Actual Miles

Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) is among the greatest, most audacious, most truly individual studio-backed movies that could probably only have been made in the 1970s, one that feels like myth from a distance but when you’re actually in it, behind the wheel of it, is really a string of loving detail with no apparent concessions to grand design. It’s about a deal made at some seldom-patronized country service station, a cross-country race for pink slips, with stops only for cheeseburgers, gas and small repairs. One car is a slick yellow GTO, the other a hulking old Chevy, a car that’s all performance, no glamour—it doesn’t even have a heater since a heater might slow it down—and Hellman’s backseat camera shakes with the Chevy’s surges in speed. The movie’s universe is soaked in restlessness, but not the romantic sort. The purity absorbs you without explaining a thing. 

The characters have no names. The Chevy has a Mechanic (Dennis Wilson) and a Driver (James Taylor), a Beach Boy and a famous singer-songwriter, though neither talk much, much less sing—they can’t afford to waste the energy. Even Taylor’s leanness seems calibrated for speed. So these stoic, long-haired hustlers, who are they? Certainly not the counterculture emblems of Easy Rider (1969). Are they young men of their generation or of something much deeper in the American mindset, or maybe that of the late 19^th century European novel? The movie, scripted by Rudy Wurlitzer, opts to keep their mystery intact, while leaving much room for the actors’ low-key charisma to unfurl.

They’re joined by a girl (Laurie Bird, who was pretty mysterious even in real life), a tousled tomboy nymphet vagabond. Her entrance is spied entirely through the window and doorway of a diner; she transfers her body and belongings from one vehicle to another—the Chevy. Driver and Mechanic get in the car as she nests in the back. They drive off without so much as a word, as though her appearance in their car was not planned per se but a perfectly ordinary occurrence. She’s the first to speak. She just wants to make sure they’re not the Zodiac killer. 

Driver and Mechanic, the two-headed lone wolf, are most often seen from the front or behind, while the pilot of the GTO (Warren Oates) is most often seen from the side, the most appropriate point-of-view for a compulsive conversationalist. Few actors in history can be so endearing while being so baldly ingratiating, and Two-Lane Blacktop supplied us with one of Oates’ finest performances. Oates’ affectations are lovingly honed: the stiff collar and cashmere V-necks, the driving gloves with the knuckle-holes, the scarf or ascot or whatever that is round his neck, the tape collection perfectly cued-up so that he can play, say, ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ just as a pretty girl slides into his passenger seat. He claims he’s scouting locations for a “down-home movie on fast cars,” which is doubtlessly total bullshit. He tells the girl he wants to take her away, says they can go to Miami or Montreal or Mexico—he’s a one-man Wild Bunch. (That Oates shares a scene with Harry Dean Stanton, the other greatest character actor of the 1970s, should constitute some special section of cinephile heaven, though the truth is that theirs isn’t one of the film’s best bits, with Stanton playing a hitchhiker who gets weepy when Oates won’t accept his unsolicited affections. “I got no time for sidetracks,” he explains apologetically.)

The racing opponents are also companions, helping each other out along the way, taunting each other playfully, exchanging hard-boiled eggs and hooch or drugs as peace offerings. Like the movie itself, which was shot in sequence in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina, they’re in for the long haul—there is nothing else. So it’s no surprise that it all ends with the movie itself seemingly burning up on-screen. Everything is obliterated in the slipstream.

Riding for the feeling: Road to Nowhere

Road to Nowhere begins with an unidentified man pushing a DVD-R—the words “Road to Nowhere” written on its face—into a laptop. “Velma was always my window into the story,” the man says, and as the disc begins to play, we see a woman—Velma?—seated on a bed, blow-drying her nails. The body of the laptop constitutes a “window” all its own, until the camera pushes in and the window falls away, and the woman on the bed is suddenly compelled to blow-dry her face, as though some arctic chill was overtaking her. The image of her doing this holds for a long while, virtually static, but oddly riveting—she’s preparing for something. Soon a man drives up to the woman’s house, and enters; soon we hear a shot; soon after that the woman departs. She drives the man’s car to a lake, where, in another initially serene moment, a Piper Cherokee falls from the sky and crashes into the water.

What’s going on? What sort of movie is this? Neither question is easily answered. Road to Nowhere, written by Steven Gaydos, is a movie about the making of a movie about a blog about a real crime, one involving suicide, murder and money, and whose facts remain elusive. It’s about a filmmaker (Tygh Runyan), teasingly named Mitchell Haven, entranced by an beautiful inexperienced actress (Shannyn Sossamon) who may or may not be connected to the woman she’s been contracted to play. (“I don’t act,” she tells him. “That’s perfect,” he replies.) Drenched in mystery, blurring demarkations between what’s rehearsed, what’s improvised, and what’s genuine, it’s about how illusion overtakes all attempts to capture the real, and contains enough stories-within-stories to make it more Paul Auster than any of Auster’s movies. In some ways it’s also a tribute to actress and photogrpaher Laurie BIrd, who gave such arresting, indelible, troubling performances in Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) and Cockfighter (1974), who Hellman fell in love with, and who killed herself in 1979 at the age of 25. Road to Nowhere is Hellman’s first movie in over 20 years and, after a single, delightfully baffled viewing, I’m already willing to call it one of his best. It’s now available on DVD and blu-ray from Entertainment One.

Comparisons to Mulholland Drive are inevitable and useful too, given the movie industry milieu, the unresolved enigmas, and the implication that role-playing is both inherently dangerous and quite possibly a wayward route to revelation. But Road to Nowhere, shot in mostly in North Carolina, is more a chamber piece, and also less coy with regards to its knowingness about Hollywood and the spell cast over filmmakers by the work of those who came before them. There’s also a marvelous a cappella performance in a bar from Bonnie Pointer, and a subtextual running commentary about the allure of new digital technology and how it further complicates the ontologies of filmmaking. Road to Nowhere is, in short, very rich, smart, utterly puzzling, hypnotic, and easy on the eyes and ears. I can’t wait to see it again. I don’t know that I’ll be able to make any more sense of its plot afterwards.