dmgrundy Review of Route One USA

Route One USA (1989)

"It makes me feel warm, sort of, but also sort of really angry"

[7/10 · 8 November 2020]

This four-hour sprawl and slice-of-America docu-fiction bears obvious comparison to Kramer's earlier 'Milestones', though it doesn't function as a sequel as such. 'Milestones' gave us a constantly-rotating cast, through whose various storylines played out the collective dreams of revolution, activism, communal living, as things both held onto and slowly abandoned by a white middle-class emerging back into the class mantle which they'd temporarily left behind. In 'Route One', which traverses the entirety of the titular road from top to tail, we instead have a central figure-'Doc' (Paul McIsaac), who McIsaac described as a kind of fusion of his and Kramer's characters, and who here serves as a travelling companion for the behind-camera Kramer himself. Doc first appears as character in 'Doc's Kingdom' two years previously, where it's suggested that he had a revolutionary past as a member of the Weather Underground and, upon leaving the states, in situations alluded to briefly here, became involved as a doctor in various revolutionary situations in Africa. Like Doc, Kramer returned to the States after a period of some years in Europe to make the film (though unlike Doc, he didn't settle). And Doc/Kramer are now jaded, morose, bemused, sometimes amused-a relation to America not that of forging a new sense of collective being within it (one connected to often romanticised notions of 'tribes', dropping out and the like) but as an individual standing on the outside: the individual now rendered a 'foreigner' in the midst of his homeland. In conversation with Frederick Wismenan, Kramer used the 'foreigner' metaphor to describe the situations that unfold in the film, where an actor is placed in a 'real life' event (say, a Pat Robertson fundraiser); for Kramer, the ease with which the two could be integrated suggested that the American popular relation to representation had changed, conscious or unconscious notions of acting and performance (particularly as they relate to being filmed) altered through the ubiquity, not only of commercial cinema, but of television. To challenge the traditional division between fiction film and documentary-which Kramer sees as arbitrary-is thus not only a formal claim, but an assertion about the nature of social relations as the Cold War ground to its close, in which 'image' has become a 'way of life'. Here, fixed in place by codes of race, class and gender, one is always 'playing one's self'. To set up these situations, the conceit of Doc and Kramer's journey down the road at a time of political campaigning -a journey whose contours are arbitrary yet precise. While 'Milestones' has elements of the road movie-notably, the couple who try to make the transition from life on a commune to an urban job and house-'Route One' takes both the cross-sectional methodology and the rootlessness of the genre as its raison d'etre. Certainly, it must be one of the longest road movies in film history; the road, not as escape, celebration of speed, doomed romanticism, and so on, but as a standing to the side, observing. For a film with such a wealth of incident, the overall mood is subdued, melancholic: the clear gains made by the political right and the absence of viable sources of living together that don't simply blame the marginalised or play out through the capitalist nexus are registered with what one critics calls a 'long sigh'-and inequality and moral hypocrisy is didactically illustrated through one of the film's best sequences, juxtaposing a teenage newly-wed who falls foul of the judicial system with the wealthy lawyer wandering his estate and talking about the need to maintain a work-life balance (because, if he kept the class immiseration he sees in his day job "in my mind, I would literally go out of my mind"). Yet, once he reaches Florida, Doc eventually gains some sense of possibility through community work with marginalised groups: like the characters in 'Milestones', trying to find a way to settle down, to resolve the sense of wandering, exile and the inability to overhaul society as such through revolutionary means with the possibilities for more local, patient, yet perhaps no less valuable modes of change-or perhaps, in the case of his patients, simply survival.