"Those Satisfactions Are Permanent."

"Time. Time. What is time? Swiss manufacture it. French hoard it. Italians squander it. Americans say it is money. Hindus say it does not exist. Do you know what I say? I say time is a crook."--Peter Lorre, Beat the Devil

1971: Two-Lane Blacktop, a movie directed by Monte Hellman from a screenplay by Rudolph Wurlitzer, starring James Taylor (the singer-songwriter and recent Time magazine cover boy), Dennis Wilson (the most movie-star photogenic member of the Beach Boys), and Laurie Bird, all in their film acting debuts, and cult figure/ character actor god Warren Oates, who starred in Hellman's The Shooting, an experimental Western shot in 1965 but not picked up for distribution until 1968. (Hellman made it back-to-back with another Western, Ride in the Whirlwind, with a crew of seven and a total budget--for both films--of $7,500 from producer Roger Corman. Hellman ha said that about $5,000 of that was spent hanging around the location, waiting for the rain to stop.) Two-Lane Blacktop, which was made for Universal for $850,000, is a road movie about an "existential" conflict between a couple of nameless characters--the Driver, played by Taylor, and the Mechanic, played by Wilson--who tool their souped-up hunk of junk around the country, getting into races for money, and an older man in a G.T.O. (Warren Oates) who challenges them to race to Washington D.C. for "pinks" (i.e., pink slips, each other's cars, which is to say for ownership of each other's identities). The film was made as part of the slate of Universal's "youth division", a highly publicized response to charges, in the wake of the success of such independent productions as Easy Rider and such big studio fiascos as Paint Your Wagon and Tora! Tora! Tora!, that Hollywood's top players were out of touch with young audiences. The youth division green-lighted a handful of low-budget features by directors said to be better in touch with the "youth" audience, basically giving them a bundle of money and letting them do what they wanted with it. (Besides Two-Lane Blacktop, the project funded new movies by the director of Easy Rider, Dennis Hopper, and its star, Peter Fonda--The Last Movie and The Hired Hand, which also featured Warren Oates--as well as Douglas Trumbull's Silent Running and Milos Forman's Taking Off.)

In April 1971, Esquire, arguably the zeitgeist magazine of the past decade, famous for its eye-catching, oversized covers, put Laurie Bird on its cover with a headline announcing that Two-Lane Blacktop was destined to be the "movie of the year." (Inside, the magazine ran Wurlitzer's screenplay in its entirety.) When Two-Lane Blacktop opened in June, it was greeted with mixed reviews and, like the other products of Universal's "youth division", did a fast fade from theaters.
Universal canceled its youth division, and plans were cancelled to have Hellman direct Wurlitzer's screenplay Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Neither Taylor nor Wilson (who drowned in 1983, a year after Warren Oates died of a heart attack) never acted in another movie; Taylor has famously never seen the movie, though Hellman says he did contact him, after the first DVD release, about getting him a copy. Laurie Bird appeared in Hellman's 1974 Cockfighter, the third (of four) movie he made with Warren Oates; except for a bit part in Annie Hall, she didn't appear in any other movies. She committed suicide in 1979. Four months after its April 1971 issue, Esquire abandoned its trademark oversized format and shrunk itself to conventional magazine size to better compete on the newstands. At the start of 1972, it included its own declaration that Two-Lane Blacktop would be the movie of the year in its annual compilation of the year's biggest missteps, embarrassments, and blunders, the "Dubious Achievement Awards."

1981: I am a straw-haired, pimply-faced teenager serving my time in hicksville, lonely and unloved to a degree that you, you prom king cheerleaders sons of a bitches, can scarcely begin to imagine. I live on the family farm in Jayess, Mississippi, which was once an actual working farm but now, with my grandfather dead, is just five hundred acres in the middle of nowhere that need mowing. When my mother isn't working, she's often driving back and forth between our house and Alabama, where she's conducting a post-divorce affair with a newspaper editor named Perry Coleman. (Met him once. Real nice guy.) I don't blame her; if I thought it would get me some time away from Walthall County, I'd offer to fuck the fellow myself on alternate weekends to give her a rest period. But I'm still too young to get my license, so I ride the school bus home, all the way down out winding gravel driveway that takes so long that lost travelers often mistake it for a road and come barreling down it until they see the big old country house it leads to, at which point they probably wonder of Leatherface is going to come charging at them, chain saw in hand. I hop off the bus and enter my home by hopping in through my bedroom window. I could just walk in through the front door, since back then nobody in Walthall County ever locked their front door, but I saw Bob Newhart leaving his office through the window in the movie version of Catch-22 on TV, and I thought it looked cool.

Watching movies on late night TV is one of my two big hobbies, one of the things that settle and restore my soul. The other is standing by the barbed wire fence that separates our front yard from what had been the cattle field before we stopped raising cattle, and watching the road on the far side. It's a long way away. The road bracketing the field forms an upside-down "L" that I can watch cars move along. Not constantly; maybe not even all that often. The waiting is part of the excitement. Wait long enough, and you'll see a tiny car moving along, heading for the crossroads. If the car turns right, it'll head down the upper length of the inverted L, towards the turnoff that might lead it down the driveway to our house. If that happens, my heart will almost stop--maybe it's the Manson family, busted out of jail and on their way to let us know what they think of all the smart remarks my mother and I made watching Helter Skelter together. Because there's a big old barn blocking my line of sight, if the car keeps driving I won't see it; the car will disappear behind the barn, and then I have to gulp and wait, wait, to see if eventually the car will come tearing down out driveway, delivering certain doom. I treated myself to many a little heart attack waiting to see if Mickey and Mallory Knox were about to come rounding the barn.

But the happiest times are of course spent watching the cars that don't head out way as they come to the crossroads, but keep their distance, steadily plowing on to points I know not. From where I stand, I can't see the people in the cars. I don't know who they are or if they're alone or have company. I don't know where they're going. I just know that somewhere out there, close enough for me to pick up signals but far enough away that I can't even guess at anything else about them, people are living their lives, moving from place to place, behaving autonomously and not chained to some cow pasture. I wonder about them, where they're going and why. Sometimes I imagine that their lives are abstract and open-ended, that they're just running to no place in particular, for the hell of it. They woke up this morning and decided to go visit the Cadillac Ranch or to go on a reading tour of America, used bookstore by bookstore, because that, I imagine, is what people might do when they're out of high school and all grown up, because they could. That's my idea of what being grown up means. In my darker moments, when hours seem to go by and no cars are to be seen, I begin to worry, and I fantasize that a virus or nuclear accident has wiped out all life on the planet, except here on the farm, the last place on the map where the toxic clouds have yet to appear. Because if the world had ended, how would I know about it?

I first saw Two-Lane Blacktop on channel 4, the CBS affiliate in New Orleans, which our TV set in Mississippi with the tall rotating aerial could pick up late at night and early into the morning, when there were no competing TV signals closer to home to interfere with its transmission. This was back when most TV channels went off the air sometime between midnight and one A.M., signing off with a patriotic
montage scored to a rousing rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner," and stations such as channel 4, which vamped between the end of the CBS network lineup and Sunrise Semester with all-night movies, were something of a novelty. On evenings when my mother was otherwise occupied in Alabama, I lived for the channel 4 movies. Because, I think, the local newspaper disapproved of channel 4 for encouraging people to sit up all night watching TV when they could be praying, the TV listings never announced in advance what movies would be screened, which gave a thrilling pot luck quality to the enterprise. You might sit up, bleary-eyed and feverish, to be rewarded with My Man Godfrey with William Powell and Carole Lombard, or a classic of unintentional comedy like The Creeping Terror, starring a man-eating carpet from worlds unknown, whose adventures are described in intricate detail by a voice-over narrator, because the filmmakers shot it without sound before realizing what a chore it would be to gather everyone after shooting was completed to record and dub the dialogue; or you might force yourself to stay awake only to find out that Santa is packing coal tonight, and expects you to watch My Man Godfrey (the remake, with David Niven and June Allyson) or Che! with Omar Sharif in the title role and Jack Palance as Fidel Castro, and which is a lot funnier in theory than it is to watch. (Even so, follow that, Steven Soderbergh!) But I don't think that anything makes my heart race like the sound of the station announcer breaking the news that, if we can just dig in our heels and make it through A Swingin' Summer and Dracula's Castle, then, by God, for our 4 A.M. dessert, we can have Two-Lane Blacktop.

I don't remember the first time I saw Two-Lane Blacktop. I wish I did. Instead, I just remember all those early, early mornings when I realized that I was going to get to see it again. On mornings when my mother happened to be home, I watched it in a dark living room, with the sound turned down way the fuck low, lying on my belly an inch or two from the set. When I had the place to myself, I'd kick out the jams, watching it with the sound up and the lights on, reacting to the commercial breaks by rushing to my bedroom to play one song from whatever drooling punk record I was especially taken with at the time and performing a frantic, epileptic-like ritual that I told myself was not wholly unlike dancing, then switching the stereo off and rushing back to the TV just as Al Scramuzza, patriarch of New Orleans's Seafood City and one of the most endearingly maladroit pitchmen ever to insist on doing his own commercials, was wrapping up his testimonial to the freshness of his crawfish. The time I remember best was the time I was in the house by myself, watching it as it headed into its last half-hour around 5:30 A.M., and my mother came pulling in. I pretended that I had just gotten up after turning in early, and we watched the ending together; it seemed to me that the movie's climax was enhanced by the smell my mother brought into the house of leather upholstery and road food and by the sound of her car's engine dying in the driveway. I wish that I could say that the experience was also enhanced by the shared enjoyment, but I think my mother was telling herself that if she hadn't been so tired and had come in at the beginning, then maybe the movie would have seemed normal.

From the first time I saw the movie, I always wanted to be Warren Oates. This would, I think, confuse the people who conceived of the idea of a Universal youth division. Oates was in his early forties when the movie was shot, and the antagonistic vibe that develops between him and the two younger men is implicitly generational. He wants what they have and what they don't give any sign of valuing--an ineffable kind of cool that's based on their not seeming to give a damn about anything. Oates, with his driving glove and collection of "groovy" music tapes, suggests a man who's stocked his midlife crisis with items from the Playboy catalog. He drives around picking up hitchhikers and subjecting them to monologues about his life, and the life he's describing keeps changing. I had seen Two-Lane Blacktop many, many times, and was seeing it again for the first time after a long break from it, when I suddenly realized how pathetic Oates's character is meant to be. It's central to the point of the movie, and I had never noticed it during all those viewing, during all that time that it was becoming for me a sacred fetish object. When I was a younger--younger, much younger in fact, than the movie's own representatives of "youth"--I was blind to the signals that cue to the viewer in to Oates's loneliness and hopelessness and self-delusion; I just thought that his freedom, to not just go anywhere but to declare himself to be anyone he wanted to be, to claim any past that struck his fancy--was the coolest thing in the world.

Of course, the point of Two-Lane Blacktop is that these characters aren't going anywhere. This is easier to grasp when you've hit the road yourself and racked up some real disappointments and regrets and begun to understand that there's more to a life fully lived than staying in motion. It also helps if you've seen other movies that Rudolph Wurlitzer had a hand in (such as Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, which was ultimately directed by Sam Peckinpah, and Candy Mountain, which Wurlitzer wrote and co-directed with Robert Frank) or his novels (such as Nog
and Flats) or Hellman's Westerns, all of which feature questing characters on a circling path going nowhere. Some of them have more going for them than others, but, with the exception of some scenes in Pat Garrett that have a lot more of Peckinpah to them than of Wurlitzer, none of them really nag at me the way Two-Lane Blacktop still does. I suspect that has a lot to do with Oates, and since I've had time to adjust to the shock of realizing that he is, in the scheme of things, the movie's designated straight man, I've come to think that this, too, may be by design. I think that Taylor and Wilson, whose abhorrent, poker-faced cool--which is written into the roles, however much it's exacerbated by the stars' inexpressiveness and unwillingness to open up to the camera-- are Wurlitzer's heroes, but that Hellman may have instinctively felt closer to the Oates character. There's no doubt that he felt closer to Oates himself; not only did he ply the actor with big roles in four movies, but on the Criterion Collection DVD of Two-Lane Blacktop, Hellman reveals that Oates was the only performer who was given the advantage of having the whole concept in his head while they were shooting; none of the other actors were permitted to
see the entire script, just the pages with their own dialogue, if that. (This resulted in one minor crisis when Harry Dean Stanton, who had appeared in Ride in the Whirlwind, showed up for his cameo and was dismayed to learn that he was going to be required to make a pass at Oates and then cry when he was rebuffed.) To appreciate how much this unstated tension between the director and the writer works to send a charge through Two-Lane Blacktop, one need one watch Candy Mountain, where the lack of any challenge to Wurlitzer's jaded-bohemian conceits reduces the movie to a pleasant but pointless collection of gorgeous travelogue footage and
self-amused hipster cameos.

On the new DVD, Hellman recalls that, rather than try to exploit the pre-release excitement that Esquire (and, in an article that's included in the Criterion set, Rolling Stone) tried to drum up, Universal threw the movie away with a minimum of promotion. There's speculation now that the whole point of the Universal "youth division" slate was to produce pictures that, with a little help from the studio, would bomb, so that the dinosaurs in charge could proclaim that these hip new directors didn't have any better idea of how to make movies than the old farts did. Anyone who has any knowledge of how the movie business has traditionally been run knows that "plausible" is too weak a word for this theory. But I doubt that Two-Lane Blacktop would have been a big hit under any circumstances. The smash counterculture hits of the day, such as Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces, romanticized alienation by showing that such characters as Peter Fonda's Captain America and Jack Nicholson's Bobby Dupea were blameless in their glamorous suffering: audiences, made to understand that they were the crippled victims of pre-credit sequence battles that the movies couldn't bear to show us, were happy to project onto their big-screen pity party, and to relate to them even at their most selfishly petty and cruel. By contrast, Taylor and Wilson and Bird are just goin' down the road, feelin' numb. They're fascinating, but you wouldn't want to be them. I no longer would want to be Oates, but it's not hard to understand why, just by his presence, he undercuts the romanticism of youth that Hollywood was working so hard to truckle to in 1971. Hollywood is still doing that, of course, without the countercultural conceit that it represents some kind of political stance. But when you're really young, you don't look up to the people who are just a little older than you--or at least, I didn't, and most of the people I knew didn't either. We reserved out hero worship for people old enough to have gotten out around the block and found out a few things, who'd had experiences. If Oates's G.T.O. has had to make up his experiences, well, that gives him a poignant edge on the Driver and the Mechanic, who are just a couple of guys on the way to wonder where the best years of their lives went.

I know now that I brought a lot of myself to Two-Lane Blacktop when I first fell in love with it. Because of where I was at the time, I read things into it that not only weren't put there by the filmmakers--they fly in the face of what the filmmakers thought they were trying to say. I've come to terms with that, and I still love the movie, both for its own qualities and for the way it automatically brings back memories I have that are associated not just with all those earlier viewings of it but the person, now a distant stranger to me, who did the viewing. And it's good to know, from watching the DVD, that I'm not alone in this. In the early eighties, feeling stuck in my little corner of nowhereville, I looked at the open endless highway and the remote gas stations and greasy spoon diners that the movie's characters pass through and thought it looked like pretty good; ten years or so later, when I began to get enough distance from my own fantasies to see what the movie was really trying to say, I could see that the filmmakers wanted to show an America where the last frontier had been co-opted and that all this was supposed to seem bleak, bleary, cheap and corrupted. Now, in a documentary included in the DVD, Monte Hellman and a student film crew follow the route the characters took in the movie and are struck by how much the road has changed--and hit, I think, by a surprising sense of loss. Ironically, the passage of almost forty years has turned the world of Two-Lane Blacktop into something with a trace of the romantic, just what I'd always insisted on seeing in it anyway. There's something else there too, that was especially attractive to me when I was feeling alienated from the 1980s. As well as any movie I've ever seen, Two-Lane Blacktop captures the look and feel of the "seventies" that I remember catching glimpses of from the back seat of my mother's Volkswagen when I was a child, a look that I saw on street corners and when my parents would have one of their rare evenings out and my baby sitters would invite half their high school class to drop by. It wasn't the look that cariacturists have defined as "70s", the world of leisure suits and outrageous polyester threads. It's T-shirts and jeans and long, unwashed hair, a world where every day is casual day. It's the world I thought I was going to grow up into, and to prepare for that and then wake up in Reagan's Morning in America was a terrible shock. It was enough of a shock that it took me a long time to get over my self-destructive defiance and realize that you have to be a lot better-looking than I am--as good-looking as James Taylor and Dennis Wilson, for instance--to pull that look off. Of all the ironies connected with Two-Lane Blacktop, there may be none richer than this: in terms of fashion sense, at least, James Taylor invented grunge.

The Phil Nugent Experience wishes to thank Phil Freeman for any insights gleaned in shared discussions of 'Two-Lane Blacktop'.