Colonizing the Subconscious: KINGS OF THE ROAD (1976)

The Road is one of the great symbols of American storytelling, standing in for a particular notion of freedom expressed in the cutting of ties and shedding of the burden of the past. That band of blue-gray asphalt bisected by white or yellow has propelled the stories of novels and films from Jack Kerouac’s first novel to innumerable Hollywood comedies, slice-of-life dramas and crime stories. If you want to take the Mississippi of Huckleberry Finn as a precursor to Highway 61 and all of those other mythical roads, such stories have been with us for quite a long time.

While this trope might have already seemed clichéd in its land of origin by 1976, a year after Bruce Springsteen’s classic anti-Jersey anthem Born to Run, for the young German filmmaker Wim Wenders it remained resonant and appealing enough to resurrect in a new European context for his Im Lauf der Zeit (In the Course of Time) (it also furnished the name, “Road Movies Filmproduktion,” for the production company he started after the film’s release). This movie, re-titled Kings of the Road in English, applies the unexpected setting of the small towns and back-roads of West Germany’s border with the East to a familiar road-movie story. Not unlike On the Road, it shows the travels and growing friendship of two guys, one a veteran wanderer, the other a recent outcast from the world of routine. Propelled by plaintive old American rock-and-roll music, their journey unfolds in black-and-white images (by Martin Schafer and Robby Müller) evocative of the Depression-era photography of Dorothea Lange and John Ford’s 1940 version of The Grapes of Wrath. Despite the wealth of references to U.S. pop culture, however, Wenders’ film is not a pastiche of Hollywood, but a very European, very personal account of growing up in the demoralized, de-Nazified West Germany.

The “Kings of the Road” in question are a classic mismatched pair. With his long hair, droopy mustache and preferred work outfit of overalls, sometimes supplemented with leather jacket, Bruno Winter (Rudigler Vogler, star of Wenders’ previous Alice in the Cities and Wrong Movement) looks like a blue-collar hippie, appropriately for his itinerant profession as movie-projectionist repairman. On the other hand, Robert Lander (Hanns Zischler), the Sundance to Winter’s Butch, displays a kind of tattered neatness with his short haircut and striped white suit, a mark of his middle-class, married status. After several days spent in that same outfit, he seems less distinct from Winter, both in appearance and in outlook. Lander’s already suspended his normal identity as a well-behaved member of the working week after the break-up of his marriage, which he marks by driving his VW bug headlong into the River Elbe. Watching this vehicular mock-suicide from his van, parked on the riverbank, Winter is taken with the other man’s brio and offers him the passenger seat in his van for the next several days.

During that titular time’s course, comprising in full three hours, not that much happens. The two men visit small-town theaters, drop in on family and old acquaintances, and take a motorcycle trip to the country. They don’t talk a whole lot, but become accustomed to each other’s habits and communicate in an understated way mutual concerns and experiences. This can easily try the patience of audiences not used to art cinema in general or Wim Wenders in particular, and even veteran critics like David Thomson, author of the great Biographical Dictionary of Film, have slammed the film for its lack of incident. I don’t, however, see Wenders trying to confront viewers with their philistine inability to appreciate his movie. Certainly Kings of the Road is not ideal for casual, Friday-night viewing, but neither is a deliberate exercise in tedium. Rather, I see the film as an attempt to get us to look at the texture of ordinary experience, outside of the demands for narrative and resolution usually demanded by both life and cinema. Once one when becomes used to Wenders’ unconventional pacing, a sense, one expected of other arts but uncommon in the movies, of serenity and peace.

Another effect of the slow, step-by-step pacing is to allow every stage, every twitch and tremor in the growing friendship of two habitually wary men to register on-screen. Despite their reserve, the performances by Zischler and Vogler have a muted sense of the charisma of Newman and Redford, earlier evoked in this review with a reference to their most iconic pairing. That movie was a signpost of the so-called “buddy movie,” the meat-and-potatoes genre Kings of the Road can be best identified as belonging to. Lander and Winter’s adventures have some of the genre’s appeal, a descendant of the fantasy scenario of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer making their escape from the stifling constraints of respectable, responsible middle-class society. The difference between Wenders’ film and a typical Hollywood buddy film is that he doesn’t see the friendship between his protagonists as an end in of itself.

From the opening by the River Elbe (a then-border between the two Germanys) to the closing nighttime confrontation in an abandoned U.S. sentry post on the border, we always have a sense of the characters’ lives unfolding within the limits and proscriptions of nations. Some of the most pretentious filmmaking of the ‘00s has turned on this idea of political and ethnic divisions as metaphors for “the difficulty of communication in the modern world,” in hackneyed movies like Crash (2004) and Babel(2006) which fall down on the basic task of portraying a world we can recognize. At his best, Wenders avoids this dilemma through a romantic sensibility that allows him to show the world in terms subtly removed from reality without being altogether fantastical.

He has always been dreamier, less grounded than his peers among the filmmakers dubbed “the New German Cinema,” particularly his good friend Rainer Werner Fassbinder, pretty much the most insistently political feature-film directors imaginable.Wenders' exploration of theme of borders and national identity might imply some political significance, but the films themselves tend to foreground their characters’ emotional lives at the expense of politics. Kings of the Road, however, shows how clearly Wenders identified with his generation, with its sense of inheriting a culture hollowed out by by the guilt of Nazism and unredeemed by post-war prosperity. Its two heroes both estranged from their parents or parents’ memory and in a larger sense from their pasts.

The movie’s dialogue, meager enough as it is, barely touches on either private or political motivations for their trauma, and the Second World War and post-war split register for the viewer mostly as vast but unseen presences. The one “issue” that is addressed directly is the decline of German film-going, particularly to the kind of small-town theaters which Winter services, and which throughout the film we see to be either nearly empty or given over to sleazy X-rated films. Towards the end Wenders shows his hand most clearly in a famous line, spoken by Lander as he and Winter explore an old bunker on the border, its interior pockmarked with graffiti by American G.I.s: “The Americans have colonized our subconscious.” With their own culture undermined and demoralized, the characters, and their creator, feel drawn to the songs and myths imported by the one-time occupiers of their country, but remain aware that they can never fully absorb them. To the movie’s credit, such weighty themes remain for the most part hidden beneath the surface of the everyday settings and characters.

In treating so successfully his concerns as a German artist, Wenders came to the end of the first phase of his career, which had gone through the early ‘70s, and began a new period largely given over to dealing directly with the Hollywood influence earlier only felt in his work. In movies like The American Friend (1977) , Lightning Over Water (1980), Hammett (1982) and The State of Things (1982) he worked at least partly in English and with American filmmakers like Nicholas Ray, Samuel Fuller and Francis Ford Coppola. The last, for whom Wenders made the film-noir homage Hammett, was such a difficult boss as to bring this part of Wenders’ career to the abrupt halt of a train-wreck. Emerging from the wreckage of this period, however, enabled him to choose his own terms and turn out the mid-period masterpieces Paris, Texas (1984) and Wings of Desire (1987), two films good enough to make later films look comparatively disappointing. Their poetically heightened stories imagine figures, in the guises of angels and raggedy-man tramps, with the ability to cross those previously intractable personal and national divisions. If Kings of the Road seems to me even better than those films, perhaps Wenders’ best film, it’s in its simple, confident handling of big themes, which gives a straightforward scenario unexpected weight.