How do you imagine Evie’s time on the road and in California at the end of World Gone Mad going?
Aw hey Raegan! Fun question…thank you for asking!
I see Evie’s time on the road as a real Hunter S. Thompson style savage journey to the heart of her own self; her faith and how she conceives of America and her place in it. She submits to the ride because after losing (or thinking she’s lost) her whole grand plan for what her future was supposed to look like, it’s sort of nice to just follow a nice, straight, previously mapped out path down Route 66. Eves would definitely roll her eyes at the kitschy tourist attractions, but she stops to see them anyway, because she’s got a deal with God that Sodapop and Steve won’t die and she’ll be damned if she doesn’t have some half-decent stories to tell ‘em someday about her own wild, fuck-off adventure. This trip has everything…ego death, weird statues, the best burritos…and then, a lot of long, quiet periods where Evie’s in her element, speeding down the highway alone…and she lets herself drop all the pretenses and pray and CRY and really think about what she wants, and how she’s willing to contend with not getting it.
I’ve been talking with Kay about the strange, spiritual landscape of the American West a ton lately and how that land holds a living history of the violent rise and fall of entire indigenous and religious nations; shit is WEIRD out there because you can almost sense this echo of everything that came before; a sense of awe at the bigness outside of oneself paired with a sense of warning and solemn remembrance that the United States is a bloody, unfair place that makes outsiders out of people who cultivated it. I’d like to think that this hits Evie the same way it did me, somewhere around New Mexico, and it gives her a little peace with relation to Steve and Soda getting snapped up by the Vietnam War machine — not in acceptance, ‘cause if anything, she’s angrier at the system, but maybe it provides a bit of context for her own hurt and allows her to forgive Steve for his part. I love the song City of Dreams by Talking Heads for Eves in this leg of the journey. The American Dream might be a bitter joke, and she isn’t sure about the whole counterculture, but I do think Evie centers herself within it all and makes her own weird peace with it; finally internalizing that nobody was ever out to get her, personally.
Once she gets to California, I imagine the whole thing turning into a 60’s beach movie vibe. Route 66 dumps out in Santa Monica, which was a 30’s - 50’s hub for bodybuilding…but by the late 60’s, the whole Muscle Beach culture had migrated down to The Pen in Venice, which was conveniently located two miles away. So I think Evie finds her way down there and has an absolute blast living like a beach bum out of her car, ingratiating herself with the dudes who lift and using them to find odd mechanic jobs to support herself and otherwise pumping iron and having FUN with it, because she’s made a sort of peace with all the pain inside. I can see Evie picking up surfing. Going to so many gay bars and experimenting without shame for the first time. Accepting the hippies, finally, because she’s letting go of this old Dally-coded idea that getting all tough could ever insulate her from that shit that hurts the most. Evie leaves when she’s got her fill and had her fun…not out of any resentful obligation, but because she genuinely misses home and doesn’t feel so wrong to be the only one going back there, anymore, once she squares up to the truth inside her own heart and lets herself feel it all without remorse.
