Like many of the movers-and-shakers in 1970s Hollywood, Monte Hellman started his career working for the king of American exploitation films Roger Corman. Shot simultaneously in the deserts of Utah, The Shooting (1966) and Ride in the Whirlwind (1966) took the traditional Western and transformed it into a bleak existentialist parable filled with aloof camerawork and bitingly cold visual stylings. This desire to take traditional stories of American empowerment and use them to articulate the fear and anger of the Vietnam generation followed him into Two-Lane Blacktop, a countercultural road movie that makes Easy Rider (1969) look like a John Wayne movie.
The film revolves around two young men who make their way in the world by moving from town to town, gulling the locals into racing against their customised muscle car. We never learn very much about these young men as they never mention their names or their place of origin. Rootless and directionless, they aspire to nothing other than simply existing. In fact, the pair are so oblivious to life outside of their car that it barely registers when a strange young woman shows up on the backseat of their car. We never learn her name either.
After a few days drifting from town to town, the trio encounter a cravat-wearing middle-aged man driving a factory-made muscle car. This man is just as mysterious as the youngsters in so far as we never learn his real name or his place of origin. However, unlike the youngsters who remain silent on these topics, the older man feels the need to fill every gap in conversation with pointless lies about himself, his destination and how he wound up owning such an impressive piece of engineering.
Sensing some kind of threat from the affect-less youngsters, the middle-aged man challenges them to a race but despite lots of macho posturing on both sides, the two cars never actually wind up racing as the youngsters keep wanting to help out the older man with his mechanical problems. At one point the middle-aged man is driving along and spots the youngsters having breakfast in a diner. Annoyed that they seem to be taking his challenge so lightly, the old man pulls over and confronts them, angrily asking “Are we still racing?” but no answer is forthcoming. Increasingly ill at ease with this strange relationship, the older man convinces the young girl to travel with him and he takes off while the other two are racing a local. With steel in their eyes, the pair take off after the older man but rather than confront him about cheating or stealing their girl, their annoyance seems to come from the fact that he moved the relationship from one of mutual cooperation to one of competition. As the older man drives off alone, he begins to weave lies about how he won the car from the younger men using his customised muscle car.
Like most of Hillman’s films, Two-Lane Blacktop is all the more gorgeous for the seeming effortlessness of the cinematography. Devoid of flashy camera-work or obviously ‘artistic’ composition, Hillman’s camera seems to constantly stumble upon images of America that yell their broken loneliness at the unending sky. The connection to the great revisionist Westerns of the 60s and 70s is also present in the script by Rudy Wurlitzer, an experimental novelist who went on to write the script for Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973). This screenplay, though extraordinarily minimalist, contains just enough oddness and just enough substance to hint at a tale of inter-generational conflict. Indeed, the older man looks upon the youngsters as a threat and so challenges them to a race. However, the boys are not interested in racing and so the older man begins to struggle. He struggles because he cannot live in the world devoid of meaning that these young people seem to inhabit. Trapped on the move and disconnected from any sense of place or purpose, the older man fills in the gaps with lies. Lies that allow him to make sense of the world but which remain totally alien to the younger men. The role of the young woman is also vital to this interpretation as the older man quite clearly sees himself as being in competition with the young men but the young men are completely uninterested in the possibility of bedding the young girl. As she herself puts it at one point, there’s nobody to take care of her back end.
This Masters of Cinema Blu-ray edition comes with a booklet of essays and a number of fascinating documentaries about the making of the film. As ever, Masters of Cinema have done a great service to cinephiles everywhere by re-releasing a much under-appreciated classic of 1970s countercultural cinema in a style that befits both its quality and intelligence.
