Literature Film Quarterly (1988) - American Friends and Strangers on Trains
Details
- article: American Friends and Strangers on Trains
- author(s): J. Yellowlees Douglas
- journal: Literature Film Quarterly (1988)
- issue: volume 16, issue 3, page 181
- journal ISSN: 0090-4260
- publisher: Salisbury University
- Sloan's Alfred Hitchcock: A Filmography and Bibliography (1995) — page 498, #838
- keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Claude Chabrol, Conventions, David Bordwell, Donald Spoto, Farley Granger, François Truffaut, J. Yellowlees Douglas, John Dall, MacGuffin, Motion pictures, New York City, New York, Novels, Robert Walker, Robin Wood, Rope (1948), Strangers on a Train (1951), Thomas Elsaesser
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Abstract
Where Highsmith's Jonathan sacrifices himself - perhaps intentionally - by taking a bullet intended for Ripley, in The American Friend Jonathan drives off without him. The film, essentially, is about colonization - or, more specifically, about the need to resist the American colonziation of the unconscious, a concern of special import to a nation which devoured American culture wholesale in the post-war period as a way of covering up a hole, of filling a vacuum created by the need to forget-as Wenders himself has noted - with chewing gum and Polaroid picture.
