The Wild One

The tension between road and community becomes focused within the love affair between Johnny, the drifter-leader of the motorcycle gang, and Martha, the small town girl who works in the local dairy bar. Johnny is the embodiment of the "road," he has no attachments and can pick up and leave at a moment's notice. Martha is "community," her father is the local sheriff, and she has never left this town of Wrightsville. In this scene, Johnny has just saved Martha from a rival gang of drunken motorcycle thugs and taken her away to a secluded park. Their inevitable kiss was a failure, and now they begin to talk.

As the scene reveals, the escape offered by the road is not only a physical, spatial one, but a mental one also. Martha tells Johnny: "I've never ridden on a motorcycle before. It was fast...it scared me...but I forgot everything...it felt good. Is that what you do?" The possiblity of "forgetting" is allied with the new kind of movement offered by the road and a motorcycle. At speed, the road becomes a liminal space, that is capable of engendering a mental frame of mind in which you can forget your past, your town, and yourself.