Two-Lane Blacktop (1971)
Or director Monte Hellman attempts to elevate the cross-country film to the level of existential art. Two-Lane Blacktop is a 1970s race picture paced like an Antonioni film: every scene drawn out to the point of surreality, every line of dialogue punctuated with pregnant longing, doubt, and despair. Two-Lane Blacktop is more about movies than Antonioni’s work, it would certainly appear to be about Easy Rider, it’s about drinking Coca-Cola out of a glass bottle outside in the most photographically macho way imaginable, it’s about the myths of the old west and self-discovery (or lack thereof). The picture is also about ennui and the erosion of confidence in your native country. Hellman skirts absurdity, but ultimately gets away with stuffing all that into his race picture because he doesn’t ever play the part of outraged schoolmarm. Two-Lane Blacktop has a more original, less judgmental, blitzed humane one thing after another sense of humor about it. It wouldn’t surprise me if Terrence Malick and David Gordon Green were admirers.
The picture, because it is so casual, is really the movie Easy Rider tried so hard to be: a document of fade, of pent up rootlessness channeled into a distracting obsession. Easy Rider, despite moments (particularly with Jack Nicholson), was never the picture so many made it out to be at the time; it’s too full of itself, too pandering and sloppy. Two-Lane Blacktop is dryer, less accommodating, more elusive and probably just as stupid, but you won’t care: it’s a have your cake and eat it too picture: a question and reaffirmation of the American myth in equal measures. The film is, unquestionably, more for the guys; a man’s idea of how remaining unfulfilled and unrealized should hopefully look should you find yourself unfulfilled and unrealized. Two-Lane Blacktop, sadly, also represents something else entirely to the contemporary viewer: a fantasy of driving cross country with only a few dollars to your name; such an activity would max out even fat credit cards these days, providing you haven’t maxed out your fat credit cards already.
The picture is spacey, tranquil and loose, and as such it may take a few minutes to get into its headspace. It took me about twenty before the slow, emotionally textured groove began to captivate me, though the picture gets better and better as it proceeds along anyway. We initially meet three characters: symbolically referred to in the credits as Driver (James Taylor), Mechanic (Dennis Wilson) and Girl (Laurie Bird) and in the film itself pointedly not referred to at all. They race their 55 Chevy, and in between they flirt and eat and drink and look for other races. The connective tissue that we’ve come to expect between scenes has been removed here, events arrive with little to no build: the girl, for instance, first appears (in a wonderful shot) in a window in the background of a cafe where the boys are eating. She slips into their Chevy and sits in the back waiting for them, the boys get in the car with her and drive away, no one seeming to have too many questions, except the girl, once, wondering why she always has to sit in the back.
Just as we assume we have the entirety of Two-Lane Blacktop figured out, and sink into our couches and savor the photography, particularly Hellman’s master shots (the images of the cars moving restlessly across the screen are especially majestic) and accept that nothing will be allowed to rupture the picture’s chic 1970s thing, along comes the Warren Oates character, referred to in the credits as G.T.O, because, well, he drives a beautiful G.T.O. We discover that the boys have been following him across at least two states, and that G.T.O. has had about enough. He picks up a hitchhiker and pulls into a gas station a few moments later. The boys catch up and, in an extended roundelay between boys, the girl, and G.T.O, that comprises possibly the picture’s best scene, a bet is finally made. They are to mail their pink slips to D.C.; first one there waits for the other one to catch up with their other newly acquired car.
The bits and pieces of Two-Lane Blacktop slowly stack up on top of one another (the hard boiled eggs, the stealing of the plates, the charge of a new challenge) and eventually we come to realize that we’re watching a great movie: a funny-flakey-haunting creation, a work of loss and disillusionment that sticks because it doesn’t seem to be sticking at all. That is the key to the picture’s subjective/objective mastery of tone: it emulates, glorifies but ultimately pities the numbing passivity of its characters. Wilson and Taylor (both the people you’re thinking they are) are surprisingly rich presences: similar looking, confident and broken: playing the musicians’ mystique to their advantage.
Oates is the true performance of the picture though, and its emotional wallop. Seemingly blessed with a differently colored V-neck sweater for every occasion, Oates is initially established as the intimidating opponent, an older man schooled in the ways of the nomad lifestyle, only to be revealed as the loneliest and most eager to impress: he’s the boys’ ghost of Christmas future, a man eaten and chattering away, continually picking up increasingly disinterested hitchhikers in a quest to slow the dissipation of his soul. His last line is a heartbreaker: “those satisfactions are permanent”. There’s someone in the car with him at the time but it’s clear that he’s, as always, talking to himself. G.T.O.’s at least partially right though, as the satisfactions of Two-Lane Blacktop are unlikely to fade anytime soon. To take a cue from the film’s abrupt, chilling ending, I think it appropriate that I don’t continue on much longer about it. See Two-Lane Blacktop, if you haven’t already.
★★★★
