![]() He was totally unaware that there was a camera going. He was just so perfect.” That went for the angry-eyed string bean’s companion too: “Dennis Wilson was unconscious. “I don’t think he even knows where it comes from. “James Taylor was fascinating, such a natural,” Hellman told Paste in 2014. “It gets in the way.” It’s an elemental road movie that accepts whatever you get from it, thanks especially to its relative lack of music and excellent, near-silent leads. “Turn that shit off,” The Driver says of the radio. By capturing this exhaust-fumed existentialism so plainly, Two-Lane Blacktop strips away the specificities of Easy Rider’s bikers, or of Kerouac’s Beats. A nod to base, natural survival with the buzzing of the cicadas. A quiet rebuke of all the things we do to distract ourselves from it, as an afroed hippie quickly flees GTO’s stream of pomposity. There’s a quiet fear of death, as the GTO picks up an old lady and a young girl on the way to the cemetery. This visualized, heightened but not romanticized theme of journey-over-destination-of motion and stagnation-keeps Wurlitzer and Hellman’s ‘70s-flecked ideology squarely in the headlights. On an even more basic level, to quote The New Yorker’s Richard Brody on the film’s road-weary Zen, “driving, after all, is moving very fast while sitting and doing nothing.” There’s a feeling of treading water that’s ironically ever-present in fast-car movies and fast-car realities: Even the best NASCAR driver’s still going in circles. ![]() In fact, it could’ve easily shared a title with Hellman’s final film, Road to Nowhere. Samuel Beckett’s a constant invisible passenger throughout the relatively plotless meanderings of the movie’s trip. It’s no wonder that Hellman, who died in April at age 91, got his start driving a truck and directing the first Los Angeles production of Waiting for Godot. It all amounts to a contemplative, pseudo-competitive, viciously anticlimactic tour around the biggest racetrack in the U.S. High-Falutin’ GTO the equalizing and indifferent series of faceless diners, drive-ins and dives encountered along the endless stretch of American asphalt. The results are a pile-up of raw aesthetics: The blue-collar denim, chambray and white T-shirts of the Chevy boys the ascots, cashmere sweaters and flop sweat of Mr. “Pinks” or nothin’ when they get to the nation’s capital. A cross-country race east for the only thing that matters: Each other’s cars. The duo’s 1955 Chevrolet 150 picks up Laurie Bird’s hitchhiker and butts heads with Warren Oates’ GTO-flaunting bag of hot air. Two non-actors play the central Men with No Names in their only film roles: Dennis Wilson (of The Beach Boys) plays The Mechanic and James Taylor (of James Taylor) plays The Driver. We may spin our wheels a little differently now, but that doesn’t mean that the dreams, lies and the dreadful potential of the open road showcased in Hellman’s mesmerizing masterpiece are any less relevant today.įollowing up Ride in the Whirlwind and The Shooting, a pair of Jack Nicholson-led acid Westerns, Two-Lane Blacktop is a modernized amalgamation of thoughtful cowboys and their quietly posturing conflicts in what passes for an automotive frontier story. While the mainstream, especially in film, has pumped the brakes on the heady reflections that helped define 1971’s countercultural cool, that particularly kinetic American ennui has never gone away. “Now everyone wants to leave the two-lane blacktops and get to the interstate.”- Two-Lane Blacktop screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer, 2008Īs the late Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop turns 50, Wurlitzer’s assessment feels correctly cynical if not completely accurate.
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