Easy Rider and Thelma & Louise revisited, or on experimental film remakes of the road movie

Abstract

Although remakes and road movies are particularly endemic to Hollywood cinema, experimental filmmakers have also embraced the road movie tradition and reproduced existing material for new audiences to retell, readdress and rearticulate the prior story, exploring the dialectics between repetition, differentiation and genre. Interestingly, however, while the remake, seen mostly as a genre phenomenon, has received some critical attention, remaking in the avant-garde film scene has been rarely explored by adaptation theory and practice. To somewhat fill in this gap, the article situates two recent avant-garde films, James Benning’s Easy Rider (2012) and Jessica Bardsley’s Goodbye Thelma (2019), within the framework of remake and adaptation studies and proposes that both works function as acknowledged and transformed remakes of the classic road movies, in which the outcome radically differs from the original story and crosses the temporal and spatial boundaries of the genre. In doing so, the projects fit in with the broader tradition of cinematic reworking and recycling as they continuously reference and exploit earlier films by creating their alternative versions as well as a strong sense of place and movement.