One code and convention of the Road Movie is the use of costume. All films use costume symbolically (to quickly signify character and show character contrast and change) But the road movie uses costume in a road movie way! Snakeskin pays homage to the road movie and it uses the Western costume to relate to famous road movies like "Wild at Heart" and "Thelma and Louise". The protagonist has cowboy boots. The hitchhiker has snakeskin boots and the protagonist later wears a snakeskin jacket ( a homage to "Wild at Heart"). In Easy Rider one of the rebellious main characters dresses like a cowboy with a Western hat, a tooth necklace and so on while Louise in "Thelma and Louise" exchanges her watch and earrings for a cowboy hat near the end of the film. All these characters are rebelling against city life and a conformist society. All of them are seeking a new life on the road, a new freedom. The wild west symbolises America's past and their original establishment of the country as a place where people immigrated to be free and could move ever further west to discover a new frontier, a new life. "Go west young man" used to be the advice given to youths who needed to strike out and make their fortune. The Western costume used in "modern" road movies links them to the iconic wild west and the quest for a new frontier, away from fences and cities.