Along America’s highways you come across a country no longer visible in New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco. Everyday life here has little to do with the concerns of those in big cities, where people drink coffee with oat milk, a bouncer reminds you to behave appropriately when entering a club and men with beards introduce themselves with their pronouns at parties for fear of being addressed incorrectly. This other America is symbolised by the motel, which is a quintessential US institution. The word motel is a portmanteau of “motor” and “hotel”, which also describes its purpose. The long, one- or two-storey buildings offer car travellers a rather low-threshold entry to somewhere to stay overnight before moving on – a bed with a parking space in front of it.

In this sense, motels are the epitome of freedom and adventure. You can’t avoid them on a roadtrip. You might drive hundreds of miles on straight roads with the radio turned up loud but as night and tiredness set in you might be drawn in by the promise of bright signs reading “Melody Ranch Motel”, “Death Valley Inn” or “Motel 6”.

Only the lit-up words “No vacancy” indicate that you should drive on. They come from the time before the internet. The fact that there are no rooms available is not a big deal, as there will be other motels. People haven’t historically chosen a motel for its special location, much less its interior design: reservations are unnecessary. A motel is on the way. You take what comes or move on to the next one.

Places of mischief and the uncanny
Many motels still in business in the US have seen better days. It’s precisely this shabby and worn-out look that makes them so charmingly anachronistic today. In luxury hotels, everything seems untouched, sterile and clean, right down to the ribbon around the toilet lid. When you enter a motel room, however, you can almost smell the stories that have taken place within the four walls.

There might be a table and chair, two plastic coat hangers, a large bed with a thick mattress that can – for better or worse – also feel alive. There’s a fitted carpet. A small, fenced-in pool in front of the window, deserted in tem­peratures of 40c. A few streets away, you’re likely to find a gun shop. There is coughing all night through the thin walls. On one side, there is the mysterious sound of furniture being moved for some unknowable but nonetheless intriguing purpose.

The guests who visit from their mobile homes stuff the pockets of their xxl trousers with packaged biscuits at breakfast and sip filter coffee from paper cups in silence. The people at the reception of the often family-run motels are impossibly friendly in that inimitably American way. When you leave, someone named Bill or Susan always shakes your hand and wishes you a safe onward journey with apparent sincerity.

Motels are a reminder of the past perhaps because they remind us of so many American films and novels, whose atmosphere they have shaped, and which have in turn been shaped by them. Maybe that is why we romanticise them. They are part of pop culture, usually places of doom and the uncanny, like the Bates Motel in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, where Janet Leigh takes her carefree shower. In the Coen brothers’ Fargo and in David Lynch’s Lost Highway, the motel serves as a hideout for criminals and secret lovers. Ridley Scott lets friends Thelma and Louise stay at the Oklahoma City Motel, where the former is seduced and robbed by a handsome cowboy.

You wouldn’t be surprised, nor disappointed, to see the travelling woman in the red dress from Edward Hopper’s painting Western Motel behind a window. She sits on a sofa, her suitcases ready, her car waiting in front of the window in the bright sun. Motels attract lonely people who are trying to escape from themselves.

Miranda July’s daring love suite
According to The New York Times, there were more than 61,000 motels in the US in 1964. They became popular after the construction of the highway network in the 1950s and 1960s. Interstate highways have since crossed parts of the entire country from north to south and west to east. Today, there are said to be about 16,000 motels left. But now, in a way that few might have predicted, motels are having a moment, the newspaper claims. Younger people are discovering motel culture and its aesthetics. Not just on their travels: some are even buying run-down motels and renovating them. On Instagram, motel fans admire the refreshed design of the originally modest inns. This is also being shown in television series such as Motel Makeover and Motel Rescue.

US filmmaker, artist, and writer Miranda July celebrates the motel in the same way in her new novel On All Fours. The first-person narrator, an artist, invests $20,000 of prize money to renovate a cheap motel room in a Los Angeles suburb where she is stranded on her roadtrip. She transforms it into a suite with fragrant soaps, fluffy designer towels and velvet armchairs in order to experience a wild affair within it.

The bourgeois bohemians might move into the motel and paint over its cloudy walls. They might add a new layer to what came before them, while also perhaps preserving it. In the old motels, however, life goes on just as it ever did. You close the door to your room, return the key at first light and drive off early in the morning with the quiet feeling of having gotten away.

This article was first published in the ‘Neue Zürcher Zeitung’. Translated by Monocle and edited for clarity and length.