Drive-Away Dolls
A lesbian road movie that embraces queer liberation and highlights the violence underpinning respectability politics.
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This post is part of the ‘One Take’ weekly series analysing the politics of a film currently showing at the cinemas.
Content warning: Domestic violence.
Note: Given that, at time of writing, Drive-Away Dolls is still showing in UK cinemas, this analysis only lays out as much of the film’s scenario as is necessary so as to avoid spoilers. It is therefore suitable to be read either before or after watching the film, while hopefully still enriching the viewer’s appreciation of it either way.
It’s 1999 in Philadelphia. Jamie (Margaret Qualley) is dumped by her girlfriend Sukie (Beanie Feldstein) for her infidelities. Now homeless, Jamie convinces her best friend Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan), to take her with her on a trip south to Tallahassee where Marian’s aunt lives. At Jamie’s behest, they opt to use a driveaway service, which means taking another client’s car one-way to a shared destination. Though they are supposed to be on a strict schedule, Jamie is intent on frequenting lesbian bars and parties along the way; Marian, who is also gay but far more prudish, would rather simply read.
However, it turns out that the car was intended for another driver, and the mix-up puts ‘The Chief’ (Colman Domingo) and his henchmen Arliss (Joey Slotnick) and Flint (C. J. Wilson) onto Jamie’s and Marian’s tails. The two friends continue driving southwards, not realising Arliss and Flint are looking for them, but begin to get a sense of what they have stumbled onto when they find a mysterious suitcase in their car’s trunk.
The road trip structure
The road trip and its connotations are integral to Drive-Away Dolls’ structure. It simultaneously liberates and confines its two protagonists. Jamie has literally nowhere to go; for her, the journey and its possibilities are their own destination. Marian wants to absent herself from her own dead-end situation, consisting of a dull office job and non-existent romantic life, but her prosaic ambition is merely a respectable existence elsewhere, engaging in wholesome pastimes like birding. Their contrasting visions of freedom and the good life must coinhabit the same small spaces of the car, bars, diners, and motel rooms, along a single trajectory.
This (literal) vehicle allows not only for the exploration of the dynamics between two very different characters – a relationship that is mirrored in their pursuers, the autodidactically, aspiringly urbane Arliss and the old-school, instinctively violent Flint. It also allows for the juxtaposition of different versions of America. It contrasts the metropolis Jamie and Marian are absconding from and the small towns they visit along the way. There is the further contrast between Philadelphia and Tallahassee, whose politics are embodied by its Republican senator Gary Channel (Matt Damon). This points to another paradox between Jamie, a loquacious emigree from the South, and Marian, who aspires to its gentility.
The late 1990s period-setting is also significant here. Firstly, in an era prior to the ubiquity of mobile phones and the internet, the world of Drive-Away Dolls is less integrally connected, certain forms of knowledge are far less readily available, and Jamie and Marian can be more readily lost to the rest of the world, not least the hapless Arliss and Flint. Secondly, it is an era of political and cultural flux, with a sharper (but closing) divide between gay and mainstream culture on the one hand, and less visible political polarisation on the other, in which the social conservatism of someone like Channel retains a pre-MAGA respectability.
Lesbian subculture1
Drive-Away Dolls shows a world in which sexuality and sociability are inseparable. Lesbianism is subcultural but not clandestine, and one can readily find opportunities to encounter other lesbians to hang out and hook up with, providing one has the necessary subcultural capital. This is the insider knowledge which the worldly Jamie readily possesses, as when a trip to a pizzeria leads to a party with a women’s soccer team. It is this knowledge, as much as the technology of the motorcar or the shady capitalism of the driveaway service, that turns their journey into a liberatory one. Arliss also assumes himself to possess the necessary social skills to navigate this world, but his reading of context and information supplied comes up short, hamstringing his and Flint’s pursuit of Jamie and Marian.
By contrast with Jamie, Marian has not been sexually active since the breakup of her relationship with an aide to Ralph Nader. This is a seemingly throwaway reference, but a pertinent one: Nader came to prominence as a vehicular safety campaigner, and in the 1990s was a politically independent, morally ascetic politician – that once derided a concern with gay rights issues as ‘gonadal politics’ – whose third party candidature contributed to George W. Bush’s narrow, crucial victory over Al Gore in Florida in the 2000 presidential election. There are parallels with Marian’s character, seemingly keen to minimise hazards and sexual activity along the road to Tallahassee. As time passes, however, the two friends’ qualities shape each other, as Marian comes to appreciate the value of sexual pleasure, and Jamie of fuller emotional attachment.
Another recurring sexual motif of Drive-Away Dolls is the dildo. This is played to a large degree for comic effect, a carnivalesque oversized, overly garish, overly ubiquitous phallic symbol whose appearance routinely challenges restrained sexual mores. Yet its subversion goes further than that. It functions in the first instance as a material signifier of women’s right to autonomy in their sexual pleasure. Secondly, it inverts the power structures that objectify and fetishize women’s bodies, turning the penis instead into something readily removable, reproducible, and commodified.
Respectability and violence
Lesbian subculture is presented in this way as radically indifferent to and cheerily rubbing up alongside seeming respectability. Marian is regularly shown reading Henry James’s 1878 novel The Europeans, whose encounter between traditionalist New Englanders and their free-spirited (and queer-coded) European visitors is analogous to her relationship with Jamie.2 There is perhaps an added significance here in that Marian is of South Asian heritage: just as for the New Englanders, attachment to the Old World’s rules are more important for their distance from it, so too the pursuit of respectability is given heightened impetus by being racially marginalised. Notably, The Chief – who also inhabits a space between Black respectability and conservatism, and criminality and queerness – is also shown reading the same book at one point.
In keeping with the films that director and co-writer Ethan Coen made with his brother Joel, comically excessive violence recurs throughout Drive-Away Dolls. As so often in that oeuvre, it is the product of people either foolhardily or unwittingly getting into situations beyond their ken, of characters failing to communicate with or understand the motivations and intentions of others. Yet violence in this film is not simply accidental and then inevitable, but an inherent and necessary component of the pursuit of respectability. It drives the Chief, Arliss, and Flint to try and hunt down Jamie and Marian. It causes the police at one point to arrest Marian for suspected vagrancy. It compels Sukie, herself a police officer, to strike Jamie for being unfaithful.
Hypocrisy is a principal target of Drive-Away Dolls. It lampoons political conservatism that licenses brutality and lawbreaking. It makes light of gay characters embracing aspects of heteronormativity in their personal and professional lives, although its treatment of this subject is nuanced. Yet the film does not take aim at hypocrisy solely as a failure to remain true to one’s ideals. Rather, albeit with tongue firmly in cheek, it highlights the self-defeating, harmful consequences of maintaining a façade of propriety. In the quarter-century since 1999, taking up this option has brought uneven gains to LGBTQ+ people, but equally legitimated equally uneven attacks on their rights. Drive-Away Dolls looks back and offers an alternative look forward, to a future of liberation, unashamed pursuit of pleasure, and care.
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My sincerest thanks to Matilda Fitzmaurice for our thought-provoking discussion around this and other elements of the film, and feedback on an earlier draft of this piece.
See Eric Haralson, Henry James and Queer Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), Ch. 1.