricted to American cinema, that has been the primary ground of the genre since its establishment in the late 1960's. It presents detailed characterization of its sources and typical traits, summarizes its historical development and analyses its attributes, components and techniques, using examples from actual road movies. The thesis' focus is especially directed at the character and the generic protagonist twosome model of the road movie - the breakdown provides typology of characters and their relationships, as well as derives sub-caterories of the genre, while as resolution identifies the basic core characteristics of the protagonist(s) in their being an outsider. This key determination has its wide spectrum spread across the genre's history, as exemplified by films, that were employed for the protagonist sorting. The complex exploration of the road movie genre, with focus on the character, provided the basis a tools for a separate analysis of a specific breaking point in the development of the genre - the introducing of characters, whose genre typical outsider definition is bound is hardwired in their sexual identity. The historical moment is the start of the 1990's, when the films Thelma & Louise (1991), directed by Ridley Scott with the screenplay by Callie Khouri, Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho (1991) and The Living End (1992) by Gregg Araki emerged. A case study is devoted to each of the films, focusing on their treatment of the road movie genre and the significance of the radical innovation in protagonist designation, the protagonists being women in the first film, homosexual men in the two others