Origin Work

Five Easy Pieces

The Fugitive Self at the Family Table

Ordered stops 10 Across 5 mediums

The traced route

10 stops · ordered to follow

Film

3 stops

Australia · Film

Wake in Fright

Ted Kotcheff · 1971

A schoolteacher bound for a coastal holiday is marooned in an outback mining town and dissolves into its rituals of beer, kangaroo blood, and male violence. Like Bobby Dupea's oil rigs, the Yabba is both refuge and prison for a man who has staked his identity on escaping the lower depths he secretly suspects he belongs to.

Indonesia · Film

The Photograph

Nan Achnas · 2007

A dying Chinese-Indonesian portrait photographer takes in a young prostitute, and the two negotiate inheritances neither asked for: his exiled lineage, her unspeakable past. The film locates Rafelson's silences between class registers in the still chemistry of darkroom and altar, where ancestry must be developed slowly or not at all.

Ethiopia · Film

Tölvubrellur (The Homecoming)

Yared Zeleke · 2015

In Lamb, a boy is sent to live with rural relatives after his mother's death and clings to a ewe his uncle intends to slaughter for a feast. The work mirrors the Dupea family table as a place where survival arithmetic and sentimental attachment cannot coexist, and where leaving home becomes the only inheritance available.

Television

2 stops

Sweden · Television

Scenes from a Marriage

Ingmar Bergman · 1973

A bourgeois couple's slow-motion separation exposes the rented vocabulary they have used to perform adulthood, marriage, and class fluency. Like Bobby's diner-counter monologue, every conversation is a negotiation over which self gets to speak, and which gets bricked into the wall.

Palestine · Television

Fauda

Lior Raz · 2015

An undercover unit's operatives slip between Hebrew and Arabic, suburban kitchens and refugee streets, until the cost of inhabiting two registers becomes the inability to inhabit either. The series shares Rafelson's interest in the man who passes too well to come home and not well enough to disappear.

Literature

2 stops

Hungary · Literature

The Door

Magda Szabó · 1987

A writer cultivates a cryptic friendship with her peasant housekeeper Emerence, whose locked door conceals a sovereign refusal of the educated world's terms. The novel sits in Bobby Dupea's territory of class trespass, where intimacy across station is paid for in betrayals neither party can name in advance.

Czechoslovakia · Literature

The Cowards

Josef Škvorecký · 1958

A jazz-besotted provincial youth drifts through the last week of the war as ideologies and elders demand he commit to a self he has not yet earned. Like Bobby's piano played to a cattle truck, music is the only honest dialect available to a young man caught between his father's house and the highway.

Music

2 stops

Northern Ireland · Music

Astral Weeks

Van Morrison · 1968

Belfast street names and Cyprus Avenue addresses are summoned in a stream that cannot decide whether it is returning home or fleeing it. The album's improvised seance maps the same emotional terrain as Bobby's lakeside confession to his mute father: a son speaking to a place that no longer answers in his voice.

Somalia · Music

Cuneiform

Dur-Dur Band · 1987

Mogadishu funk grafts American soul horns onto Banadiri rhythms, producing a hybrid that belongs nowhere except the brief window of its own making. The recordings carry the Five Easy Pieces dilemma at national scale: a generation fluent in two registers and at home in neither, soon to be exiled from both.

Anime

1 stop

Japan · Anime

Tatami Galaxy

Masaaki Yuasa · 2010

Wait — replace with: a college student relives his undergraduate years across parallel club affiliations, each promising the rose-colored self he failed to become in the others. The series shares Rafelson's diagnosis that the trouble is not the path chosen but the suspicion that any other life would have produced the same fugitive at the same family table.