Have you ever seen the movie Convoy? I have seen bits and pieces of it over the years, but never watched it all the way through.
That changed last night, and the first thing I learned was that the Convoy was directed by Sam Peckinpah. I should have put that together, especially after the climax on the bridge, where everyone has a gun and was shooting it. I found the movie entertaining, but it wasn’t good.
Convoy was one of the many movies, tv shows and songs about truckers and trucking in America. I’m talking about White Line Fever, Smokey and the Bandit, Handle with Care, Breaker! Breaker!, High-Ballin’, B.J. and the Bear, and Any Which Way but Loose to name a few. As cultural trends go, the trucker/CB movement of the late 70’s is so fascinatingly unique. And I do hold that it was a movement, with the movies, tv shows, songs, and clothing. That’s a lot of trucker shit in its very brief life from 1975 to, I would say, about 1980. What I also find odd about the trucker/CB stuff is that it never had a resurgence. Sure, trucker hats were cool a couple of years ago, but Ashton Kutcher never made a trucker movie.
But why did all this trucker stuff become so popular in the late 70’s?
Most of these movies revolve around the idea of the free or independent hero who is harassed or chased by law enforcement, ether justified or not. These heroes aren’t free-spirited hippies; they are blue collar workers. They have a job to do, hauling goods across America, which is vital to the economy, but each trucker has their own rig, which makes them their own boss, which makes them free.
Basically, all these movies are Easy Rider, just trucks instead of bikes. And not as many drugs.
I saw most of these movies growing up in the late 80’s and early 90’s, thanks to basic cable. And when I think back on all of these movies, I guess they all behave like westerns. Most of them take place in the West or South, away from “cities” and “normal” people. Law enforcement is corrupt and unrestrained. Individualism is respected, expected, and the hero lives outside of society, except for the community of truckers. Almost like late 60’s anti-hero movies.
Having said that, maybe these movies were of a specific time, and as such, cannot exist outside of that context. Maybe the late 70’s were a time when the idea of the rough individual American was going away, foretelling the coming of the corporate, conforming yuppie 80’s.
I will add this; it would be nice if they did make more movies with monkeys as sidekicks.
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