The Road Less Travelled Dept. - Two Lane Blacktop

He blew his mind out in a car.

The late sixties, early seventies were weird scenes inside the Hollywood goldmine. The unexpected cash-cow yield of Easy Rider sent the studios' eyes spinning in jackpot dollar signs. The suits shrugged, said we don't know what's happening here but if you young people can make us some money, you go right ahead. Peter Biskin's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls brilliantly documents the brief era when Art and Commerce jumped into a vibrating motel bed together and fucked each other's brains out.

The arthouse bastards born of this unlikely coupling did no better than Easy Rider at the box office, and the suits turned away to spill their seed on the pale underbelly of frathouse fatboy George Lucas, who treated the public like dumb little kids and made everybody feel good about it, infantilising cinema to the point where, today, adults don't feel shortchanged anteing up for a superhero movie.

Nothing childish or feelgood about Easy Rider, Two Lane Blacktop. Nor Five Easy Pieces, or Vanishing Point. These were movies about men incapable of relationships, in crisis, and going nowhere. Not date movies, not popcorn movies. Movies for men incapable of relationships, in crisis, and going nowhere after the sixties dream shredded into bloody tatters. You can imagine how women felt watching them in cinemas. Fucking assholes. Movies about men's issues before men knew they had issues, or even knew what issues were.

Two Lane Blacktop is the genre in its purest form, so stripped-down that only meaning is left. Although the publicity invariably focusses on James Taylor, Dennis Wilson, and Laurie Bird, the third point in the triangle is Warren Oates. Laurie Bird, like all the women in these road movies, is a landmark rather than a destination. Charlotte Rampling's similar role in Vanishing Point was cut right out of the movie.

James Taylor is The Driver. That's what he does. He drives the car. He's focussed, in the moment, as humorless as any two year-old - and driven. His only off-topic conversation is an embarrassing and inept attempt at engaging The Girl (Laurie Bird) in small talk about the bizarre and bleak life of cicadas. "You're boring," she says, moving off.

Dennis Wilson is The Mechanic. He's either under the hood or thinking about what's happening under the hood. His dialog is mechanical. He gets to fuck The Girl, but that's mechanical, too, working under the hood.

Warren Oates is G.T.O. - he doesn't even get the dignity of a role, reduced to the name of his car. Unlike our other two holy assholes, he's a liar and a dreamer for whom the past and the future are nothing but fantasies to suit the moment. He's also desperately unhip, and desperate. He yearns for a destination, he wants to go home, and his own company makes him antsy.

But in American Zen, you can't go home again. And you can't get there from here. That's the story of the movie. Recognise it?

We never discover anything about these three, their backgrounds. They're principles, isolated aspects of male behavior, not fully rounded characters on individual arcs. Nobody learns anything, thank God. There's no message here. No satisfying linear development and resolution. Just the road, and you either come to terms with that - and its direct relevance to you - or you're lost. Be here now. There is nowhere else.

A note on the ending - spoiler alert: sometimes viewed as a cop-out because they couldn't think of an ending, it's poetically inevitable. This is a movie - a story - with no beginning and no middle, either. No traditional Three Act structure. Just what's happening. Look at James Taylor concentrating on the lights up there. He did notice when they changed. Monte Hellman's burnt-out film stock is misunderstood as some kind of nihilist Vanishing Point ending, but he's saying - this is what happens when you stop. When you stop moving, you burn up. Keep moving.