Midway through American Honey, the film pulls in to the kerb, the action pauses for breath, and the heroine discusses her dreams with a passing trucker. The trucker tells her his dream is to visit the ocean. She tells him that hers is a home and a bundle of children. The sun sinks in the west, Bruce Springsteen plays on the stereo and this pivotal scene is almost too perfect. Make a film about gritty American life and, sooner or later, the dream will crawl in through the cracks.
I’m not even sure it has to be as gritty, restless and hungry a movie as American Honey. More likely it’s just any US-set picture that sends its characters on a journey, that has them want something and set out to achieve it. The American dream, after all, is the ur-text of Hollywood and the founding principle of a nation that was always as much an idea as a physical place to be cultivated and plundered. Small wonder that film-makers are drawn back to it again and again, like Gatsby contemplating the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. Some come to celebrate it (Rocky, Mr Smith Goes to Washington). Some come to damn it (Chinatown, Scarface). American Honey, unusually, manages to do both.
The film follows the fortunes of teenage Star, played by Sasha Lane, who lights out to “explore America” as part of an itinerant crew of magazine vendors. Her route loops back and forth across the midwest, from strip malls and oil derricks to sterile McMansions perched on irrigated lawns. Inside the bus, the crew members thrill to songs of freedom and empowerment. Outside, they angle for subscriptions, spinning a different story at every door. They speak in Horatio Alger, working-hard-to-escape-poverty cliches. Theirs is the rags-to-riches life, yet it’s clear from the start these kids are going nowhere fast.
Director Andrea Arnold acknowledges her film is about the American Dream. “I was aware of that when I was making it, but it’s been fed back a lot to me since. It probably has to do with the idea of selling. These kids are supposedly selling magazines, but really they are selling themselves. That feels very American. So the environment in the bus is like a potted version of a bigger picture.”
It could be that the road movie is the best way to navigate the dream. It’s the genre that seems to take the concept back to its frontier origins, to manifest destiny and the pursuit of happiness, the sense that life was somehow better and richer when it was lived on the move. “There is no truth but in transit,” said the essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson in the mid-19th century, while Alexis de Tocqueville marvelled at the “feverish ardour” of the rootless American. At a time when the New World was still freshly minted, the crown governor to Virginia was already identifying an impulse that suggested settlers would be forever unsettled, “forever imagining that the lands farther off are still better than that upon which they are already settled. If they attained Paradise,” he added tartly, “they would move on if they heard of a better place farther west.”
Such restless striving is at the heart of every ambulatory picture about the American dream. It’s there in 1939’s Stagecoach, typically cited as the first great Hollywood western, which frames the coach as a microcosm of new American society, clattering through increasingly hostile terrain. And it’s there in such road movies as Easy Rider, with its countercultural cowboys, or Thelma and Louise, with its feminist pioneers, or the existential Two-Lane Blacktop where the finish line’s an illusion, the engine overheats and the very celluloid seems to catch and combust in the projector.
Arnold was raised on a Kent housing estate. American Honey, backed by the BFI and Film4, is her first US-set feature. But she points out that, back in the late 1990s, she studied film-making in LA. It was America, then, that helped jump-start her career. “Growing up,” she says, “I was always very conscious of my class. I basically come from a working-class background. But when I went to America, I felt liberated, accepted for who I was as opposed to where I came from. I started to think I could be all I wanted to be, live the idealised life. So I understand the mindset. It’s very seductive. But how does it work if you’re a kid from a small town with no industry and no work except what you can get at the fast-food restaurant? How do you rise above all that and find some self-belief?” For many – for most – the American dream is just that.
If Arnold’s film has an ancestor, it may be The Grapes of Wrath, John Ford’s searing 1940 odyssey adapted from the Steinbeck bestseller and charting the voyage of a family of dustbowl migrants. Like Star, the Joads hail from Oklahoma. Like her, they are chasing the promise of a better life. And like American Honey, Ford’s drama aims for an unvarnished, social-realist intensity, documenting the desperate lives of a marginalised underclass.
But there are major differences. In American Honey, for instance, there is no particular place to go. There’s no fiery Tom Joad at the centre, clamouring for social change. Nor are there many obvious villains intent on bringing these 21st-century hobos to heel. Instead, they are sent bobbing through an apolitical, atomised, zero-hours environment where everybody else appears to be in pretty much the same boat. The magazine vendors aren’t targeted – they’re ignored, and this affords them a weightless euphoria.
It is this quality, I suspect, that makes the film so special. On my first viewing, I filed it as a bizarrely joyous and exuberant picture, despite its harsh subject matter. After watching it a second time, I think it might be more complex. More likely the joy and the subject matter are indivisible, each dependent on the other. Some films come to prop up the faltering, debased notion of American exceptionalism; others to expose it as a bright and shining lie. But American Honey sees the dream for what it is – a fantasy born out of hardship – and appreciates it on its own terms. Intuitively Arnold’s film understands that the trip is usually more exciting than the destination, that the pursuit is invariably more authentic than the happiness at the end. Or, to put it another way, in chasing after the dream we are, in fact, already living it.
If American Honey is fuelled by a sense of hope and possibility, Arnold believes that this is largely thanks to the cast. The majority are non-professional actors, plucked from skate-parks and Wal-Mart lots. They all came from difficult circumstances but, she insists, they all brought their own spirit, a spark of undimmed potential. “Some of their lives have changed as a result of the film. Some got jobs or moved away from abusive partners. The film gave them a small sense of control of their lives.”
It would be nice to credit American Honey with providing the cast with the dream – or at least a convenient leg-up towards it. But that’s too much the Hollywood happy ending. It doesn’t account for the other pitfalls on the road, the fact that people can backslide and circumstances can change. It may even run counter to the abiding spirit of the film – which exults in the freewheeling abandon that comes from having nothing much left to lose, the thrill of whipping through the fringes of an unfamiliar city with the music up loud and the sunroof thrown back to show off the stars. All around is a humdrum nightmare of dead-end jobs and foreclosed homes, vacant lots on the endless road. But in the middle, in the moment, there’s the American dream.
- American Honey is out now.
