![]() ![]() This wasn’t easy because we lived in New Zealand. Later, in another voiceover, Melanie Lynskey puts her finger on the heart of the difference between placid New Zealand and the American pop culture images of the road movie: “… Just so we could go out driving and pretend we were on Route 66. There is even a series of jokes throughout about the quintessential New Zealand pop icon and road movie Goodbye Pork Pie (1980). With amusing incongruity, Melanie Lynskey is constantly referring to the tranquil South Island countryside as ‘badlands’ and her automatic thought when pulling up to a gas station is to indulge fantasies about robbing it. I wish so much my life would be like one of those Hollywood movies – a life on the road with a new adventure around every corner.” The film comes chock full with quotes from American pop culture and films – Elvis, the Marlboro Man and The Dukes of Hazzard (1979-85), the car has little statuettes of Elvis and Marilyn Monroe on the dashboard seemingly as patron saints, while the title itself is a reference to Nicolas Cage’s snakeskin jacket in Wild at Heart. My first role model was Princess Leia, my second and third were Thelma and Louise. I didn’t go to any church but I saw a big screen movie every week. In the opening narration, Melanie Lynskey tells us: “Clint Eastwood taught me right from wrong. This is the particular brilliance of the film, for what we have is a road movie that is about the iconography of the American road movie and the dream it represents. If the aforementioned road movies represent a traditional road movie through a world gone askew, then Snakeskin is a road movie that takes a journey through semiotic space. Snakeskin is a surreal road movie with a particular New Zealand spin. ![]() ![]() ![]() Whereas the road movie traditionally concerns characters embarking on a journey of self-discovery, where the wide-open spaces represent the unlimited possibilities open to them, the “fucked-up road movie” represents a journey through a societal headspace that is filled with the bizarre and/or gone to hell. These are films that invert the classic thrust of a road movie. This New Zealand-made production is an entry in the mini-genre of what one might term the “fucked-up road movie.” It joins films like Wild at Heart (1990), Thelma and Louise (1991), Kalifornia (1993), Natural Born Killers (1994), Butterfly Kiss (1995) and The Doom Generation (1995). ![]()
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