"Van Life" was a fad among young people, more or less, discredited by the murder of Gabby Petito. The term describes a nomadic life-style in which people travel around the country in a camper-van. Ideally, adherents to "Van Life" enjoy the pleasures of the open road, the freedom to travel and live anywhere that there is a road and a place to park their vehicle. Gabby Petito, a prominent internet celebrity, embarked on her "van life" excursion in July 2021 with her fiancee Brian Laundrie. Her plan was to post updates on the internet as she traveled across the country with her boyfriend. And, in fact, Gabby did document the first part of her "Van Life" adventure on the web; unfortunately, the gap between her perky and enthusiastic posts and reality widened dramatically: in fact, the trip turned into a horrible saga of confinement with her abusive boyfriend -- the van became a prison and, ultimately, Laundrie strangled Gabbie. So much for the pleasures of freedom and the open road. As with most everything under the sun, this story isn't new. In fact, it's an old tale of isolation, abuse, and madness -- elements of this life-style are prominent in another Covid-era film, Chloe Zhaou's Nomadland (released 2021). But the best depiction of the Van Life ethos and its discontents is Vincente Minnelli's nightmare film The Long, Long Trailer (1954). Minnelli's picture exploits the star power of Lucille Ball and her real-life husband, Desi Arnez, in a picture that documents an earlier "van life" craze, the mid-fifties fad for traveling the nation in Airstream and similar trailers. Minnelli's pictures often have melancholy and strangely forlorn features -- consider, for instance, Judy Garland singing "Have yourself a merry little Christmas" in Meet me in St. Louis and The Long, Long Trailer is particularly disturbing because the film's subtext is a marriage under extreme stress; ultimately, the enormous and cumbersome trailer in which the couple lives becomes an hellish symbol for their marriage and the film's parable, of course, was materialized in the couple's high-profile divorce about six years after the movie was released.
Nicky Callini (Arnez) is some kind of civil engineer -- he builds things like dams. (His background is unclear -- he speaks with a Latin accent and, at one point, in the movie expresses his frustration in an eruption of Spanish cursing.) Nicky is engaged to Tracy (Lucille Ball) -- it's unclear what she does for a living; her primary aspirations (it's 1954) is to be a supportive housewife for her husband. Tracy persuades Nicky to buy a "long, long trailer" -- the idea is that the couple who must move to Denver for her husband's next engineering assignment --will drive the van east from Los Angeles (maybe?) to Denver, enjoying the dubious pleasures of the "open road." Once, they reach Denver, Nicky and Tracy will park their trailer in a court and live in the place as their home. The trailer is outrageously expensive it costs about six-thousand dollars and their annual income is only about half of that sum; the trailer is purchased on time and, immediately, becomes a money pit -- the trailer weighs three tons and the couple has to buy a new, more powerful, car to haul it. The trailer is hard to manage on the highways and if its brakes are not applied in a specific order, the rig will jack-knife disastrously. The whole enterprise becomes very expensive -- for instance, Nickie has to buy a special heavy duty trail hitch to tow the thing. The trailer, despite its huge size, is claustrophobic, with an interior step in the wrong place -- Nickie either hits his head on the ceilings and doorways in the cramped space or stumbles over the trip-hazard of the step. The shower is tiny and the nozzle hard to control; god only knows what the toilet is like. In the film's first half, several sequences highlight the tiny cramped interior of the trailer. The sense of pervasive inconvenience and confinement mirror the tensions in the marriage that come to the fore as their cross-country odyssey progresses. (The film is told as an extended flashback in a trailer court somewhere in the high Rockies; it's raining and Nickie is locked out of the trailer and, so, he rages to another camper in the office about selling the rig and divorcing his wife.)
The Long, Long Trailer was promoted as a riotous comedy and, in fact, Desi Arnez and Lucille Ball were so popular that the film was a big hit, notwithstanding the fact that it was competing with Desilu productions I Love Lucy on television. But there's nothing funny about the movie and it is, in effect, a highly effective horror film. After a crowded wedding reception in the trailer, horribly packed with people, the couple set forth on their adventure. On the highways, they block traffic and, unknown to them, wedding guests have posted a "Just Married" sign on the back of the rig so that the trucks and cars passing them are filled with malign-seeming gawkers who jeer at the couple. With a huge line of cars backed up behind them, the couple reach a trailer court. The place is full of elderly shirtless men and busy-body matrons and, when their fellow "trailerites" discover that the couple is just married, they flood the claustrophobic trailer for another Marx Brothers (A Night at the Opera) crowd scene. The elderly nomads think that Tracy has sprained her ankle (Nicky lied when he explained why he was carrying her across the threshold) and so someone slips her a sleeping pill. She's dead to the world and their honeymoon night is thwarted. (Sexual frustration is a theme throughout the film.) The next day, the couple flees the oppressive attention of their fellow "trailerites" and take a dirt road into a forest to park their trailer next to a babbling brook -- at least, this is the plan. But in a horrible rainstorm, the trailer gets bogged down in the mud, tilts disastrously to one side, and has to be towed out of the forest at enormous expense. (Nicky says they could have stayed at the Waldorf-Astoria for the amount of money spent on the tow.) For a few weeks, the couple travel around the country, seemingly becoming adjusted to one another and life in the trailer. They visit Tracy's relatives where Nicky has to back the trailer into a driveway -- he panics and ends up knocking down a wall, some rose bushes, and, ultimately, smashes to pieces the Victorian porte cochere on his new in-laws home. By this time, Tracy has taken to collecting suitcase-sized boulders -- she plans to display them at their trailer court in Denver. She has also bought crates of pickled fruit and jams. Tracy decides to cook a meal in the trailer as they are driving down the road; her plan is to have a wonderful beef ragout supper with Caesar salad ready when they stop for the night. But it's impossible to cook in the moving trailer (and, in fact, even illegal for anyone to ride in the trailer while its moving) and, while Nickie sings a sort of aria about beef ragout, Tracy is severely battered as the rig bounces over the road -- she gets covered in flour, the ragout and the salad end up on the floor and she is, more or less, knocked senseless. This is all played for laughs, but, in fact, she's badly hurt and has to see a doctor after this episode. To get to Denver, the trailer has to be driven over an 8000 foot mountain pass. Nickie tells Tracy to get rid of all the boulders and the crates of pickles and jam, but she simply conceals the souvenirs in the trailer. The trip to the crest of the mountain pass is hair-raising -- it's more frightening than anything in Clouzot's Wages of Fear (or Friedkin's Sorcerer remake of the French film); the trailer has to be backed when oncoming traffic is encountered and the rear of the huge rig hangs out over thousand-foot abysses. Disturbed rocks plunge into the vertiginous void. At the crest of the pass, Nickie discovers that the trailer is full of Tracy's boulders and crated jars of fruit and pickles. In a rage, he hurls the junk over the edge of the precipice. A horrible fight ensues and Nickie decides to sell the trailer -- but there's only one problem: he has given the deed to the trailer to his wife as a wedding present. So the imminent divorce is also complicated by property ownership issues. An old codger at the trailer court in the mountains says that most marriages could be saved if only husband and wife could bring themselves to utter two words: "I'm sorry." This turns out to be good advice and so the marriage is saved and the movie ends on an ostensibly happy note with the couple reconciled. (But the albatross of the trailer remains hanging around their necks.)
I watched the movie is a state of petrified terror. The whole film is frightening. For instance, when Nickie is persuaded to allow Tracy to drive she blithely proceeds uphill in the wrong lane nearly causing a dozen accidents. The unwieldiness of the huge trailer is dramatized in just about every shot. The scenes on the mountain road, seemingly shot uphill from Lone Pine on the road to the Whitney Portal in the Sierra Nevada are horrifying -- Minnelli tilts the camera to make it seem as if the trailer is being towed up a 45 degree slope. Desi Arnez' expressive features are contorted into a mask of agonized fear: his eyes bulge and show white with terror. When he's not being scared to death by the logistics of towing the three-ton trailer ("remember," someone helpfully tells him, "it's like driving a fifty foot freight train"), he's being humiliated by his inability to back or maneuver the rig. On their belated honeymoon night, trapped in the downpour in the mud, Minnelli cuts from the bedroom, where Tracy keeps falling out of the sliver-thin bed, to the jack supporting the tilted trailer in the deep, brown mud. It's a very disconcerting shot and the sequence ends with the jack failing. When the trailer lurches to the side, Tracy is hurled out the door into the mud and Minnelli shows her literally vanishing into the puddle of muck -- she seems to sink right out of sight in the pelting downpour. This picture scarier than most horror films.
Turner Classic Movies programmed The Long, Long Trailer with Albert Brooks' rather smug, and inconsequential Lost in America. Screening the two movies side-by-side was instructive and entertaining. In Brooks' 1985 movie, an advertising executive quits his job, buys a Winnebago, and with his mousy, timorous wife, embarks on a cross-country tour of the the country. The wife, played by Julie Hagerty, loses their "nest egg" gambling in Vegas. As in the Desi Arnez and Lucille Ball picture, horrible marital problems ensue. The husband berates the wife mercilessly and they have a huge public quarrel at the Hoover Dam with bystanders fleeing from the scene as Brooks screams at his spouse. (The parallels to the Gabby Petito killing are too obvious to be ignored -- the police in Utah stopped the couple; Gabby showed signs of being battered by her fiancee, but the cops didn't want to intervene and, so, did nothing to protect the young woman from her abusive boyfriend with the result that she was killed a couple days later.) In Lost in America, the couple reconcile after the wife is picked up while hitchhiking by a violent psychopathic ex-con. (He punches Brooks in the nose). They end up in Arizona in a trailer court; she gets a job as the assistant manager of Wienerschnitzel franchise and Brooks ends up as a school-crossing guard taunted by the feral kids. Brooks and his wife are mimicking the freedom of the open road as shown in their favorite movie Easy Rider. When they are stopped by a motorcycle cop, he is about to give them an expensive speeding ticket when the subject of Easy Rider comes up and he lets them go. The disconcerting aspect of this encounter is that it seems that the cop likes the movie because the hippies on their motorcycle are shot to death by good old boys in the Deep South -- in other words, the cop is probably not a good liberal. After Brooks encounters a man in Mercedes Benz with a leather interior, he;s moved to go back to New York City with his wife, miraculously finds a perfectly sized parking space on Fifth Avenue in front of his old office building, and returns to the 'rat race.' The movie is shot like a perverse documentary and features long Cassavetes-style harangues by Brooks' character and the picture is, more or less, dripping with ill-disguised contempt for the denizens of middle America (the wasteland between the coasts). Like The Long Long Trailer, the film was marketed as a comedy, but it's not at all funny -- it's cringe-humor at best. The implicit theme of both movies is stay put, blossom where you're rooted, don't try to escape the bourgeois world and its conventions; the alternative to bourgeois domesticity is pictured as a horrific gypsy existence that is, at once, uncomfortable and aimless and terrifying.
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