Sole Criterion: Two-Lane Blacktop
By Brett Ballard-Beach
March 1, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
During my undergraduate years, in pursuit of my B.A. in English, I took about one-third of my required courses from a professor who had a very helpful strategy for allowing/forcing me and my classmates to more closely interact with the novels and essays we read: find a passage that puzzled, confused or otherwise confounded us and write a one to two page single-spaced “reading log” in which we free associated or stream of consciousness-ed our way to, if not an understanding, then at least an articulation of our puzzlements (which could often be as meaningful).
For this week’s column, I will attempt something of that nature to help me sort through my feelings - or lack thereof - concerning the 1971 drama Two-Lane Blacktop, a film that if nothing else is like looking at the missing link between the dramas of disaffected youth & outsiders and generational conflicts that marked Hollywood in the late 1960s and early 1970s and the sub-genre of independently financed driving/racing movies that sprung up in the mid-1970s and ultimately led to big-budget all-star “comic” car chase extravaganzas like The Cannonball Run by the early 1980s.
Two-Lane Blacktop stands as a monument for all the films that have been ridiculously overhyped prior to their unveiling and had to simply exist in the flow of time for years or decades in order to finally be "seen." The screenplay was published in advance as an Esquire magazine cover story. A making of feature appeared in Rolling Stone the fall before the film debuted. It was hailed prior to its release as the most important film of the year and an instant classic, and all those other classifications that merely serve to obscure whatever interesting might actually be there to observe underneath the blanket of buzz. Critics and audiences collectively shrugged. The head of the studio deeply regretted the nearly $1 million accorded for its budget.
In his brief notes introducing a copy of the 1970 first draft screenplay (by Rudolph “Rudy” Wurlitzer, based on a story and earlier script by Will Corry who also receives credit) that accompanies the Criterion release of Two-Lane Blacktop, director Monte Hellman explains that the script was filmed nearly as written, in its entirety, resulting in a rough cut that clocked in at around 210 minutes. This was more than slightly halved, by Hellman who worked as his own editor, to 103 minutes, in order to retain right of final cut, which he would have given up at any length of over two hours.
At the risk of evincing some naïveté, I am willing to take Hellman at his word. In reading the screenplay immediately after watching the film, it felt as if almost every scene included in the film (with one exception being the particular moment I am going to discuss) I encountered in roughly the same form. Wurlitzer’s poetic evocation of scenes and setting are in many cases as important as the dialogue of the characters or the shape the narrative takes, or ends up not taking, by the time the film reaches its definitive ending. If I were to attempt a feeble summation of what Wurlitzer achieves, it would be to find poetry in the lives of people lacking poetry, or leastways, the ability to express themselves outside of a single self-designated role. The only imposition by Hellman on Wurlitzer was in regards to how to end the film - the final two scenes were at his request. And now, I will attempt to work my way through a cinematic variation of my collegiate “reading log”.
About a half-hour into the film, and just before the key element of the narrative - a cross-country race from New Mexico to Washington, D.C. between a 1955 Chevrolet 150 and a 1970 Pontiac GTO - is introduced. Characters known only as the Driver (James Taylor) and The Girl (Laurie Bird) have retreated to a nearby meadow alongside a filling station, and are sitting on a fence post. She is a hitchhiker who has wandered into the lives of The Driver and his racing partner The Mechanic (Dennis Wilson) and taken up residence in their backseat. It’s one of the few meaningful (attempts at) conversations that occasionally punctuate the film and its awkwardness belies the fact that the men can only express themselves talking about the cars they drive and the races just behind them and just ahead of them.
The girl (little more than a teenager) seems torn between looking for a sympathetic and resigned to hearing herself talk for talking’s sake. The scene unfolds in a medium-close shot. It lasts about two minutes with no edits. It feels like one of the longest scenes without a cut in the film. They could be any young couple with an interest in one another and an inability to express it. He makes stumbling small talk about the cicadas (which we can hear dominate on the soundtrack) punctuated with a vulgarity. The air is immediately deflated. Shortly thereafter, he lopes off mumbling behind him for her “not to get a splinter in your ass” while she counters with a brusque “You bore me” that cuts this thought off.
This can be considered against the scene about a half hour later where he attempts to teach her how to drive a stick, a failed experiment that ends with them in an embrace that possibly leads to sex, which we are to infer has already happened earlier in the film between her and The Mechanic. (The screenplay contains a lot more overt physicality and sexuality, almost all of which is sublimated, kept off-camera, or missing from the film).
So what is it that puzzles me about the first scene? I find it upsetting, an emotion that I experience at almost no other point during my viewing. (Boredom, joy, sorrow, and angst are also noticeable in their absence.) I had seen the film once before, shortly after it was officially released on DVD in the late ‘90s, and I carried away very little emotional tenor. Upon a second viewing, I began to understand why.
This scene, as well as the other one, is specifically about missed connections, a theme brought to the surface here but simply part of the structure of the film elsewhere. Both dialogues seem too overly symbolic in the lines (in a film where your characters have no names, you already have symbolism and then some) and it tips to the point of evoking what could be unintended laughter, which would also be the only moments in the movie where the tone falters in such a way. The awkwardness of the characters coupled with the performances by first-time actors Taylor and Bird - who were reportedly only given the pages of the script relevant to each day’s shooting - intermingle and as such it becomes impossible, when Taylor appears to flub a line during the scene in the meadow, if it was his “error” or the character’s. I am sensitive to this awkwardness more so I think than at any other point in the film, and yet here, as elsewhere, it never pushes over into discomfort.
And that thought drives me what I find most remarkable about the film: it consistently refuses to push buttons that most other narrative feature films do simply as a matter of course. Below are a few points of consideration to argue this point.
Two-Lane Blacktop sidesteps most every cliché for its genre, for many genres in fact, but it doesn’t do it by subverting conventions, by satirizing or mocking them. Wurlitzer’s screenplay and Hellman’s direction doesn’t paint The Girl, The Mechanic, and The Driver as anti-heroes, any more than it sets out to construct them as superior to the other hitchhikers, diner patrons or small town denizens they encounter. Reading Wurlitzer’s prose, it becomes obvious that he faithfully embedded himself in the street racing and gearhead lifestyles in order to create a vivid and realistic portrait, but the film throws a lot of that out and what’s left is simply the milieu. There are not a lot of racing scenes or car chases. There are a fair number of shots from a backseat perspective, that take in the measure of a driver and a passenger and the road unfolding beyond their windshield, but nothing held for a significantly long time or that suggests the film is aiming for the hypnotic rhythms suggestive of ceaseless driving. Although the narrative eventually peters out, it becomes apparent that it is the characters themselves driving this and not the film making a statement by becoming "plotless."
Two-Lane Blacktop may seem to be making concessions to the “youth market” (the film was produced by the division of Universal that sprung up briefly in the wake of the financial and cultural success of Easy Rider) with the casting of Taylor, who scored his first top 40 hit “Fire and Rain” while the film was shooting, and Wilson, drummer for The Beach Boys, but it doesn’t use them as “teen idols” in any sense.
Limited as their acting talent may be, they deliver what is required from the roles: Wilson captures the Mechanic’s easygoing California vibes tempered by the character’s sometimes paralyzing introspection. Taylor’s imposing height and poker face defuse the future “Sweet Baby James” persona and suggests the seething and self-doubt just beneath the surface (but which the film never unleashes, unless you count his provocation/taunt “you’re on, motherfucker” early on to a potential opponent as sufficiently angry. Hearing Taylor cuss is an odd experience).
Two-Lane Blacktop would seem to have been the ideal candidate for a tie-in soundtrack that would have pushed along the film’s commercial appeal. There is no score, but there are a fair number of tunes including Kris Kristofferson singing his composition “Me and Bobby McGee” (made famous in a rendition by Janis Joplin). And yet, a soundtrack was never released. There is a reason for this, I think.
I would be hard-pressed to name another film where songs are so prevalent and yet the music leaves little to no impression. It provides the soundtrack to the inhabitants of the cars, but the radio is turned off as much as on, and even after debates over which tape to pop in, no one seems to much notice what’s playing, even if they happen to be singing along. The sounds that stay with me are the swell of the cicadas, the electronic buzz of the GTO when the door is opened while the key is still in the ignition, the revving of engines as cars are worked on a racetrack, and finally the absence of any sound, save for a rush of air, during the film’s final minute.
The only main character in Two-Lane Blacktop not discussed to this point is perhaps the most important and certainly the most enigmatic: the driver of the GTO who lays down the challenge to the others. As embodied by character actor Warren Oates in one of his few lead roles, he is a contradiction embedded in an enigma. He talks the most of any of them, but his stories always cancel each other, suggesting the American capacity for reinvention pushed to its most annihilating extremes.
Depending on his audience, he is a businessman on leave, an auto tester, or a NASA employee, with "connections" in Chicago, NYC, and Southern Florida. His history shifts like the gears in his car until it can only be ascertained that he is as lost in America as The Mechanic, the Driver, and The Girl. Wurlitzer’s screenplay identifies him as an aging frat house type, which was precisely the phrase that came to my mind. Imagine Will Ferrell’s character from Old School fused with the intensity of an early '90s Michael Rooker performance and that can at least point you in the right direction. Oates is somehow able to simultaneously suggest easygoing and barely contained, a preppie past his prime (he is wearing a different colored sweater every time we encounter him) with a fading baby face, whose air of bluster is only surface deep. He winds up spending as much time in the company of the others as he does “racing” them and it becomes apparent that he needs them as much as they seem they could care less about him. (A scene in a southern diner where he defuses a sticky situation with some locals by pretending to be the manager of The Driver and the Mechanic speaks to the would-be family unit that is almost achieved by the quartet.) My own personal feeling is that all of them are part of what would be considered Nixon’s "Silent Majority," out of step with the 1960s counterculture that has just passed and uncertain how they fit in with the dawning of a new decade.
Tying this back into my idea of how the film swerves from the obvious is the fact that GTO is not made to be the buffoon or the antagonist simply because he is older, patriarchal, unhip, or out of step with the times like the father in a terrible Disney comedy of the period. It is almost easier to feel a little more sympathy for GTO than the others (not that the film pushes it) by virtue of his obvious foundering. As Two-Lane Blacktop slowly morphs into something other than just a race for pink slips, it resists the urge to acquire meaning through some kind of trendy violent/tragic/nihilistic ending. Hellman guides it towards a definitive conclusion, perhaps the most cinematically appropriate one possible, and even then manages to bypass the idea that it should be read simply as a metaphor, or a slick bit of reflexivity. A line of dialogue that didn’t make it into the film has an exasperated Girl unloading on the driver:
“You make me uptight.”
“Yeah, . . . why is that?”
“You never say anything. I mean I dig you and all, but you’re not letting anyone into your movie.”
As Hellman’s final shot suggests, silence can be its own prison and, one way or another, every film comes to an end.
Next time: My first column in which I encounter a Criterion release for the first time. Antonioni in the 1980s. DVD Spine # 585