Road Trip, Failure, Escape: A conversation between Y tu mamá también (2001) and Little Miss Sunshine (2006)
We watched Little Miss Sunshine (2006, dir. Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton) and Y tu mamá también (2001, dir. Alfonso Cuarón) as a double feature one night. The pairing was coincidental: we’d found both on a Letterboxd list of “Tumblr Movies,” which also included such whimsical, gif-friendly 2000s highlights as Juno, Marie Antoinette and Wes Anderson’s entire filmography.
On the surface, the two films have little in common besides a certain sun-saturated aesthetic popular with those of us who spent the early 2010s sharing Megavideo links in 72-minute bursts and listing our privileges on our blogs’ “About” pages. In Little Miss Sunshine, gawky Olive Hoover (Abigail Breslin), 7, qualifies for a beauty pageant held in Southern California; despite the disarray of her family’s finances, careers, and mental health, they all embark on a chaotic days-long drive so that Olive can compete. In Y tu mamá también, two teens, Tenoch (Diego Luna) and Julio (Gael García Bernal), try to impress and seduce an older woman, Luisa (Maribel Verdú), who joins them on a meandering road trip to a beach in Mexico.
But in addition to having the “Tumblr Movie” genre in common — that Letterboxd list is surely a deeply anthropologically significant document — these films both take long, dusty roads to answer the same driving questions: what makes us free, and how do we deny ourselves that freedom? What particular freedoms are licensed within the liminal, transient space of the road? Do we get to keep them, or must we let them all go at the very end?
I. Road Trip as Heterotopia (NOT to be confused with ‘heterosexual utopia’)
Tenoch: Get your ass in gear. We’re going to the beach.
Julio: What beach?
Tenoch: Heaven’s Mouth.
Julio: There’s no such place, man!
Tenoch: I know.
~
Olive: There’s the hotel!
Richard: We’re gonna make it. We’re gonna make it. Alright. How — how the hell do you get over there?
A road trip movie should make you float. It should annihilate all sense of past and future in its saturated dazes of neon, gasoline, and heat. A road trip’s destination, real or imagined, is a mere technicality. The road trip is a space suspended between places. The road trip is nowhere. The road trip is — with apologies from the one of us who was an English major — a heterotopia.
Michel Foucault, known bald fisting enthusiast, defines a heterotopia as a ‘real place’ that simultaneously represents, contests, and inverts a culture's real sites. Such places are “outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality.” Heterotopias are funhouse mirrors, reflecting, yet distorting, the world within which they are embedded. Foucault’s examples include the prison, the ship (what is a ship if not a big, old, wet car), the brothel, the cemetery, the museum, the zoo, and — aptly for our purposes — the cinema. Thinking about Little Miss Sunshine and Y tu mamá también, we might add: the motel, the roadside restaurant, and, perhaps most glaringly, the beauty pageant.
Foucault also offers a specific definition of “crisis heterotopias”: “privileged or sacred or forbidden places, reserved for individuals who are, in relation to society [...], in a state of crisis: adolescents [...], pregnant women, the elderly, etc.” Foucault presents these “crisis heterotopias” as a vanishing phenomenon in the modern West, incrementally replaced by “heterotopias of deviation,” in which those who live outside the norms of the dominant society are enclosed and brought to heel: the prison, the psychiatric hospital, the old people’s home. But there are, he says, a few “remnants” still kicking around. He cites, as an example, the “honeymoon trip,” in which, archetypally, “the young woman’s deflowering [could] take place ‘nowhere’,” in a hotel or a train car or some other addressless, transitory site.
In these movies, the road trip is a crisis heterotopia on wheels. Y tu mamá también is almost exactly the “honeymoon trip” example transposed and updated: ritualized journeying, ritualized deflowering, for two boys experiencing the long crisis of adolescence and a woman undergoing the more abrupt crisis of terminal illness. Little Miss Sunshine takes a handful of crisis-types — the adolescent son Dwayne (Paul Dano), the elderly grandpa Edwin (Alan Arkin), the recently-institutionalized uncle Frank (Steve Carell) — and shakes them up inside a violently yellow van for a tight 101 minutes. The road trip becomes a site of contained deviation.
For the duration of these movies, we’re living in a utopia — etymologically, a no-place — in which social rules are on hiatus, in which definitions of failure and success become warped, in which you get to go off the rails but stay on the road. You can yell at your husband, you can fuck your best friend, you can go feral on a dusty scree because you’re never going to make it to flight school. Once you’ve entered the road-trip-heterotopia, by pinching your sister’s car or abandoning your husband or leaping into the moving van (per Foucault, “the heterotopic site is not freely accessible [...] to get in one must have a certain permission and make certain gestures”), you’re also afforded certain liberties. And, in these films, our heroes take those liberties to some distinctly queer places.
II. Heterosexuality in Crisis
Grandpa: Are you gettin' any?
Richard: Dad!
Grandpa: You can tell me, Dwayne. Are you gettin' any?Richard: Come on, please.
[Dwayne shakes his head]
Grandpa: No? Jesus. You're what? Fifteen? My God, man!
Richard: Dad!
Grandpa: You should be gettin' that young stuff.
~
Luisa: Who cares who you two fucked when you come that fast.
In order to talk about queerness in these movies, we first have to talk about nineteenth-century gay dilettante loser Marcel Proust.
Proust is the life’s work of the only self-professedly queer major character in either of these movies, Little Miss Sunshine’s melancholic Frank. (As a side-note, Little Miss Sunshine imagines a world in which a university would have not one, but two, Proust experts and a micro-industry of Proust grad students working together in fully-funded paradise. Also a world in which a Proust biography entitled, tediously, Understanding Proust, can become an NYT bestseller. I want to live there.) Proust’s masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time, is a deeply queer text, but also one in which queerness is often a thing obscurely glimpsed or overheard — through twitched-back curtains, through a thin, decidedly un-soundproof wall, through the clouds of perfumed language that cover a cruising scene. It’s never fully articulated: at least, not in a way that chimes with our modern, identity-oriented framings of queer desire.
The queerness of Y tu mamá también and Little Miss Sunshine works similarly. For much of Y tu mamá también, queer possibility has to be misdirected or postponed. After the movie opens with The End of Heterosexuality — Tenoch and Julio’s girlfriends going abroad, leaving them free to measure cocks, fuck around in changing rooms, and masturbate side-by-side all summer — Luisa swiftly steps in to occupy the role of socially-sanctioned object of desire. This ostensibly licit heterosexual longing becomes a staging-ground for male-male intimacy. Long before the film culminates in a threesome, wanting Luisa is positioned as something ‘we’ do together: “Think your cousin wants to get laid?” One boy says to the other. “We oughta try to ease her pain.” And Luisa cops to the dynamic pretty fast: “Typical men! Fighting like dogs and marking your territory when all you really want is to fuck each other!” It’s such a direct expression of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theory of the triangulation of desire in which the shared coveting of a female love-object actually draws two male “rivals” into greater proximity. That Sedgwick surely deserves a writing credit.
Y tu mamá también is a film about the blurring of bodies. Tenoch and Julio trade places so frequently — fucking Luisa, fucking each other’s girlfriends, switching shifts in the driver’s seat — that they start to blur into each other. Any notion that they can be disentangled is long dead by the drunken revelations that precede the threesome (on the mutual girlfriend-fucking: “that makes us cum brothers, man!”). Seeing them kiss, moments later, buries that notion six feet in the ground.
While Y tu mamá también boasts a heady, swirling queer atmosphere (and a hefty dollop of queer practice), it also repeatedly refuses queerness as identity. In the final scene, Tenoch and Julio discuss a mutual friend, Daniel, whom they haven’t seen in years. Julio tells Tenoch that Daniel is a “total queen at this point,” that “his dad kicked him out,” but that he’s ultimately “super happy, man. Got a boyfriend and everything.” Tenoch’s reply is muted: “that’s cool.” The possibility of a queer life does exist in the film’s universe, but it’s wholly removed from the reality of these two boys. Try to put it into practice in the world outside that little car, that little beach, and you’ll face the consequences: family rejection, exclusion, becoming nothing more to your old friends than the alien specter of the “total queen.”
Little Miss Sunshine offers us a queer road-trip relationship of a very different sort: not erotic, but companionable; not romance, but kinship. The Hoover family’s final destination is a child beauty pageant, that bedazzled breeding-ground of the rigid gender confines that undergird heterosexuality. These pageants’ barely-concealed sexualisation of their pre-pubescent participants is magnified to monstrous proportions by Olive’s miniature stripper routine in the film’s final act. And at least on paper, much of the driving engine of the plot is the (rickety) heterosexual marriage between inept patriarch Richard (Greg Kinnear) and put-upon caretaker Sheryl (Toni Collette). Within this overbearing heterosexual framework, however, we see the emergence of a decidedly queer intimacy between the Proust-loving, pink-shirted Frank and the silent teenage Nietzchean Dwayne.
Before we continue, it’s necessary to make one thing clear: Dwayne is not a heterosexual teenage boy. Dwayne, it seems achingly clear on a rewatch, is coded as an “egg.” To quote Jackie Ess, the term’s popularizer (and later critic), an egg is a “prodromal trans woman, someone who’ll do it later” — someone who shows glimmers of trans identification, trans potentiality, but hasn’t yet come to realize themselves as trans. Dwayne is an egg in the tradition of depressed stoner James in Imogen Binnie’s trailblazing novel Nevada: a miserable “boy” living in a shitty small town to whom transness hasn’t yet been presented as an available or plausible option. Like James, Dwayne fixates on escape fantasies, ways of shucking off his present life and becoming Something Else, Somewhere Else. For Dwayne, this consists of reading too much Nietzche, plotting his journey to flight school, and adopting a vow of silence. Like James, Dwayne, too, is read by those around him as socially and sexually dysfunctional: the dialogue above, in which Edwin is horrified by Dwayne’s apparent virginity, is a case in point. The profound discomfort on Dwayne’s face during Edwin’s “fuck a lotta woman, Dwayne” speech goes beyond the sheer horror of your step-grandpa telling you to go out and get pussy: Paul Dano’s aghast face suggests the sheer inconceivability of Dwayne’s participation in the grim rituals of heterosexual teenage sex. Indeed, Dwayne looks uncomfortable all movie long. He moves, dresses, and cuts his hair like someone who wants to be thinking about his body as little as possible, who finds himself being unpleasantly surprised on a regular basis by his height, the length of his arms, the general travesty of his enfleshment.
But the strongest case for Dwayne’s eggness lies in his kinship with Frank. It seems plausible that Frank is the only queer person Dwayne knows well enough to speak to. It also seems no coincidence that — apart from Olive — Frank is the only person in the family with whom Dwayne tolerates closeness or conversation. On the surface, they have nothing in common: Dwayne’s life of pull-ups and flight manuals is incommensurate with Frank’s former life of ritzy faculty dinners and affairs with grad students. Still, they find each other, room together at the motel, take each other out for a relief break during the rhinestoned nightmare of the beauty pageant. It is Frank, the outsider, who breaks to Dwayne the knowledge that he can’t fly because he’s colorblind; it is also Frank who, in a cut line, offers Dwayne a material alternative to his discontents at home: “Maybe I can adopt you.” Dwayne imprints on Frank, on Frank’s queerness, and Frank tends to Dwayne — possibly because he glimpses in Dwayne a familiar sort of wretchedness.
I can imagine the shadow-possibility of a sequel to Little Miss Sunshine in which Dwayne moves to college on another coast, joins a goth band, grows out that haircut, changes her name, and finds herself lying in bed with her girlfriend, talking about how she used to be obsessed with being a pilot (a pilot!) and had a freakout about being colorblind on the side of a road. Maybe someone will make that movie someday. For now, though, all we have is Frank and Dwayne, hunkering down in the van as the nuclear family judders and quakes all around them.
III. Getting Off Track
Tenoch: Fuck you, asshole! You fucked up our friendship, you fucked up my trust, you fucked my girl! You fucked up me!
~
Dwayne: Divorce? Bankrupt? Suicide? You're fucking losers, you're losers! No, please just leave me here, Mom. Please, please, please. Please... just leave me here.
Heterosexuality isn’t the only thing in crisis in these movies. Almost every character is struggling under the weight of social expectations, excruciatingly aware of their failure to measure up. Meandering road-trips allow these characters to deviate, literally and metaphorically, from the well-trodden paths laid out before them that they do not want to or cannot currently undertake. Queerness is implicated, of course, but so are further anti-capitalist and non-normative themes.
Little Miss Sunshine’s Hoover family unit is enmeshed and sustained by common failure. In one fell swoop, Frank has lost his career and had his lover and his MacArthur Genius Grant snatched by a rival Proust scholar (happens to the best of us). Beauty queen-obsessed Olive, once outside of the family home, faces a reality dictated by her average looks; she reckons, too, with all the discontents of child pageantry, looking discomfited, awkward, and disenchanted once onstage alongside the other polished pageant girls. Grandpa Edwin has been kicked out of his senior living community; he also literally fucking dies during the film (colossal L). Tragicomic patriarch Richard, a self-help-obsessed devotee of meritocracy and bootstrap economics, cannot win a book deal for his book about winning. Until Act II, Dwayne seems to be of a different breed altogether — vowed to silence, training single-mindedly toward becoming a fighter pilot, and disavowing his family’s dysfunction — but when he discovers his color-blindness, an inherited factor keeping him from flight school, he breaks down completely.
Y tu mamá también, of course, involves deviation by nature: this road trip was borne of false pretenses, and neither Tenoch nor Julio knows the location of the promised beach, Heaven’s Mouth. They seem to know that they’re taking on a ticking time bomb of Luisa losing patience with their directionless ramblings and petty schoolboy fighting. Additionally, early on, the boys fetishize a fantasy of bohemian, stick-it-to-the-man dropout culture. Tenoch complains about his father’s insistence that he study a sensible degree like economics — he’d rather be a literature major — to which Julio gleefully replies, “You should have flunked [...] Fuck economists, man!” Their interpersonal and sexual failures cut deeper. Julio and Tenoch’s girlfriends have departed on a whirlwind summer abroad — to a Europe full, as the boys crow repeatedly, of alluring Italian “fags” — and the emasculating prospect of their infidelity looms throughout the movie. Luisa is also in a failing partnership: her husband Jano repeatedly cheats on her. On the road, Tenoch and Julio tell Luisa about their exploits — puffed-up and exaggerated — as well as of the vows of brotherhood that they have made to one another, as part of their secret club of “Charolastras.” (Even the name derives from a blunder: their friend Daniel, the “total queen,” got it from misunderstanding the lyrics of an English song.) Once spoken, though, these principles are revealed to have been fractured for some time: they’ve already violated a cardinal rule by fucking each other’s girlfriends. The charolastras’ loyalty is failing, has failed, and will fail again.
Queerness is a specter of “failure” haunting heteronormativity and heterosexual performance. In Y tu mamá también, the heterosexual compact of one girl to one boy is violated: the boys have been sharing. They also do not perform particularly well in bed, according to Luisa (“these boys don’t know how to go down on a girl [...] You were slurping like it was some kind of lollipop”). Like the similarly-aged Dwayne in Little Miss Sunshine, the boys are either not fucking when (or who) they ought to be, or they’re failing to fuck properly. When Tenoch and Julio realize each other’s betrayal, they have theatrical meltdowns, maintaining their rages as hollow fronts until being worn down again by the familiar rhythms of companionship. They can’t even get mad at each other properly. Somehow, despite failing on every count to maintain proper heterosexual romances, as long as they’re on the road, it’s all fine, better, even: there’s a sense of liberation and newfound joy between them as they make amends and unfold their secrets, one by one. Cheers.
These road trip journeys are also beset by more prosaic failures: car troubles, sudden diversions, mis-routes, and even death (Grandpa Edwin’s happens at about the halfway mark in Little Miss Sunshine, and Luisa’s is impending in Y tu mamá también). Gestures towards the political backdrop — more overt in Cuarón’s directing than in Faris and Dayton’s — also invoke possibilities of national failure, of institutional collapse on an impossibly grand scale. Everywhere you look, things are falling apart.
But failure does not necessarily spell misery. Like the directionally-challenged characters in these films, several queer theorists have recently made claims for the delights of, in Jack Halberstam’s words, “detouring and getting lost.” “Under certain circumstances, failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world,” Halberstam writes in The Queer Art of Failure. “What kinds of reward can failure offer us? [...] failure allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior and manage human development with the goal of delivering us from unruly childhoods to orderly and predictable adulthoods.”
The road trip provides a medium for this rambling and exploration. The characters’ failures are allowed to unfold in a capsule: they get to have a taste of what it is to lapse, to err, to veer entirely off course, with the underlying knowledge that this is all a temporary vacation. And time seems to bend to allow this. Tenoch and Julio linger on the trip with their borrowed car as days stretch into a week with Luisa; the Hoover family somehow makes their improbable deadline and check-in cutoff at the California hotel despite countless missed turn-offs, state troopers, and an incident involving a corpse in the back of the car.
But the unfortunate thing about roads is that they tend to come to an end. For all that these films’ ecstatic moments — Y tu mamá también’s threesome, Olive and family dancing to “Super Freak” onstage at the pageant in Little Miss Sunshine — carry a whiff of liberatory potential, we can’t stay suspended inside them forever. Ultimately, we have to drive back home.
IV. Back to Reality
Sheryl: You know, like it or not, we're still your family, for better or worse...
Dwayne: No, you're not my family! I don't wanna be your family! I hate you fucking people!
~
Tenoch: I got into the university.
Julio: Cool. When do you start?
Tenoch: September.
Julio: Economics?
Tenoch: Yeah. And you?
Julio: Biology. I start next week.
The trip has provided Tenoch and Julio a momentary escape from the confines of their societally dictated roles. For a few days, Tenoch is no longer the ambitious son of a prominent politician; Julio is no longer the “man” of his more workaday family’s house. On the road, they have a chance to rewrite their existences according to their own ideals: brotherhood, sensuality, unbounded freedom. But the heterosexual family unit grasps back at them immediately after the final night’s threesome. As soon as Luisa is no longer lying between them, Tenoch and Julio wake up and leap apart, as if scalded. Gone is the easygoing Charolastra banter. In the harsh light of morning, they cannot acknowledge their incipient queerness. Their family ties, too, call them back — “I gotta get going. I promised my sister the car,” says Julio. “I better get going. My folks will start to worry,” says Tenoch. They’ve crossed a bridge, and the only way to resume ignorance is to burn the bridge afterward. Contrary to the comedic hijinks punctuating their drive to Heaven’s Mouth, the drive back is elided onscreen, merely narrated to us as “uneventful.” The moment they reject each other and leave the beach, they depart the heterotopia altogether.
Little Miss Sunshine, by contrast, keeps us suspended in the heterotopia until the very end of the film. After the pageant, the family restart the car, get it going in the running-leaping-honking way we’ve grown accustomed to, and drive off into the distance. Directors Faris and Dayton spare us the ending and keep us guessing as to whether the Hoovers have been materially changed by their experiences — or whether, as in Y tu mamá también, they might fail to take anything transformative away from this road-trip.
Cuarón provides a coda for Y tu mamá también. We get to glimpse Tenoch and Julio’s final encounter, years down the line. It’s excruciatingly awkward, the silences stretching between them for miles. Through a brief, stilted conversation, Tenoch and Julio reveal their successful assimilations out of the queer, aberrant failure-modes through which we came to know them and into the confines of heteronormative and capitalist society — respectable degrees, families and relationships, a future. The ‘natural order of things’ has taken hold and taken them away from each other, not least because their cross-class solidarity was as much of an aberration as their queerness. Tenoch is the heir to his upper class, well-connected politician father; Julio will get his biology degree and perhaps “succeed” as a middle-class professional, or maybe remain (as Tenoch lets slip during a fight) “low-class trash.” The narrator tells us afterward that they never see each other again. It’s a depressing ending but also an honest one. A film in the Call Me By Your Name mode might try to soften the blow by hinting that they’ll find each other again during their respective midlife crises or give us their final, aching confessions of love. Instead, all we have here is a harshly-lit coffee-shop, pleasantries, and unfulfilled assurances that they’ll “see [each other] around.”
On the other hand, Little Miss Sunshine’s ending keeps us grinning from the high of seeing the family coming together at last in a wild, exuberant dance. The image of Sheryl twirling, Richard letting loose, Dwayne and Frank looking goofy as hell, is positioned as triumphal. The film wants us to see them all up onstage with Olive, throwing off decorum and standing in solidarity with their weird little girl, and think: good. It’s because they’re a family, Little Miss Sunshine says, that they’re able to stand strong together by the film’s conclusion and come to terms with all of their failures in healthy ways. It’s a neat ending, one that fully earns Little Miss Sunshine its status as a “feel-good film” — but also, perhaps, an unsatisfyingly glib one.
The Hoover family is perceived as abnormal, weirdo, wacky, merely “pretend[ing] to be normal”’ as Richard says in one iconic line. Fuck the normies, fuck the feds, this movie often appears to say. Fuck the bureaucracy of filling out the proper paperwork for moving grandpa’s body across state lines; fuck the gatekeepers trying to keep Olive from registering for the Little Miss Sunshine pageant; fuck the police officer who pulled them over for insane driving. In fact, both movies, as “Tumblr movies,” have acquired a certain pedigree for being seemingly pro-freak, pro-abnormality. But Little Miss Sunshine’s conclusion doubles down, rather than challenges, the hegemony of the family unit — albeit a family unit that features stepdads, half-siblings, and a stray gay uncle. “At least we’re a family,” the Hoovers conclude, but the movie fails to ask: should they be?
Dwayne, unlike Olive, is old enough to bear witness to his parents’ dysfunction. Even as Frank tries to distract Dwayne with the TV in their motel room, Dwayne turns off the TV, listens to Richard and Sheryl screaming at each other through the wall, and smiles. Dwayne’s cry mid-meltown — “I fucking hate you people” — rings as one of the most raw and honest lines of the entire film, even as his family, and we the audience, are lead to disregard it as a moment of hyperbolic teen angst (“I apologize for the things I said,” he says shortly afterward. “I was upset. I didn’t really mean them.”) But there may be a glimmer of liberatory potential in the idea that Dwayne actually doesn’t have to be part of their family — that what constitutes a “family” can be the product of consensus and care, rather than a blood-contract. Dwayne begs Sheryl to leave him there, at the side of the road, possibly in the company of Frank, and Sheryl immediately shuts him down — “No, we are not doing that.” So Dwayne gets hauled out to the beauty pageant, to the final tableau of familial reconciliation. This film is hell-bent on enshrining and preserving the family’s centrality. The traps are set; no one is getting out. “For better or worse,” they’re family: no one is getting a divorce (yet), no one is escaping through work or a college scholarship (yet), Olive is going to have to live with these people for at least another decade. Deep down, familia omnia vincit is a pretty conservative message. The weirdo families at the beauty pageant are played off against the Hoovers — viewers are led to think, I guess they’re not as bad as those people.
In keeping up the heterotopic pretense until the credits roll, Faris and Dayton spare us from witnessing the inevitable regression following the trip, and the film’s lighthearted tone stays the course. But in actuality, the Hoovers are probably not freer, happier, or better off than Tenoch and Julio. When they return, either they will calcify in their preordained roles and treat the liberation of their journey as a one-off blip — as Tenoch and Julio do — or their long-suffering family unit will fracture for good. Cuarón provides a realist take on how this tragic ending plays out with a desaturated palette; joyless, stunted dialogue; and the now-grown boys’ uptight suits. Either way, rupture is inbound.
Foucault’s heterotopia is unstable. It isn’t a space of secure dwelling. Your presence in a heterotopia must eventually end: you leave the ship when the boat docks, you get discharged from the psychiatric hospital, the museum boots you out at closing time. The characters inside these films get out of the car, eventually. They must say goodbye to the road trip, that capsule of transient experimentation, that glimpse into liberation, that joyful domain of what-could-be — just as we, the viewers, leave the cinema — or, in our case, stand up, stretch our legs, brushing off any stray bits of popcorn, close the tab, and emerge back out into the night.