Proposal

Nora Obeid

Prof VZ

English 299

23 March 2016

LA Sunsets in European Skies: Drive And Nicolas Winding’s Critical Roads

Nicolas Winding 2011 film Drive is both a genre study for the viewer and the director himself. The film’s trailers upon its release, filled with guns, LA city lights, and romantic kisses may deceive the true arthouse nature of this film. With its deliberate pacing, ironic kitsch and violence, as well as bizarre pop soundtrack, the film is truly a reflection of both Winding’s style, as well as inspiration from the Landscape and culture of LA. This dynamic is often characteristic of the european lense taken to America. A native of Copenhagen Denmark, and its unique often dark art scene, Winding has developed an auteuristic style that can be described as being somewhere between noir, crime, action, and horror, all framed with striking photographic cinematography. Drive however was Winding’s first film shot and set in Los Angeles, home of the artificial, of the car chases, the big heros and their attractive mates. I propose to search for how Drive can serve as a commentary on these accepted conventions of Hollywood film making, as well as the genres it eludes falling under fully.

In what follows I seek to contextualize Nicolas Windings Drive in the context of the intermingling between the european auteur style and the american mythos of the road. Critics arguments seem to fall to two different sides: one, that the film is shaped by windings definitive Danish film schooling and european art house style, and the other, that the film follows generic american conservative Hollywood tendencies (think gender roles and slick heroes). I  hope to characterize Drive less as an appropriation of classic Hollywood film tropes by a foreign director, but rather a commingling of american countercultural ideologies and European new cinematic style.

It is important first to define both the tendencies which I believe the film leans towards, and ones other critics have made claims towards. I seek to defend a presence of the american road movie genre in Drive. This genre throughout american filmic history has been more commonly suited by independent films, rather than those that we would classify as classic Hollywood. In these road films we are often presented with a traveller (often but not necessarily a pair), who is usually something of an outsider. The genre is often steeped in countercultural critique, whether societal, existential, or political, perhaps all three. Milestones such as Two Lane Blacktop and Easy Rider Come to mind. Additionally, I seek to acknowledge the European perspective. Characterized by new wave tropes: the self reflexivity is the root. A certain irony— as well as a detachment from accepted societal and political– and by extension commercial Hollywood filmic norms. This materializes in the emphasis of the artifice of film itself- specifically in Drive the L.A. locale and Driver’s career as a Hollywood stuntman. Additionally we have the bizarre characterization of our protagonist (lack thereof) as well as the marginalization of the romance (something which could arguably fill a box on both the american countercultural and european auteuristic checklists). In doing so I will link Drive with Wim Wender’s 1984 film Paris, Texas – a similar case of the European lense on a long established american travel mythos.