The road movie has long since proven itself as one of the great Amer­i­can cul­tur­al forms, not least by cap­tur­ing the imag­i­na­tion of oth­er soci­eties, no mat­ter how dis­tant or dif­fer­ent. As New York Times crit­ic A.O. Scott declares in the video above, “one of the finest road movies, and per­haps the purest of them all, is Monte Hell­man’s Two-Lane Black­top.” In his orig­i­nal 1971 review of the film, a Roger Ebert described Hell­man as “an Amer­i­can direc­tor whose work is much prized by the French, who have a knack for find­ing exis­ten­tial truths in movies we thought were West­erns.” In some sense Two-Lane Black­top is indeed a West­ern, but Hell­man’s death ear­li­er this week will prompt many to revis­it the film and see that it’s also much more — as well as much less.

Two-Lane Black­top osten­si­bly tells the sto­ry of a cross-coun­try race from New Mex­i­co to Wash­ing­ton, D.C. In one car, a cus­tomized 1955 Chevro­let 150, are qua­si-hip­pie gear­heads known only as the Dri­ver and the Mechan­ic (joined for a stretch by a hitch­hik­ing Girl). In the oth­er, a brand-new GTO, is a mid­dle-aged man known only as GTO. “The mys­ti­cism of this movie is in its absence of mys­ti­cism,” says Scott. “It’s so lit­er­al-mind­ed, so bare-bones, so absurd, and it expos­es not only the romance of the open road and the car cul­ture, but the empti­ness, the nihilism.” Hell­man, as the New York­er’s Richard Brody puts it in his own video essay, “shears this com­po­si­tion down to its exis­ten­tial bare bones,” leav­ing not much more in its real­i­ty than what Ebert calls “mis­cel­la­neous estab­lish­ments thrown up along the sides of the road to sup­port life: motels, gas sta­tions, ham­burg­er stands.”

As stripped-down as its ’55 Chevy, Two-Lane Black­top rolled up in the wake of Den­nis Hop­per’s Easy Rid­er, whose suc­cess con­vinced more than a few stu­dios that cheap­ly pro­duced, counter-cul­tur­al­ly themed road movies could hit the box-office jack­pot. Though unsuc­cess­ful upon its ini­tial release just shy of 50 years ago, the film has only con­sol­i­dat­ed its pow­er since. Some of that pow­er comes from unex­pect­ed sources, such as the cast­ing of singer-song­writer James Tay­lor and the Beach Boys’ Den­nis Wil­son as the Dri­ver and the Mechan­ic. These musi­cians, to Brody’s mind, “exert a neg­a­tive charis­ma: their pres­ence is both pow­er­ful and blank, deeply expres­sive in its neu­tral­i­ty.” Scott sees Tay­lor’s turn in par­tic­u­lar as occu­py­ing “a realm beyond act­ing, in a kind of dead­pan, stoned, zen state of non-per­for­mance.”

As GTO, War­ren Oates brings all the tra­di­tion­al act­ing chops Two-Lane Black­top requires, shift­ing between brag­gado­cio, pathos, and a kind of post­mod­ern pos­tur­ing as often as he changes his bold­ly col­ored V‑neck sweaters. “This name­less dri­ver has bought the James Bond ide­al of the well-round­ed man,” writes Kent Jones in his essay on the film for the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion, “but he pre­fig­ures Woody Allen’s Zelig in the des­per­ate speed with which he adapts him­self to every new sit­u­a­tion and pas­sen­ger.” These ten­den­cies can’t save him on the entrop­ic open road, only empha­siz­ing as it does what Brody calls “the impos­si­bil­i­ty of soli­tude, the ten­dril-like encroach­ment of the out­side world.” But then, nei­ther can the mechan­i­cal sin­gle-mind­ed­ness of the Dri­ver and Mechan­ic. This is the Amer­i­can con­di­tion, but only in that it’s a high-octane dis­til­la­tion of the human one.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Brief His­to­ry of the Great Amer­i­can Road Trip

178,000 Images Doc­u­ment­ing the His­to­ry of the Car Now Avail­able on a New Stan­ford Web Site

James Tay­lor Gives Gui­tar Lessons, Teach­ing You How to Play Clas­sic Songs Like “Fire and Rain,” “Coun­try Road” & “Car­oli­na in My Mind”

Rock Stars Who Died Before They Got Old: What They Would Look Like Today

Tom Waits Names 14 of His Favorite Art Films

A Hulk­ing 1959 Chevy Bel Air Gets Oblit­er­at­ed by a Mid-Size 2009 Chevy Mal­ibu in a Crash Test

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

This deep into the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic, how many cinephiles haven’t yet got word of the bank­rupt­cy or shut­ter­ing of a favorite movie the­ater? Though the coro­n­avirus has­n’t quite killed film­go­ing dead — at least not every­where in the world — the cul­ture of cin­e­ma itself had been show­ing signs of ill health long before any of us had heard the words “social dis­tanc­ing.” The pre­vi­ous plague, in the view of Mar­tin Scors­ese, was the Hol­ly­wood super­hero-fran­chise block­buster. “That’s not cin­e­ma,” the auteur-cinephile told Empire mag­a­zine in 2019. “Hon­est­ly, the clos­est I can think of them, as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the cir­cum­stances, is theme parks.”

This past March, Scors­ese pub­lished an essay in Harp­er’s called “Il Mae­stro.” Osten­si­bly a reflec­tion on the work of Fed­eri­co Felli­ni, it also pays trib­ute to Fellini’s hey­day, when on any giv­en night in New York a young movie fan could find him­self torn between screen­ings of the likes of La Dolce Vita, François Truf­faut’s Shoot the Piano Play­er, Andrzej Waj­da’s Ash­es and Dia­monds, John Cas­savetes’ Shad­ows, and the work of oth­er mas­ters besides. This was ear­ly in the time when, as New York­er crit­ic Antho­ny Lane puts it, “adven­tur­ous moviego­ing was part of the agreed cul­tur­al duty, when the duty itself was more of a trip than a drag, and when a review­er could, in the inter­ests of cross-ref­er­ence, men­tion the names ‘Drey­er’ or ‘Vigo’ with­out being accused of sim­ply drop­ping them for show.”

Alas, writes Scors­ese, today the art of cin­e­ma today is “sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly deval­ued, side­lined, demeaned, and reduced to its low­est com­mon denom­i­na­tor, ‘con­tent.’ ” Video essay­ist Daniel Simp­son of Eye­brow Cin­e­ma calls this lament “more than an artist rail­ing against a busi­ness­man­’s ter­mi­nol­o­gy, but a yearn­ing for a time when movies used to be spe­cial in and of them­selves, not just as an exten­sion of a stream­ing ser­vice.” In “The Decay of Cin­e­ma,” Simp­son con­nects this cri de cinephilic coeur by the man who direct­ed Taxi Dri­ver and Good­Fel­las to a 25-year-old New York Times opin­ion piece by Susan Son­tag. A mid­cen­tu­ry-style film devo­tee if ever there was one, Son­tag mourns “the con­vic­tion that cin­e­ma was an art unlike any oth­er: quin­tes­sen­tial­ly mod­ern; dis­tinc­tive­ly acces­si­ble; poet­ic and mys­te­ri­ous and erot­ic and moral — all at the same time.”

Some may object to Son­tag’s claim that tru­ly great films had become “vio­la­tions of the norms and prac­tices that now gov­ern movie mak­ing every­where.” Just two weeks after her piece ran, Simp­son points out, the Coen broth­ers’ Far­go opened; soon to come were acclaimed pic­tures by Mike Leigh and Lars von Tri­er, and the next few years would see the emer­gence of Wes Ander­son and Paul Thomas Ander­son both. But what of today’s mas­ter­pieces, like Chung Mong-hong’s A Sun? Though released before the hav­oc of COVID-19, it has nev­er­the­less — “with­out a fran­chise, rock-star celebri­ties, or an ele­va­tor-pitch high con­cept” — lan­guished on Net­flix. And as for an event of such seem­ing­ly enor­mous cin­e­mat­ic import as the com­ple­tion of Orson Welles’ The Oth­er Side of the Wind three decades after his death, the result wound up “sim­ply dumped on the plat­form with every­thing else.”

In a time like this, when the many stuck at home have few options besides stream­ing ser­vices, one hes­i­tates to accuse Net­flix of killing either cin­e­ma or cinephil­ia. And yet Simp­son sees a con­sid­er­able dif­fer­ence between being a cinephile and being a “user,” a label that sug­gests “a cus­tomer to be sati­at­ed” (if not an addict to be grant­ed a fix of his habit-form­ing com­mod­i­ty). “There’s only one prob­lem with home cin­e­ma,” writes Lane. “It doesn’t exist.” Choice “pret­ty much defines our sta­tus as con­sumers, and has long been an unques­tioned tenet of the cap­i­tal­ist feast, but in fact carte blanche is no way to run a cul­tur­al life (or any kind of life, for that mat­ter).” If we con­tin­ue to do our view­ing in algo­rithm-padded iso­la­tion, we sur­ren­der what Simp­son describes as “the human con­nec­tion to the film expe­ri­ence” — one of the things that, when all the social dis­tanc­ing ends, even for­mer­ly casu­al movie­go­ers may find them­selves des­per­ate­ly crav­ing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Susan Sontag’s 50 Favorite Films (and Her Own Cin­e­mat­ic Cre­ations)

Mar­tin Scors­ese Explains the Dif­fer­ence Between Cin­e­ma and Movies

Mar­tin Scors­ese on How “Diver­si­ty Guar­an­tees Our Cul­tur­al Sur­vival,” in Film and Every­thing Else

Watch the New Trail­er for Orson Welles’ Lost Film, The Oth­er Side of the Wind: A Glimpse of Footage from the Final­ly Com­plet­ed Film

This Is Your Kids’ Brains on Inter­net Algo­rithms: A Chill­ing Case Study Shows What’s Wrong with the Inter­net Today

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.