Stopping at gas stations can be a mere formality that allows you to recharge your batteries, but in the cinema they have become spaces where adventure is activated.
Stretching your legs, filling up with gas, a visit to the bathroom and perhaps buying some refreshments. Usually, taking a break on a road trip is a basic necessity, a mere formality that allows you to recharge your batteries to continue the journey. But this almost never happens in cinema or on television, because if it did, the audience would leave the theatre, bored, or change the channel. Gas stations in films are usually a place of transit, yes, but their low-key and very often decadent representations in a deurbanized and desolate landscape have given rise to a multitude of plot turns, whether they are robberies, chance encounters or even explosions. And they have rarely been able to separate themselves from the representation of modern life, which has made vehicles and tourism its most precious asset.
The audiovisual industry has developed a great love for the most forgotten places, those that could even be called non-places, due to their hostile, empty location and always on the margins (in this case, of the road). In road movies gas stations offer a moment of rest and pause for the flow of a story, whether frenetic or peaceful, although they have also caused the opposite effect. Far from being a pleasant location, on many occasions they have detonated the plots or caused a twist in the script that can come to define the rest of the trip.
At a gas station, the paths and destinies of characters have crossed, which, for better, and especially for worse, have marked a before and after in the story of the protagonists. The conversations forged around a fuel pump usually go through the origin or the destiny of the speakers. In 1967, the shameless Bonnie and Clyde (Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty in Arthur Penn’s film) told a young manager at a forgotten Texas station about their plans to hit the road to rob banks.
That was Michael J. Pollard, nominated for an Oscar for his role in that very film: a daring boy who was influenced by two minds determined to break the law. And boy was he provoked to rebel against the system: Clyde’s arrogance, and especially Bonnie’s sarcasm, made him agree to steal the money from the safe of his own establishment and donate it all to the cause, throwing the bills into the convertible car. It is a seminal moment in the story based on real events, which would end up including CW’s character in the journey as an invaluable collaborator in the misdeeds of Bonnie and Clyde, and which would lead to the final tragedy that awaited the main couple.
Speaking of decisive encounters, another American road movie made two years later would include a gas station sequence, this time starring motorcyclists heading for the hedonism of a carnival. Drinking from the hippie movement, Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969) inspired a desire for adventure and exploration throughout the state of Louisiana, but also developed a certain fetish for two-wheeled vehicles, a pure symbol of liberation on the road, yes, but also of a motor industry of great relevance in a vast country such as the United States.
A gas station is the ideal setting for Hopper and Peter Fonda to refuel their motorcycles after a long journey through a desert landscape, and to pick up a mysterious hitchhiker (Luke Askew). “Our dreams are in that tank,” Hopper reproaches Fonda, observing that the third party in the equation takes the liberty of inserting the pump into the tank decorated with the American flag. “You let a stranger pump gas.” An image so loaded with symbolism exudes the insemination of anarchic thought in a predominantly consumerist system, a dichotomy that both protagonists will travel through for the rest of the film. When they leave the gas station, they leave behind a gigantic Enco company sign that could well represent the constant imposition of a system like the liberal one for emancipated souls.
The huge advertising billboards create a feeling of smallness, insignificance and even abandonment for individuals who circulate through rest areas. The fictional Dinoco gas station in the first installment of the Toy Story saga (John Lasseter, 1995), with its illuminated and rotating sign of a dinosaur, stages one of the most interesting plot twists in the film, when the living toys Woody and Buzz Lightyear fall from their owner Andy’s car, leaving them unprotected in the nighttime elements. In a world of fluorescent logos and advertisements, the moment is an ode to Pop Art and the iconography of consumption, as Professor Tom Kemper of the University of Southern California says: “The photography […] presents a surprising use of angles and composition to generate energetic geometric forms […]. A dazzling evocation of the charm and effervescence of a commercial world” ( Toy Story, A Critical Reading: London, Palgrave, 2015).
A decade later, the iconic yellow Volkswagen Kombi with its broken brakes in Little Miss Sunshine (Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris, 2006) parked in run-down motels and decaying junkyards on its journey through Arizona and California, but it was also reminiscent of the plot of Home Alone (Chris Columbus, 1990), when the entire dysfunctional Hoover family forgets little Olive (Abigail Breslin) at a gas station on the way to the children’s beauty pageant. The comedy comes when the clan returns to the place to pick up the youngest daughter again and, unlike the Pixar toys, the positive girl with the huge glasses did not seem at all scared of being stranded at a God-forsaken gas station.
We don’t tend to laugh at service stations. The most critical cinema has already taken it upon itself to associate it with bad vibes, and even with the feeling of risk and a certain inhospitality. Alfred Hitchcock blew up a gas station in a brief but unforgettable sequence in The Birds (1963), in which Tippi Hedren watched from a window how a trail of diesel fuel led to an inevitable explosion in the peaceful town of Bodega Bay, suddenly transformed into an absolute avian hell.
The threat is also felt at the beginning of The Cabin in the Woods (Drew Goddard, 2011), when a group of high school friends led by Chris Hemsworth go to a remote cabin for a weekend. Shortly before arriving, the rude owner (Tim DeZarn) of a ghostly gas station warns them of the difficult path to get to the top of the mountain, and also of their unlikely return, in addition to spitting on the ground and calling Jules’ character (Anna Hutchinson) a “bitch.” The tension here is accompanied by the outdatedness of the pumps, compared to the more modern life represented by the caravan of students, who are about to discover a fatal destiny.
The same problem that young people encounter when paying by card is encountered by the character of Rodrigo (Ernesto Alterio) in El cuarto pasajero, the BlaBlaCar ride turned nightmare by Álex de la Iglesia. Service stations would not be the same without their snacks, drinks and magazines, always susceptible to being robbed, and the film by the Bilbao director knows how to make the most of it, when he introduces one of the protagonists into the queue at the checkout counter: a penniless egomaniac who refuses to pay the minimum amount imposed by the establishment to pay by card.
After several attempts to make a contactless payment, the eccentric man gets on the nerves of the other customers, and begins to rant about banks that insist on charging a minimum for each purchase. The sequence becomes a real battle, when Julián (Alberto San Juan) enters the store to look for his traveling companion: punches are exchanged between customers, bags of chips fly through the air, and both protagonists are chased to the vehicle as if they were being followed by an angry horde of snack-eating zombies.
But not everything has to be about materialism: if anything has been demonstrated by the recent We Live in Time (John Crowley, 2024) it is that a gas station can also be a sentimental place. Of course, it may not be the most hygienic setting to bring a child into the world. And if not, just ask Almut (Florence Pugh) when, after her waters break, she is forced to give birth in the bathroom of the 24-hour convenience store at the nearest gas station due to the huge traffic jam she gets caught in on the way to the hospital. In addition to her husband Tobias (Andrew Garfield), a couple of employees on duty leave their work aside to try to assist the young woman in what is probably the least sterile place in the whole of the United Kingdom. Both employees end up bumping fists like colleagues, in celebration of good teamwork, because, in the movies, a service area can facilitate exactly that: almost any service.
Write: Alberto Richart
