Mention air conditioning, color TV, and a heated pool to anyone over 50, and they're likely to say “motel."
“Color TV” is no longer a luxury item to advertise, but some older, retro-type motels still keep it on their signs for nostalgic appeal, as do the “time capsule” motels that’ve never been updated out of neglect. As long as the “no” before “vacancy” on the sign’s not illuminated, such signs have long been an invitation to take a swim, recline on the bed with a drink in hand, and turn on the TV.
What better way to wind down after a 10-hour stretch on the two-lane blacktop? Maybe order a pizza too, because the snack machine in the lobby’s as close to room service as it gets in these no-frills places. Polish off a six-pack in the room. Just follow the direction that big neon arrow atop the main sign’s pointing to and everything's taken care of.
Normal people might lounge in bed with a beer, but that doesn't interest movie directors much because the audience doesn't go to the movies to watch normal people. The audience wants danger, bad-intentioned rogues, and three inches of whiskey in the glass. The motel—along with the car, the bar and the diner—plays an outsized role in American cinema. In the drug-soaked 1999 film, Jesus’ Son, the camera catches a motel, a car, and a bar all within one minute. Drugs and motels go together in movies. Just as movie directors take the diner, which most Americans see as a place of familiarity and comfort, and substitute the picaresque for the quotidian, they also take a place people see as a convenient overnight refuge and use it as a setting for illicit assignations, hideouts, drug abuse, and moral decay.
The motel, unlike respectable hotels, is for those on the edges of society. Their proprietors aren’t too picky about their guests, and the price is right.
Motel signs are pure Americana. They're often hand-crafted pieces of roadside architecture that grab the eye with neon lights and bold colors. Compare a Motel 8 sign with an old motel sign that was custom-made with immense care and pride, often with themed illustrations. It's clear why the camera loves the latter. Today's commercial signage, dull and unimaginative across the board, leaves directors with so much less scenery to work with.
Alfred Hitchcock stripped away all the familiar, welcoming messages from the peeling Bates Motel sign in Psycho (1960). All it says is “Bates Motel.” Prior to that horror movie, movie motels were generally neutral, or even wholesome spaces. They represented the optimism and freedom of the post-WWII American highway era, when anyone could get in their car and go anywhere.
Terror lurked at the Bates Motel, but directors usually use motels as venues for less extreme forms of misbehavior than shower murders. At a hotel, there's a pristine look that can fool guests into thinking they're the first one ever to stay there. Not so at a motel, where stories from past guests are almost written on the walls. In the mind of a film director, those stories are often seedy, surreal, or threatening. The anonymity and transient nature of the motel signals to the audience the strong possibility of unpredictable and unnerving events.
Motels are where husbands who suddenly leave their wife and home go to in the movies. When this happens to women in movies, they go and stay with their mothers—never at motels. In Leaving Las Vegas (1995), Ben Sanderson (Nicolas Cage), a suicidal alcoholic, abandons his family life entirely and moves into a Las Vegas motel. In cinematic terms, the motel is often symbolic of personal collapse. When Sanderson takes a desert road trip with his girlfriend, Sera (Elisabeth Shue), he gets them kicked out of another motel for drunken behavior. Motels will tolerate bad behavior, so the end is near when that happens.
David Lynch loved making his motels surreal, and threatening. In Wild At Heart (1990), Sailor (Nicolas Cage) and Lula (Laura Dern) drift across an unwholesome American landscape, staying in motels full of kitschy Americana that reek of danger and sex at the intersection of romance and nightmare. In one of those dank motels, a porn movie's being shot in one of the rooms. The men they drink with in the courtyard all radiate a sense of weird menace, especially Bobby Peru (Willem Dafoe), a greasy-haired psycho with teeth rotted almost to the gums.
The narrative range of the motel is broad. In The Last Picture Show (1971), that's where, in Anarene, Texas, Jacy Farrow loses her virginity. In No Country for Old Men (2007), Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), in flight mode, goes from motel to motel before cartel members finally catch up and kill him.
Jim Jarmusch favors narratives of alienation and disconnectedness, so motels, havens for uprooted drifters, work for him as a story-telling device. In Stranger Than Paradise (1984), he uses the motel to signal the futility of his three characters’ pursuit of something better. Willie, Eddie and Eva move from place to place, finally deciding on Florida as the destination that’ll make them happy. But they don't find any white beaches with fine-textured sand, or palm trees swaying in a warm breeze. Instead, the wandering trio end up, once again, in a rundown motel in a nondescript location where their dreams fizzle out.
Years ago, I had to stay at a motel for a couple of weeks. The Kon Tiki Inn wasn't too shabby—more like it had needed a makeover for about 50 years. I spent my evenings drinking beer while watching TV. One morning the maid—a woman in her 60s—came in. Embarrassed about the wastebaskets overflowing with empty beer cans, I told her I'd had a party the night before. But she wasn't buying it. She gave me a look, and said, “Honey, this is a motel.” I'll never forget it. Her perfect, knowing reply made me feel as if we were playing out a movie scene.
There's no need to keep up appearances at the motel.