Gas Food Lodging is a 1992 film directed by Allison Anders.
It centers around a single mom and two daughters who live in a trailer in a dusty nowhere New Mexico town. Nora (Brooke Adams (Actress)) is the mom, a truck stop waitress; her husband and the father to her daughters ran off long ago. Shade (Fairuza Balk) is the younger daughter. She's quiet and studious and speaks Spanish well enough to watch Mexican movies at the local theater, where she strikes up an acquaintance with the projectionist, a boy named Javier (Jacob Vargas). Trudi, the older sister (Ione Skye) is her polar opposite, a hellraiser who skips school and sleeps with every guy in town.
All three women go through changes over the course of the movie. Nora has an encounter with her old lover Raymond, who happens to be a married man, then starts dating the exotically named Hamlet Humphrey. Shade develops a crush on her friend Darius, while trying to match her mother up with a man. After Trudi is cruelly dumped by her latest boyfriend, she falls for Dank, a young English rockhound who is looking for rocks in local mines.
James Brolin plays John, the Chekhov's Gunman.
Tropes:
- Chekhov's Gunman: John, the guy with the cowboy hat who gives Shade a dollar when she's short at the laundromat. He turns out to be her and Trudi's father.
- Creator Cameo: J. Mascis of Dinosaur Jr., who wrote much of the soundtrack, appears briefly as Cecil.
- Disappeared Dad: A plot point, as Shade hopes to hunt down her father, missing since she was a small child.
- Dramatic Irony: Shade arranges a surprise date for her mom with a cool guy that Shade met outside a bar...namely Raymond, the married man that Nora had a long-term affair with. The two of them make polite but knowingly sarcastic small talk during dinner, rather than spoil things for a hopeful Shade.
- Girlish Pigtails: For much of the early part of the film Shade is wearing her hair in girlish pigtails. This is both to mark her as distinct from her sexually adventurous sister, and to set up a Letting Her Hair Down rite of passage when she stops wearing the pigtails as she starts pursuing boys.
- Good Girls Avoid Abortion: Nora simply assumes that they will get Trudi an abortion but Trudi angrily refuses. Instead she travels to Texas to have her baby and give it up for adoption.
- Incompatible Orientation: It's not definitively stated, but strongly implied, that Darius recoiled from Shade's attempt to seduce him because he is gay.
- The Matchmaker: Shade's innocent hope of fixing her mom up with a man goes awry when she arranges a date with the man who, unbeknownst to her, is her mom's old lover.
- Meet Cute: Nora meets her new boyfriend Hamlet when Hamlet, who runs his own satellite business, wakes her up by noisily installing a satellite dish for the neighboring trailer at 5 a.m.
- Narrator: Sometimes Shade is heard in voiceover telling her story, although her voiceover does not appear for parts of the movie she doesn't know about, like her mom's secret affair with Raymond.
- Off-into-the-Distance Ending: Ends with Shade walking away from the camera back into town, as in voiceover she thinks about eventually telling Trudi the truth about Dank.
- Promiscuity After Rape: Trudi was gang-raped at some time in the past, and as she says herself, after that she became extremely promiscuous.
- Rape as Backstory: Trudi's anti-social behavior and her extreme promiscuity are revealed to be because, at some point in the backstory, she was gang-raped. She tells her boyfriend Dank that she never says "no" to men because she thinks men will just take what they want anyway.
- Really Gets Around: Trudi admits to Dank that "I mess around with guys a lot. I even make the first move." This is immediately explained when she tells him about her trauma after being gang-raped.
- Screaming Birth: Trudi delivers her baby with the standard screaming childbirth, and with her mom and sister and her mom's new boyfriend there for support.
- Small Town Boredom: Trudi tells Shade that she's not coming home from Dallas because "Laramie is a shithole. There's nothing there." Of course she immediately follows this up with "Too many bad memories," namely, her gang-rape.
- Stock Desert Interstate: The setting is Laramie, NM, a dusty little town by the highway with a truck stop and a trailer park.
