Land of the rising Sunbelt

John Shlesinger’s career peaked in 1969 with the Oscar recognition for Midnight Cowboy and reached its critical and commercial nadir a decade or so later with Honky Tonk Freeway, a kind of breezy, optimistic reversal of Joe Buck's solitary journey to disillusion in a loveless and uncaring New York.

There are all kinds of reasons for the odium that accumulated around the film, perhaps primarily nobody like to think that they are being sent up by an interloper, in this case a gay Limey casting a satirical eye on the mores of the unsophisticated Southern states. Hony Tonk Freeway is in reality a rather charming film with some good writing, great character acting and a brisk pace, it is also a rather fascinating vision of some of the fundamental shifts in American life

Honky Tonk Freeway is "America on wheels" the song over the main credits tells us over a montage of goofy, freedom loving road users, and here we see a concentrated version of the shift in power and population from the North to the South, the rise of the Sunbelt. The Southern states booming in the Seventies through more relaxed labour laws, cheaper land prices, more business friendly tax regimes, improvements in air conditioning and, lest we forget, the colossal army of desperate workers waiting on the other side of, and frequently slipping through, the tortilla curtain. The film exploits the tension between the rise of the South and the relative decline of the North, but its vision of Northern life, frustrating bureaucracy, crime and urban malaise, dysfunctional families, alcoholism, bad weather etc contrasts with the optimism and grounded familial, spiritual, community-minded and entrepreneurial vision of the South, where even the films sole black character, the Ticlaw Police chief is prepared to wander the streets of the town dressed in a grass skirt with a bone through his nose if it will serve the cause of American entrepreneurialism.

The film was marketed as a car-crash movie. The denouement, the pay off, is a colossal pile-up of a representative sample of American society mostly drawn from the North. There are a retired couple, a pair of thieves from New York, an All American (read unhappy and sexually frustrated) middle-class family in a Winnebago, a coke dealer, a couple of Nuns and most importantly of all perhaps, a Rhino. The final crash sequence, is, however, completely gratuitous.

 A Rhino, (like the infamous water-skiing elephant, a symbol of the town's and the Souths' faith-based determination to move any mountain in pursuit of their dream) is being moved from North to South in a van driven by a wired Country and Western loving aspiring singer songwriter, whose Accelerationist anthem "Going faster, faster" and delirious disregard for the rules of the road eventually causes the climactic pile-up and lets loose the Rhino (along with a few lions) to terrorize the film's cast. This is the spirit of American Capitalism free to run amok, home at last in the hot and humid South where it truly belongs, smashing up the sclerotic and neurotic subjects and structures of the North.

Free at last, free forever.

(accelerationist anthem circa 1980s)