Reasons for Being on the Road: Mona vs. Billy and Wyatt
Perhaps the ultimate road movie outcast, Mona does not cruise the highway on a sleek motorbike, sporting a sexy leather jacket, wrecking subversive havoc. This European road movie refuses to romanticize rebellious driving/traveling, as most American road movies do. ...Mona is ugly and disheveled; she has no car nor any impulse to drive, a truly disturbing homeless drifter(Laderman, 267).
In the movie Vagabond, we met Mona, a hopeless drifter who gave up what we assume is what a socially acceptable life, with a career and an education, to become a social outcast. This movie introduced to us a different idea of why people feel the need to travel the road. In Easy Rider, the main characters, Billy and Wyatt, are traveling along their road to find a new kind of social acceptance, they are searching for an America that will accept them for who they are, and what they represent. Mona is searching for nothing. She is not looking for social acceptance of herself. She has willing left behind a normal life to live on the road, scavage and beg for food, and help from strangers. She smells terrible, indicating that she has left behind more than just a socially acceptable life, she has left behind the social accepted idea of hygiene as well. On screen she does not look sexy, or dashing, or offer us a life that we might secretly envy. With Billy and Wyatt, there was a feeling that they were doing something right, they were defining the norms of society in order to be themselves. With Mona there is no such glamor. She is simply a wandering vagabond, not searching for anything specific, or moving with a greater purpose in mind, she is just moving from place to place in search of her basic needs, food and shelter. This idea in itself seems very rare, females are usually portrayed in films to have many ulterior motives for they actions. They are looking for a man or looking for someone to take care of them, they very rarely are able to met the basic human needs on their own, men are always introduced into the picture to help take care of them, or to provide them with some basic need. Mona needs no one to help her do this, in fact she willing leaves the care of men multiple times. While her circumstances certainly do not improve after she does this, it shows that she is able to provide for herself on her own, a new idea for females in film.