Hollywood: Give bicycles a shot - 25 June, 2006. By Murray Carpenter
Belfast, Maine — Some joker once said that there are really just two types of stories: a person takes a journey, and a stranger comes to town. There’s a lot of truth to it. But why, in modern movies, do they never do either on a bicycle?

In the movies, it’s OK to ride into town in a beat-up Ford pickup, in a Corvette or on a Harley. It’s fine to hit the road “Thelma and Louise” style in a big old convertible or to follow your passions south of the border on a palomino. It’s even acceptable to fly on Air Force One, a corporate jet, or a bush plane in Alaska or Africa. But not a bike.

You can do your business on a boat, the lone sailor against the seas or the swashbuckling pirate coming to bust up the harbor. Taxis are fine, especially for creepy films like “Taxi Driver” and “Collateral.”

But a bicycle? No. The hero never rides into town on a bike. Not on a ratty old mountain bike with a bedroll in a backpack, nor a natty touring bike with panniers fore and aft. Bikes, no doubt, need better agents.

Perhaps I overstate the case, for there have been a few exceptions. We all remember “Breaking Away,” but that was about racing, not transportation. There was the Kevin Bacon movie “Quicksilver,” but that was about bike messengers, a quirky subculture. And who could forget the romantic scene in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” with Paul Newman riding Katharine Ross on his handlebars to the tune of “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head”? But I suspect that movie sold more horses than bikes by a long shot.

Bikes are sometimes used in BBC productions as props to identify a comical, bumbling sort. And a bike played a prominent role in “Il Postino,” but I suspect few people left the theater dreaming of mounting up and pedaling out for the territories.

Sadly, the best-known cinematic image of a bicycle is from “The Wizard of Oz.” Remember Dorothy’s mean old neighbor flying her bike in a cyclone? How many bikes do you think that movie sold?

The trend extends beyond movies, to most American fiction. I’ve tried for years to sell a short story about a guy who rolls into a mountain town one quiet evening during mud season. A guy whose past is full of dark secrets, who knew the town 20 years earlier, before it, and he, had earned the ugly scars of hard living. A man, don’t you know, on a bike. I’ve never sold it. (I should mention here that I’ve never sold any fiction, so I can’t blame this on the bike alone, but it’s comforting to think it’s a factor.)

There may be hope yet. Ron McClarty’s wonderful novel The Memory of Running is wrapped around a fine bike journey, and a movie is in the works.

But most bike riding — most functional bike riding — in the movies features children too young to have their driver’s licenses. Think “E.T.” Once folks are grown up, it seems, we are supposed to propel ourselves by burning petroleum.

In the movies and in real life, bikes simply play a negligible role in the modern American transportation system. It’s a bit tragic. Because if we are going to crawl out of the hole we’ve dug ourselves into now that so many of us are driving several hours a day — double-glazing the planet while increasing our isolation, clogging our idle arteries and paving over the countryside — bikes will have to play a role.

Bikes are great ways to roll from here to there while breathing fresh air, getting exercise and greeting neighbors. They are whisper quiet, relatively cheap and emit no greenhouse gasses.

Ah, but that’s boring, isn’t it? Give me Angelina Jolie in a helicopter, you say, or Tom Cruise in a muscle car.

Me, I’m waiting for the heroine of the next movie to come riding over the hill in the twilight on a bicycle, just in time to save the whole damn town.

Murray Carpenter is a Maine-based writer and editor. He wrote this column for The Providence Journal in Rhode Island and Scripps Howard News Service.