Essay Question/Borat

So this one's less about a movie as about movies. Lukey and I were coming back from the 'Boo, both pretty tired. He had a pretty sweet idea for a short-story/film about a toll booth worker, and I was thinking about that and other things, so I threw this at him: "Essay question: Discuss whether the road trip is an echo of the classic heroic quest, or whether both are echoes of something deeper".
We batted it around for an hour or two - I won't try and put words in Luke's mouth, but in the end, my feeling was that there are two types of heroic quest stories - the type that end at the end of the quest, and the type that end with the return home. Road trips echo the 2nd type, 99% of the time. I'm sure a lot of it is reading the here and now into it, but that second type I think is a metaphor for growing up - we're not sure exactly how to transcend into adulthood, so we create these stories where the young hero leaves his normal world and gets to encounter exotic dangers; strengthened and matured by her trials, she returns home and is now an adult, capable of ruling over/guarding the original home. Road trips echo this to a certain extent, in that whatever worries at home are left behind and traded in for strange new adventures - however, you are not guaranteed to return from a road trip as a strong and capable adult/ruler.
Fulfilling my contractual obligation to mention a movie, I finally saw Borat recently. It definitely falls into the quest/return motif; I thought it was a nice, sentimental take on that motif. Had some funny bits too. I wasn't really shocked by anything - I don't know if that's a result of hearing about the movie for so long before I saw it, or just my natural unflappability (I'd like to think it's that second option).