Roads to Nowhere: Borders and Belonging in Le Salaire de la Peur

Just as film (in its non-digital format) is literally a composite of separate and distinct cells which, through movement, take on the illusion of connectivity and sequence, the Americas are a conglomeration of differentiated, and differentiating, nation-cells which, through an imposition of movement, form a network that is traversable and interrelated. The film medium's illusion is dependent on a projector and a screen, whereas the illusion of national communicability is dependent on the traveling body, a represented (and representative) subject that performs and re-performs connection through space and time. I argue that the Americas' cohesion is illusory not as a statement on political relations or cultural hegemony, but quite simply as a recognition that national constructs have no real, that is, empirical, relation to the places they signify. As such, the traveling body becomes both projector and screen, as it were, of geographical and historical identification.

This filmic construction of the Americas is useful for it not only allows me to grapple simultaneously with the work of representation and connection, but because it affords me the opportunity to explore the spaces that differentiate and define the individual cells that make up the American narrative composite. These spaces are areas that we are meant to, quite literally, overlook in our attempts at unity and correspondence. These are the divisions between cells, spaces that are formed and get lost in movement.

I have chosen to consider this American composite by focusing on a film that is set somewhere in the Americas: Le Salaire de la peur (Wages of Fear) (1953). My use of this European text is not meant to reflect either a definitive representation and reading of American spaces, nor its opposite, an erroneous and/or romanticized representation. Representations of space that necessitate an active (and narrative) identification on the part of the viewer must, in some way, perform a process that alludes to, or actively embodies, the concept of belonging. All such representations, therefore, negotiate distinction and sameness, foreign and native. This film is no different. I do not gauge the Americanness of this film, because I question the worth of such an engagement as well as its efficacy. I do, however, wish to emphasize the European, read non-American, nature of this text if for no other reason than to highlight the importance of distance in representations of belonging. The film's representations of the Americas make constant reference to spaces beyond American borders and seem to construct the Americas as one almost homogeneous space. My analysis of this film, in particular, is founded upon Michel de Certeau's examination of the ways in which distance manifests in a narrative text's content and structure.

Michel de Certeau writes that "every story is a travel story" (115). This may be generally understood in terms of narrative's temporal dependency—every narrative, whatever its structure, is a meaningful ordering of events. Order, sequence, repetition are traits made manifest through time and its passage. As such, narratives depend upon a dynamic engagement with time, a movement forwards or backwards or through. Certeau, however, uses his statement to make a case for the topological character of narrative, that not only does narrative represent, and instigate, temporal change, it also demands a sort of dis- and relocation. Stories can transport listeners to faraway places, of course, or they can return readers to her/his home with developed insight, but what Certeau is interested in with his investigation of the role of space in narrative is not the nature of these places so much as how these spaces are constructed through their telling. "[A] movement," he claims, "always seems to condition the production of a space and to associate it with a history" (118). Movement, then, not only links space and time, it also allows both to be narratively representable and representative. As such, one cannot narrate space without utilizing time, and one cannot tell of time without the use of space. Every narrative representation, therefore, is part of a movement that traverses, as it constructs, its spatial and temporal arena...