Divided Highways Documentary Recounts Epic Story Of 40 Years Of Road Construction
“Divided Highways” airs Wednesday at 8 p.m. on Spokane’s KSPS-Channel 7 and other PBS stations.
Here, like most everywhere else, it cuts through hills, trees and communities with the terrible majesty of modern achievement - a multilane ribbon of smoothness to the horizon, its seamlessness bursting with the possibility of a thousand destinations.
We do one thing above all else in this nation: We go. It is integral to who we are - perpetually on the move, going elsewhere, choosing new paths, finding new places. “It is something strictly American,” Gertrude Stein wrote, “to conceive a space that is filled with moving.”
In our midst today sits the ultimate physical expression of American motion - the Interstate Highway System, arguably humanity’s mightiest public works project and an endeavor that changed life in uncounted ways. Yet rarely do its users consider the fundamental changes it wrought.
“Divided Highways,” a jaunty but substantive documentary that premieres at 8 p.m. Wednesday on PBS, does - with style. It recounts the epic and long overdue story of four decades of construction, 43,000 miles of interstate highways and the nation it all linked - from the first muddy roads to today’s sleek monuments of mobility and motion.
With an astonishing mass of archival footage and interviews with Mr. Rogers to Julia Child to John Kay of Steppenwolf, filmmakers Lawrence R. Hott and Tom Lewis have compiled a tale of modern myth - incredible achievement tinged with sobriety at what was overrun, made obsolete or simply left behind.
“We thought that it was going to be the United States as usual, except we were going to have these neat roads,” philosopher Lisa Newton says. But of course that was not the case.
Today we live in a landscape of endless straightaways, rest stops and cloverleaf interchanges. It is a place where, as the documentary demonstrates quite visually, teenagers play pickup basketball on courts amid the pylons of elevated highways, entire “edge cities” have sprung up to meet roads - and, sadly, towns have decayed into nonexistence simply because big freeways passed them by.
“Divided Highways” succeeds because it tackles these oft-overlooked issues, but also because it packages them in the context of a quirky, attitude-filled yarn.
Old Keystone Kops-style silent-movie footage illustrates the pitfalls of early muddy roads. Film of a beauty queen christened “Miss Black Top” underscores the obsession Americans have had with their roads. And the film crackles with biting commentary from people like humorist Dave Barry, remembering his rides on the interstates as a boy.
“We’d pass the Grand Canyon at 50 mph,” says Barry, his image superimposed over cars speeding along an interstate. “My father would say, ‘It’s over there.”’
Cute, but it also illustrates a larger issue - that Americans wanted to get places and get there fast, a 20th-century Manifest Destiny. The point is that, from its inception as a land of immigrants who left their homes to find new lives, the United States has been defined by people wanting to go elsewhere faster. And the interstates, traffic snarls aside, were designed to satisfy that motion jones.
Highway systems are an outgrowth of progressivism, the idea that there exist correct answers to national problems. But the interstate builders failed to take into account one pitfall: that the right answers to transportation problems might be the wrong answers for communities.
“Divided Highways” handles this, too, depicting places and people - most prominently farmers and minorities - that were decimated, bisected and flattened by the eminent domain-powered highway juggernaut.
Above all, the documentary keeps returning to dramatic images of highways: places like this stretch of I-79 northwest of Pittsburgh, where cars do 80, even 85 in a 65-mph zone, rushing past the city and each other toward other places - forever on the move, traversing their land in the automobiles that, for many Americans, have become a virtual birthright.
“Today we move mountains out of the way instead of going around them,” the baritone narrator of an old newsreel says confidently. But in “Divided Highways,” it becomes a springboard for a series of questions: Should the mountains have been moved? Or would going around them have been a better alternative?
No one, of course, can say for sure. But posing these crucial questions in such a lively and accessible way makes “Divided Highways” the kind of good, relevant TV that shouldn’t be missed - and the kind to which only public television can really do justice.
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