Two-Lane Blacktop

I've forever been wondering when science will provide us with a way to record our dreams. Some device that can capture the imagery running through our subconscious as we sleep, saved on some medium of storage, then retrieved for later analysis. The results may be quite terrifying. Or, they may be utterly ridiculous. Like sexual activity, for example. To the participants, it is obviously of great importance. To an observer, often, it appears quite silly. In any event, many of us say that we wish we could remember our dreams. We explain that we plan on keeping a pad and pen on our night tables to try to jot something, some piece of this most mysterious of natural events, something humans and animals alike do every time we doze for a sizable period of time. Is it feasible? I could conjecture, but my guess is that we don't know enough about electroencephalogy (to say nothing of neurology) to make it happen. Meantime, many artists have, perhaps by accident, created aural and visual likenesses to dreamlike states. 

Director Monte Hellman certainly did with his 1971 art house cult film TWO-LANE BLACKTOP, one of the most ambiguous bits of film ever to be produced by a major studio. It came out during those lovely years when Hollywood was producing all manner of personal films, when the "inmates were running the asylum." While there are lots of movies with dream sequences and those that resemble and are about nightmares, BLACKTOP looks as if someone figured out how to put someone's subconscious in glorious Panavision. The camera roams all over the American West. We drift through service stations in Utah and California. Look, there's a guy lifting a bottle of Coke, watching two other guys fueling their '55 Chevy. We hear their conversation. A challenge for pink slips. A race from the West Coast to D.C. in their hot rods. 

There's your "plot", dear viewer. The first guy (Warren Oates, absolutely great) drives a G.T.O. That's how this film identifies him; no traditional Christian name. The other two guys, quite younger (James Taylor and Brian Wilson) are called The Driver and The Mechanic, respectively. There's also a girl, called "The Girl" (Laurie Bird). Writer/director Walter Hill also did this sort of thing some years later with THE DRIVER, a far more conventional pic. Easier to just call these blank souls by their occupation or archetype than to personalize them. Taylor and Wilson, of course, were far better known for their music than their acting. They're rank amateurs, as are most of the cast, and that's the way it should be. Would Method emoting have suited this milieu? On the other hand, Oates, as I said, is terrific. He is a professional and gets G.T.O. to his core, whatever may lurk there. He's the most human of any of this lot, and his electricity is perhaps a statement in itself. 

This film, by the way, is very likely the only chance you'll get to hear Sweet Baby James utter the phrase "mother fucker", a dubious but nonetheless entertaining thing. The characters don't need traditional names. It barely matters who they are in this universe. They are ideas, abstractions, part of the dusty locales. You can hear and touch them, but they seem more like Representations. Of what, exactly? As with other existential works, it's all in what the consumer brings to the table. The obvious themes of freedom, youthful wanderlust, distrust of the Establishment are here. It seemed that the Baby Boomers (before they cashed in their peace buttons for keys to the executive washroom) were questioning these insane notions of personal responsibility, or least the conventional blueprint of 1) School 2) Job 3) Marriage 4) Mortgage 5) Kids 6) Retirement. Who could blame them? I've always been distrustful of this myself.

But the Man at Universal Studios (distributor), chief Lew Wasserman, was not amused. Even in the wake of the breakout success of EASY RIDER, several associated with this movie attest that he found this film and its loose ideas quite offensive. The characters here don't seem bound to societal rules and norms. They just, wander. They don't seem to have goals, or even cares. Their communication is impersonal. Staccato utterances that just get down to business. No meaning, yet volumes expressed at the same time. They just, go. They race. Could be familiar to you? Also, does TWO-LANE BLACKTOP care enough to let you know who wins the race? The movie, like the characters, are endlessly sidetracked. Even though no vehicle in this movie has a bumper sticker reading IF YOU WANT TO MAKE GOD LAUGH, MAKE PLANS, it wouldn't be out of place. Hard to tell if God figures into this universe, though. It all seems so random. 

G.T.O. does try to reach out a little. He picks up a hitchhiker (Harry Dean Stanton) and actually tries to communicate with him. It's mostly a monologue, though. G.T.O. is pretty lonely out there. When someone crosses his path, he's just grateful to have someone there to listen to his nonsense. He won't even bother to check to see if the other is listening. However, when his passenger makes a pass at him, G.T.O. will have none of that. Yeah, he's straight and all, but it's mainly because he doesn't have the time. He's got a race. To D.C., right, but maybe he's not sure. Writer Rudy Wurlitzer reveals on the Criterion DVD commentary that he and Hellman (who made more unique films and later produced RESERVOIR DOGS) certainly weren't so sure. There are lots of themes to derive from repeated viewings, but who's to say they're valid? So goes subjectivity. 

TWO-LANE makes no attempt to explain anything, or to provide, if you will, a clear cut Point A to Point B. It's a dream, a collection of someone's subconsciousness, put right there on film. It will frustrate the hell out of many viewers (even gearheads looking to gawk at the machinery), guaranteed. Not me, though. Watching it, for me, is the closest I've come to thinking I'm watching something unwatchable, so abstract that it can't be reduced to mere imagery. It's so oblique, so alien. The sights are familiar, the American landscape and its hamburger stands and petrol station blandness. You can almost smell the motor oil and the stale air conditioning in yet another fleabag motel. It all seems real, yet not. I hesitate to call many entertainments "art", but here you go. And so, the stage seems to exist in another unreality, its characters, ghosts. They appear and vanish. We learn a little about them, but by the time the film's final seconds (one of the most inconclusive wrap-ups in film history) play out, they have blurred into the dream. Maybe that's not so inconclusive after all? Maybe. But why don't you go ahead and tell me about that dream you had last night, you know, the one you didn't write down.

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