Female nomads are confusing, male nomads are heroic...
... but neither of them are really accomplishing anything.
“But what does freedom on the road really mean? Here, something other than the American Road movie portrays. Something more difficult, less attractive, less free. Read through Vagabond’s lens, the freedom symbolized by the American road movie turns out to be idealized ruse, an ideological construction� (Driving Visions, 268).
It seems that in both Easy Rider and Vagabond, the protagonists take to the road to escape whatever it is in normative society that conflicts with them. In Easy Rider, the protagonists opt on to the road, searching for a sense of self and a sense of freedom. Laderman argues that Vagabond dismantles the freedom myth created and romanticized in Easy Rider, but I would argue that Easy Rider reaches a similar conclusion.
To me, the absurd way that the two protagonists die in Easy Rider says that the new freedom they thought they had found is an illusion after all, since those still within bounds of normative society (the men from the small town) bring their journey to an end. In Vagabond, Mona is forced on to the road, presumably because she was outside the bounds of normativity and needed to escape some type of restricting force (law, family, etc). So, different narratives with the same conclusion – that you’re never really free (and if you are, its not all that great).
Gender plays a role in how the stories are told. In Easy Rider, the men are forcefully navigating themselves in a specific direction, motivated to continue their journey and experience more of “life�. In Vagabond, the female protagonist chooses her nomadic lifestyle, but allows others to choose where she goes and lacks direction. Her wandering is empty and without motivation and difficult for those who encounter her to figure out. In Easy Rider, the traveling men as less questioned and more understood (and often admired) by the people they encounter. Only in what Laderman refers to as Mona’s encounter with the American road movie mentality is her lifestyle ever admired. In all other parts of the film her mobility and lack of emotional connection to people is confusing, perhaps because it is contrary to normative ideas of what women should want.