gearhead existentialism

Two-Lane Blacktop: (1971. dir: Monte Hellman) Part of that extraordinary canon of existential masterpieces (including Vanishing Point, the Parallax View, the Passenger, High Plains Drifter, and Hellman's own the Shooting, among others) appearing in about a ten-year period rounding out the sixties and starting up the seventies, Two-Lane Blacktop is poetry, and that's no exaggeration. "That Plymouth had a hemi with a torque flight," the Driver says to explain why he was able to pull in front during a race once he hit fourth gear. It's all like that, like listening to poetry in another language, one you know just well enough to catch a few words, an image or two. James Taylor is The Driver, Dennis Wilson The Mechanic. The Mechanic performs magical rituals on the car: at one point he synchronizes the ignition timing using a sort of strobe-wand or timing light. He's readjusting the distributor, apparently, so the spark plugs fire at just the right instant. I watch him do it, then my boyfriend says, "pause it," and explains to me what I'd just seen, and it's STILL Greek to me, or, rather, magical, in the sense that it seemed both an important and a preternatural action.

Casting rock stars in your movie was not unusual by the turn of the seventies, but casting in lead roles so far against type was. They're used to being looked at, lusted after and photographed, rock stars, but they don't have actorly habits that give them a falseness before the camera. There's something about the awkwardness of using non-actors that emphasizes the existential angst of the piece. On the other hand, they don't have actorly chops to get them through the rough spots, so it's a general wash, except that Warren Oates is there to pick up the pace and hit the right marks. Nobody in the world played the creepy guy with more endearing vulnerability than Warren Oates did, and this one is some kind of acme, some kind of Everest he's topped.



Vanishing Point: (1971. dir: Richard C. Sarafian)

**********
"The rebel himself wants to be 'all' ... or 'nothing'; in other words, to be completely destroyed by the force that dominates him. As a last resort, he is willing to accept the final defeat, which is death, rather than be deprived of the personal sacrament that he would call, for example, freedom." Camus, the Rebel
**********

The vanishing point is that place on the horizon where all roads converge into the sky. It's where everything disappears from view, where being turns into nothingness. You reach it, you dissipate into the universe.

Vanishing Point is the story of Kowalski (just Kowalski; no first name, following halfway in the tradition of the Man With No Name, played to perfection by Barry Newman): ex-soldier, ex-racer, ex-cop, and speedfreak, in more than one sense of the word. He works delivering souped-up muscle-cars back and forth across the country. His current task: to drive a white 1970 Dodge Challenger halfway across the country over a weekend. He insists on the assignment (his employer begs him to take some time, get some sleep first), then insists he will complete it in less than half the alotted time. Although from the outside the decision seems random and unmotivated, Kowalski makes it clear that, internally, he has no choice. "I gotta be in Frisco three o'clock tomorrow afternoon," he tells his dealer, who says he must be joking, to which Kowalski replies, "I wish to God I was." We never get a clearer reason, and that's one indication of the greatness of this film.

Super Soul (played with grace and sphinxlike intelligence by Cleavon Little) is the DJ of a tiny but ultrahip radio station in an armpit backwater burg somewhere in Nevada. He is handsome, dark-skinned, smooth-voiced, and, in the ancient tradition of prophets the world over, blind. Tapping illicitly onto police wavelengths, he hears about the ongoing interstate pursuit of the Challenger and becomes obsessed with it, sensing both a deeper importance in Kowalski's gesture of rebellion and perhaps an intertwining of their own personal destinies as well. Throughout the film, he speaks to Kowalski across the airwaves and somehow hears his responses.

Everyone knows this film, whether they know it or not. (Tarantino's Death Proof is a sort of ode to it, or the second half is.) Believe it or not, it was remade in 1997 with our beloved Viggo in the lead, and with all that makes it great and subtle stripped clean away. In this one, Kowalski's enigmatic gesture of defiance becomes a race across country to join his wife in a life-threatening childbirth: that catch-all, feel-good, old family-values reason. Scapegoated by a wicked FBI agent out to make a name for himself, "Jimmy" Kowalski becomes a hero for the Ted Nugent/Ruby Ridge crowd when his progress is reported by an anti-government, don't-tread-on-me, taxation-is-thievery DJ in a baseball cap played by the extraordinarily whitebread Jason Priestley. Believe me, not even Viggo or a cameo by John Doe can make this one interesting.

The original, though, is a true American classic. Newman's smile just before he makes that final decision is one of the real Mona Lisa moments in film-making history: why does he smile? what is he thinking? Somewhere on the cutting-room floor there lies a telling scene: Kowalski has picked up a beautiful hitch-hiker (Charlotte Rampling). She gets him high (the only time in the film he accepts any drug other than speed), tells him she's been waiting for him forever then disappears into the night. In commentary and interviews with actor and director, it seems accepted that this encounter was to be a metaphor for approaching death. Does that clarify the smile? What are we to make of the fact that it was excised, then?

In a truly-lived existentialism, one creates one's own rules, one's own code, seeking honour and freedom from within, completely independent of the predominant (and often crippling) paradigm. In America, we tend reflexively to picture freedom as a long, solitary drive in a fast car along a desert highway. These two movies can be watched as a visual essay about the pursuit of existential freedom in that particular moment when the sixties had just become the seventies, hippie optimism was hardening into a more cynical stoicism, and the rebel was really and truly without a cause, without allies, without hope, more so than ever before in cinematic history. Pending films like The Parallax View and Chinatown, both from 1974, would take these themes and colours and darken them further, almost into hellishness.