Two-Lane Blacktop

Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) has a cool, distinctive vision of America that’s both post-hippie and pre-counterculture; the young anti-heroes, though two are played by musicians, seem rather apathetic to drugs and rock’n’roll. James Taylor and Laurie Bird share sexual vibes, but this love ain’t free—though, for the hitchhiking teenager Bird, love often appears to be. For the mechanic, played by Beach Boy Dennis Wilson, life only seems to exist beneath a car’s hood. Then there’s Warren Oates, the rambler in his G.T.O., who seems snowed in by his life experiences (he has lived twice as long as the others); he has the most human dimensions, but seems like a mythological shape-shifter: He’s so uncomfortable with himself that he puts on a smile and tells a new lie to every hitcher he picks up. Being an itinerant isn’t really a choice for him. When he picks up Harry Dean Stanton—whose voice warbles like Hank Williams’s, in piteous tones—and Stanton caresses G.T.O.’s leg, Oates shouts (hilariously!), “I’m not into that!” When Oates picks up a mustachioed hippie, who implies that a mysterious “we” have only thirty, forty years left (it being 2010 puts “us” in trouble), this pessimism makes Oates crumble; it rattles his phony enthusiasm and hits him too close to home. Nobody in this picture has a past or future; and since they keep on trucking, nobody really has a present, either. The “road” is a cheesy metaphor—even Hellman, in a D.V.D. feature, hates to “acknowledge the existential stigma this movie has to it”—but it’s a beaut here. Route 66—now an icon for nostalgists—is the road they’re taking cross-country, and if that’s not a bad omen, what is?

While seconding Hellman’s reluctance to broach existentialism—though, in a way, it’s there, just as it’s present in so much else—I think this film compares to Hiroshima, Mon Amour, Alain Resnais’s beautiful avant-garde poem of about a dozen years earlier. The stories are completely different, and so are the narrative techniques, but they both hit on that lack of a present timeframe. In the French film, time is garbled by flashbacks to emotions that still feel fresh; here, we haven’t anything to flash back to. It’s about the perils of living in the moment. Blacktop came out the same year that Hunter Thompson wrote about the wave of youth and freedom cresting in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The counterculture’s awareness of its own demise is palpable, almost bitter, here—in a way that it wasn’t in the euphoric Bonnie and Clyde, four years earlier. (Some critics compared this film to the recent George Clooney vehicle The American, but despite the drag-racing, Blacktop exists on its own—without pulp. The American wraps its “art” not around something that’s dying, but something that’s always been, aesthetically speaking, dead.) But, to look back on Blacktop from this vantage—writing on a laptop, publishing on the internet, driving on long, anonymous freeways from which every town looks the same—there’s enough long hair to make one feel nostalgic. We’re witnessing a moment the filmmakers already thought was gone.