"Two-Lane Blacktop" [1971] is a cult road film starring James Taylor in his only film appearance, Dennis Wilson of Beach Boys fame, Warren Oates fresh from his career making appearance in Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch," Harry Dean Stanton in a memorable cameo as a homosexual hitchhiker, and Laurie Bird, whose short life and career would be capped tragically by suicide in her boyfriend Art Garfunkel's apartment.
In many respects "Two-Lane Blacktop" holds up better than the much more celebrated "Easy Rider" released a year or two earlier. Whereas "Easy Rider" is seriously dated by drug glorification, psychedelic imagery, hair styles, clothing fashions, and heavy-handed anti-establishment politics, "Two Lane" ties more deeply and less topically into the American Romantic tradition begun by Walt Whitman and re-invented in the 1950s by Jack Kerouac and the Beats. As in Kerouac's "On the Road," the journey across America that structures "Two Lane" is both a quest to grasp the huge American landscape and a thrust at freedom from the restraints of modern civilization as expressed through the car culture and youthful rebellion born in the 1950s and burgeoning in the 1960s. As director Monte Hellman suggests on the Criterion DVD release, "Two Lane Blacktop," despite its official release date, is the last movie of the 1960s.
The souped up 1955 Chevy driven by Taylor and tended to by his mechanic sidekick Wilson is the film's central symbol for the Romantic notion of burning with a white hot flame. ("You can never go fast enough.") Similarly, travel on mythic Route 66 back from West to East is a reversal/renewal of the path followed in the founding of the country. Yet none of the principal characters actually make it back to Washington D. C., New York, or Florida - the three east coast locations variously mentioned as geographical goals. Their journey and ours leads into the rural, back-roads heart of the country, leaving us there and making the next step in the journey open and unknown.
In spirit and vision "Two Lane" has much in common with "Breathless," the defining work of the French New Wave. Like Godard's Bogie-inspired Michel, "Two Lane"'s main characters adopt arbitrary identities - in their case, racing hustlers and wandering free spirits. Like Michel too, they impose an arbitrary meaning on their world. While his takes the form of petty thievery and sexual adventure, theirs is a cross country race for pink slips. Yet the race is abandoned and even forgotten by film's end. Only life in the moment has any meaning; once an "end" is glimpsed, the quest is abandoned in favor of some new impulse.
The film shares much else with the French New Wave as well, especially its rejection of big budget studio formulas for structuring stories. The film was shot on location in sequence as the actors were actually making the cross country journey that the film was fictionalizing. There was a deliberate use of spontaneous and accidental event (e.g. a rainstorm that wasn't scripted). To keep the actors in the "present," only the most experienced one of them, Warren Oates, was allowed to see the script. No use was made of make-up, set design, special effects or other accoutrements of the Hollywood system. The actors were youthful and inexperienced (other than Oates) and the plot, such as it is, is riddled with deliberate aimlessness and disproportion, ending anti-climactically and with little or nothing resolved.
In most ways "Two Lane Blacktop" is really an anti-road movie and those who watch it thinking they will be rewarded by exciting car races and sexual adventure are in for a big disappointment. Ultimately the film isn't about car racing at all, but about defining one's self in an existential void. It's about living absolutely in the present, in the here and now - with the past irrelevant and the future unknown. More than anything, this extreme and unapologetic romantic bent is what makes "Two Lane Blacktop" such a pure and unforgettable expression of the 1960s.
In many respects "Two-Lane Blacktop" holds up better than the much more celebrated "Easy Rider" released a year or two earlier. Whereas "Easy Rider" is seriously dated by drug glorification, psychedelic imagery, hair styles, clothing fashions, and heavy-handed anti-establishment politics, "Two Lane" ties more deeply and less topically into the American Romantic tradition begun by Walt Whitman and re-invented in the 1950s by Jack Kerouac and the Beats. As in Kerouac's "On the Road," the journey across America that structures "Two Lane" is both a quest to grasp the huge American landscape and a thrust at freedom from the restraints of modern civilization as expressed through the car culture and youthful rebellion born in the 1950s and burgeoning in the 1960s. As director Monte Hellman suggests on the Criterion DVD release, "Two Lane Blacktop," despite its official release date, is the last movie of the 1960s.
The souped up 1955 Chevy driven by Taylor and tended to by his mechanic sidekick Wilson is the film's central symbol for the Romantic notion of burning with a white hot flame. ("You can never go fast enough.") Similarly, travel on mythic Route 66 back from West to East is a reversal/renewal of the path followed in the founding of the country. Yet none of the principal characters actually make it back to Washington D. C., New York, or Florida - the three east coast locations variously mentioned as geographical goals. Their journey and ours leads into the rural, back-roads heart of the country, leaving us there and making the next step in the journey open and unknown.
In spirit and vision "Two Lane" has much in common with "Breathless," the defining work of the French New Wave. Like Godard's Bogie-inspired Michel, "Two Lane"'s main characters adopt arbitrary identities - in their case, racing hustlers and wandering free spirits. Like Michel too, they impose an arbitrary meaning on their world. While his takes the form of petty thievery and sexual adventure, theirs is a cross country race for pink slips. Yet the race is abandoned and even forgotten by film's end. Only life in the moment has any meaning; once an "end" is glimpsed, the quest is abandoned in favor of some new impulse.
The film shares much else with the French New Wave as well, especially its rejection of big budget studio formulas for structuring stories. The film was shot on location in sequence as the actors were actually making the cross country journey that the film was fictionalizing. There was a deliberate use of spontaneous and accidental event (e.g. a rainstorm that wasn't scripted). To keep the actors in the "present," only the most experienced one of them, Warren Oates, was allowed to see the script. No use was made of make-up, set design, special effects or other accoutrements of the Hollywood system. The actors were youthful and inexperienced (other than Oates) and the plot, such as it is, is riddled with deliberate aimlessness and disproportion, ending anti-climactically and with little or nothing resolved.
In most ways "Two Lane Blacktop" is really an anti-road movie and those who watch it thinking they will be rewarded by exciting car races and sexual adventure are in for a big disappointment. Ultimately the film isn't about car racing at all, but about defining one's self in an existential void. It's about living absolutely in the present, in the here and now - with the past irrelevant and the future unknown. More than anything, this extreme and unapologetic romantic bent is what makes "Two Lane Blacktop" such a pure and unforgettable expression of the 1960s.