Two-lane blacktop (1971)

[oscar jubis]

I just re-watched Two-lane Blacktop on Criterion DVD. I am preparing a screening list for the film history courses I will be teaching in the Fall and Spring semesters. This collaboration between director Monte Hellman and screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer (Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Walker) is one of the best films of the New American Cinema. It is a product of a period of 8 years or so (late 60s to mid-70s) when Hollywood financed production of daringly modernist films with the aim of attracting the "counter-cultural" younger demographic.

Two-lane Blacktop has four main characters known simply as the driver, the mechanic, the girl, and "GTO", the middle-aged guy played by the great Warren Oates who drives that Pontiac model. The scarcity of psychological dimension in these characters is a modernist trait found in films like Last Year at Marienbad by which the lack of individuation of the characters renders them representative and archetypal. They function as stand-ins for particular groups or reflect the human condition in general rather than a single subjectivity. Hellman uses James Taylor and Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson like Bresson used his "models". Near nothing passes between their lips unrelated to the souped-up ’55 Chevy they ride on the amateur racing circuit. GTO is in the habit of picking up and chatting up hitchhikers. We find out he lost his job and his wife but little else. He often fibs and misrepresents himself, effectively destabilizing his sense of identity. The viewer's curiosity about the characters remains unsatiated. The driver and the mechanic encounter GTO on the road. They decide to race to D.C. from the southwest for the “pink slips” (car ownership papers), creating certain viewer expectations associated with genre conventions . But nobody is in a rush to get to D.C., or anywhere it seems, and the film becomes a series of digressions and interruptions.

What emerges is an insightful picture of America at a specific historical juncture when the idealism of the 60s had yielded to exhaustion, aimlessness, and confusion. This is America on the verge of sending Nixon back to the White House and it is sad and a little creepy. Two-lane Blacktop denies the viewer a sense of closure and there is no catharsis. The film ends in media res, with a view of the driver from the back seat of the Chevy. The shot comes to a stop when the image freezes and the film burns out and self-destructs. Hellman explains "we stopped the film in the projector but we didn’t end the story". The last line of dialogue, spoken by GTO to two soldiers he picks up, refers to "emotions that stay with you" and "permanent satisfactions" in a context that underlines their scarcity and elusiveness in contemporaneous America.