4 • Two-Lane Blacktop
The white lines of a freeway, spotlighted by headlight lamps, flash past into darkness. Warren Oates, white-knuckled and with a nervous grin plastered across his face, yells, barely audible over the din of the roaring engine, “What are you trying to do, blow my mind?” A caption scrolls past on the screen: “Their lives begin at 140 m.p.h.” Youngsters in search of more high-octane kicks in the wake of Easy Rider would likely have found the promise of much excitement in this trailer for Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop. Rapidly cut shots of fast cars race across the screen, while the presence of singer-songwriter James Taylor and Beach Boy Dennis Wilson surely indicates another cool contemporary rock ’n’ roll soundtrack. The trailer highlights the cross-country race between Taylor and Warren Oates’s characters and their simultaneous war for the affections of the young drifter played by Laurie Bird. The trailer’s prevailing sensibility is urgency, emphasizing the high-stakes race, in which the loser forfeits ownership of his vehicle to the victor. The trailer hints at the dangerous underground network of the street-racing fraternity. The lurid attention paid to this illegal activity aligns the film with the AIP exploitation-film stock from which Easy Rider emerged. Two-Lane Blacktop teases an exploration of a menacing subculture on the fringes of society, seen at clandestine late-night roadside meetings in pursuit of the single goal of driving very, very fast. The trailer concludes with an exciting promise of entry into “the far out world of the high speed scene!” This was a fundamentally dishonest marketing campaign.
Universal hoped that Two-Lane Blacktop would capitalize on Easy Rider’s success, which was largely determined by the earlier film’s savvy appropriation of the exploitation formula. However, in adopting Easy Rider’s production methods, Hellman was largely free to subvert and neutralize the screenplay’s generic/exploitation content. Nevertheless, it was still marketed as an exploitation/youth film, and it failed both at the box office and with critics. This happened in part because it failed to fulfill the exploitation promises of its mismarketing, but also because it was perceived as a transparent and belated Easy Rider cash-in. The recent reappraisal of Hellman’s film has largely focused on celebrating the very things that were condemned in its initial release, but to view it as a typical New Hollywood film is to continue to reinforce a reductive and ahistorical understanding of the period.
To describe the plot of Two-Lane Blacktop as it was filmed is to risk being misleading, because the events it depicts are so slight, and presented in such a deadpan manner, that putting them in writing risks attributing narrative significance to events that pass by without dramatic emphasis in Hellman’s rendering. The film follows two young male car enthusiasts, referred to only as the driver (James Taylor) and the mechanic (Dennis Wilson), as they drift through California’s highway system in a heavily customized 1955 Chevy, occasionally participating in street races. A young woman, referred to as the girl (Laurie Bird), climbs into the back of the car one day while it is parked at a diner. Anonymously, wordlessly, she goes along for the ride. After a number of encounters with a stock 1970 Pontiac GTO on the road, the driver and the mechanic find themselves sharing a gas pump with the driver of that car, played by Warren Oates and referred to as GTO. A challenge is issued: the two vehicles will race to Washington, D.C. The prize: the pink slip, the document that confers ownership of the losing vehicle. What follows is a brief series of sketches and interludes: run-ins with the police, street races, hitchhikers, and mechanical failures. These incidents pass by in such an understated manner that any notion of an unfolding narrative barely registers. As the film reaches its conclusion, the girl switches her allegiance from Taylor’s driver to Oates’s GTO. The driver decides to abandon the race, turning back from his leading position to intercept GTO and the girl. All four characters converge on a diner close to their destination of Washington, D.C. The girl abandons both the driver and GTO, leaving with a passing motorcyclist who happens to be in the diner at the time. At this point, the driver, the mechanic, and GTO apparently abandon their race entirely. The film concludes with an epilogue showing that life goes on for its characters exactly as it found them at its opening: GTO continues to pick up hitchhikers and regale them with excerpts from his life story, and the driver takes the ’55 Chevy through another street race. In this concluding scene the film itself slows, stops, and incinerates before the audience’s eyes.
Production History
Two-Lane Blacktop was written by former western TV actor and one-time writer for Gunsmoke (CBS, 1965) Will Corry and was acquired as a property by agent Mike Medavoy. According to Medavoy, Terrence Malick, who was working, pre-Badlands (dir. Terrence Malick, Warner Bros., 1973), as a Hollywood script doctor at the time, rewrote it.1 Medavoy offered Corry’s script to his client, director Monte Hellman, along with Floyd Mutrux’s The Christian Licorice Store. Hellman turned down Mutrux’s screenplay, which later surfaced under the direction of James Frawley for National General Pictures in 1971. Hellman had been working for the preceding decade in television, theater, and the Roger Corman stable that had reared Easy Rider. In addition to editing a number of Corman efforts—notably the pre–Easy Rider biker exploitation picture The Wild Angels, starring Fonda and written by Nicholson—Hellman directed Jack Nicholson in two Corman westerns: Ride in the Whirlwind and The Shooting.
A self-consciously stilted, almost impenetrably cryptic film shot against a stark Utah backdrop, The Shooting was written by Five Easy Pieces scribe Carole Eastman and is distinguished by memorable appearances by the reliably hangdog Warren Oates and a menacingly villainous young Jack Nicholson. A streak of impulsive violence underscores Nicholson’s performance, without elevating it to the stylized mania that would become a hallmark of his later screen persona. Hellman and Eastman’s studied avoidance of conventional generic resolution takes on an absurdist bent on the way to its puzzling conclusion.
In search of his next project while both The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind lacked a distributor in the United States, Hellman found something in the screenplay of Two-Lane Blacktop sufficiently appealing to persuade him to accept the project. He later said of his decision, “I liked the IDEA of Two-Lane Blacktop, so I lied, and told [Medavoy] that I thought it was a great script, and then after I was hired I said that, ‘I think we need a lot of work on this script.’”2 Hellman would elsewhere label Corry’s script “the most insipid, silly sentimental, dumb movie you could imagine. But it was about a race. I was attracted to just the idea of a cross-country race.”3 Hellman enlisted novelist Rudy Wurlitzer, whose only screen credit at the time was the dark, X-rated, postapocalyptic/counterculture meld Glen and Randa (dir. and cowritten Jim McBride, Universal Marion Corporation, 1971), to rewrite Two-Lane Blacktop.4 Wurlitzer had even stronger reservations about the material. Hellman recalls that Wurlitzer, “read five pages, and said, ‘I can’t read this,’ and I said, ‘well, you don’t have to. The basic idea is a cross-country race between two cars,’ and so he wrote a completely new script that had pretty much no relationship to the original other than the driver, and the . . . mechanic.”5
The path through preproduction on Two-Lane Blacktop was not an easy one. Hellman began developing the project with producer Michael Laughlin at Cinema Center Films, the short-lived (1967–1972) film production branch of the CBS television network. The auditioning process was arduous, with Hellman and casting director Fred Roos testing hundreds of actors and nonprofessionals in Los Angeles and New York.6 Hellman cast James Taylor in the lead after seeing a billboard advertising the singer’s breakthrough second album, Sweet Baby James (1970) while driving in Los Angeles. Roos suggested Beach Boy Dennis Wilson. Laurie Bird originally came to the attention of the crew as a bohemian hanger-on who gravitated toward the casting sessions in New York. Impressed by her charisma, Hellman envisioned her as a prototype for the character of the girl and recorded a four-hour interview with her that he referred to when casting for the role in Los Angeles. It was only after these Los Angeles casting sessions failed to find a suitable performer for the role that it occurred to Hellman to cast Bird in the role.7 Of the four leads, the seasoned Warren Oates was the only one with previous on-screen credits to his name, although in Hellman’s estimation, it was Wilson who was “the most famous person who wound up in the movie.”8 Screen tests were undertaken “to satisfy a lot of studio executives” that Taylor and Bird would be able to carry their roles.9 Oates came to Two-Lane Blacktop after having been turned down for director Vernon Zimmerman’s trucker comedy Deadhead Miles (Paramount Pictures, 1973), from an early Terrence Malick screenplay. Hellman only cast Oates after Bruce Dern confirmed his unavailability for the role.10
At this stage, with the major roles cast, an executive at Cinema Center Films read the script for the first time and found little to have faith in, deciding to pass on the project. This left Hellman little recourse but to take “the picture literally to every studio in town,” including Columbia (via BBS), Warner Bros. (via John Calley), and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.11 None of the production executives at any of these studios believed that Hellman would be able to complete the film for his proposed $1.1 million budget. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had further reservations that Hellman “could maintain interest in a picture that was shot entirely within a car.”12 Finally, executive Ned Tanen at Universal agreed to finance the film on the condition that the budget not exceed $900,000. Hellman’s film ultimately came in under budget at $850,000.13
The new modes of production established by Easy Rider were necessarily adopted by the low-budget Two-Lane Blacktop. Most obviously, both films feature an emphasis on location shooting, a trend that was emerging in multiple Hollywood genres at the time. Unlike Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces, which predominantly utilized real locations accompanied by a handful of constructed sets and augmented real-world locations, Two-Lane Blacktop was filmed entirely on location, using existing settings. More dramatically, Hellman decided to shoot the movie in sequence, meaning that the entire film crew undertook the same cross-country journey depicted in the film. This presented a number of logistical hurdles: Universal wanted the film to be shot in rural California, which the studio felt offered a sufficient degree of geographical variation. Hellman and executive producer Gary Kurtz refused. Budgetary and practical restraints therefore necessitated a relatively small crew of eighteen, traveling in half a dozen vehicles.14
The decision to shoot on location in sequence produced some specific artistic and aesthetic qualities. Having a relatively small crew facilitated a degree of practical freedom, permitting Hellman to follow inspiration where and when it struck. On the commentary accompanying the Umbrella Australian DVD release, Kurtz recalls that a roadside stockyard was included in the film simply “because we drove by, and said, ‘that looks great, we use it.’”15 As so much of the movie is set within moving cars, many such scenes were shot while in transit between locations.16
A further extrapolation of the Easy Rider production methods was the use of nonprofessional performers sourced on location. Easy Rider had incorporated actual residents of on-screen locations for key scenes, most memorably in the Louisiana café sequence. Hopper had rejected members of the local amateur theater company in favor of the clientele who happened to be in the café at the time of production. Two-Lane Blacktop is almost completely populated with nonprofessional actors, from the untrained dramatic leads (excepting Oates) to the gas station attendants and store clerks. Drivers and vehicles were sourced from real street-racing clubs, a proposition that on many occasions was initially met with suspicion by the outlaw racers. State police also appeared on-screen, equally distrustful of the filmmakers’ intentions. Roles were cast on location as the production rolled through towns.17 A similar sense of lived-in realism was brought to the roles played by Taylor, Wilson, and Bird when Hellman decided to forgo having a costume department, instead taking the performers to opportunity shops in downtown Los Angeles, where they picked out their clothing. All three wear the same outfits for the duration of the film: jeans, chambray work shirts, and denim jackets for Taylor and Wilson, and jeans and an army surplus jacket for Bird; nondescript, contemporary fashions.18
Anecdotes from the production of Two-Lane Blacktop illustrate some of the outcomes of Hellman’s unconventional production practices. One noteworthy sequence, in which the girl panhandles tourists for change in Needles, California, was shot in an unsealed public square, with the telephoto lens–equipped camera concealed in an adjoining department store building. A mix of employed extras and unwitting members of the general public were solicited for change on camera, then asked to sign release forms after the camera stopped rolling. This process made it possible to capture natural, unguarded reactions.
In addition to shooting in chronological sequence, Hellman chose to withhold the screenplay in its entirety from all the performers except Oates. This creative decision further blurred the line between documentary and fiction, as the performers found themselves not only living through the experience of the road journey both on-camera and off, but also reacting to the various situations of the screenplay for the first time as the cameras rolled. Under this model, the actors approached each scene without foreknowledge of what lay ahead. For Hellman, his performers “didn’t need to know any more than what [had] happened before, but not [what] was going to happen, because in life you don’t know what’s going to happen the next day.”19 As with Hopper’s (mis)direction of Easy Rider’s Louisiana café sequence, in which he coaxed hostility from nonprofessional performers by telling them beforehand that Billy, Wyatt, and George had raped and murdered a group of local teens, Hellman captured his principals reacting, rather than acting. Hellman’s unorthodox method began to upset the power dynamic between director and actor, chafing Taylor in particular, who by the midpoint of the shoot “really felt that he was out of control, that he had no control over his life. He refused to go on unless [Hellman] gave him the script”; the director finally relented.20
The circumstances of Two-Lane Blacktop’s untraditional production methods are visible onscreen in the striking authenticity of the locations and supporting cast, as well as the deadpan naturalism of the untrained leads. Like Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces before it, Two-Lane Blacktop features documentary-style sequences that employ rapidly cut, noncausally motivated montage, handheld camera, nonsynchronous sound, continuous soundscapes, and the use of a wide angle lens. These sequences are less concerned with imparting narrative or causal information than they are with establishing an impressionistic sense of the world each film inhabits. The documentary-style montage sequences in all three films are attuned to the nuances of their contemporary, real-world American settings. As was done in the New Orleans Mardi Gras sequence of Easy Rider, Hellman allows his characters to interact with real people moving through the world, while his cameras simply observe, and later assembles these shots into an associational montage. In the case of Two-Lane Blacktop, Hellman and Kurtz hired out an actual speedway in Memphis and staged a drag race that was open to the public. As in the Needles panhandling sequence, Taylor, Wilson, Bird, and Oates mingled with the assembled throng at the race, under the observation of roaming cameras.
The small crew and on-the-fly production of Two-Lane Blacktop helped to define the look of the final film, which is characterized by minimal editing, long takes, wide framing, and use of available light and high-speed film stock. Night scenes are often underexposed, to the point that the screen is almost completely black. Hellman has acknowledged the intertwined relationship of production style and aesthetic outcome, wryly stating that “the austerity in my work is a result of the austerity in the budgets.”21 In Two-Lane Blacktop, Hellman’s aesthetic is workmanlike, bare bones, sparse. The film offers few of the moments of lyricism that punctuate Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces. Instead, it presents a series of cinematic experiences that do not much resemble Hollywood, or for that matter New Hollywood, output. Hellman employs flat, static mise-en-scène, inexpressively naturalistic performances, elliptical edits that often omit key plot points, and the corresponding inclusion of narratively unmotivated “in-between moments that most filmmakers would automatically cut,” as the central characters spend long periods of time on-screen eating silently in diners, sipping cans of Coca-Cola, huddled in anonymous hotel rooms, and generally lounging nonchalantly.22 While other directors would toy with antidramatic sensibilities in the New Hollywood moment, Two-Lane Blacktop reduces them to an unprecedented vanishing point. Hellman’s unrushed approach to the passage of cinematic time places him in the company of post–French New Wave contemporaries such as Eric Rohmer and Maurice Pialat, and indeed both Ride in the Whirlwind and The Shooting were well received in France. With Two-Lane Blacktop, Hellman’s cinematic style veered into territory that was anathema to the carefully developed, streamlined rules of Classical Hollywood storytelling. Where Easy Rider’s aimless motor journey is classically told, Two-Lane Blacktop more closely conveys the actual experience of those long hours traversing America’s endless roads to nowhere, although Hopper’s unreleased extended cut of Easy Rider may have offered a similarly durational experience.
More so than Easy Rider, which depicts the swirling social climate from which it emerged, Two-Lane Blacktop comes closest to offering a pseudo-documentary look at the experience of youth’s aimless revolt in early 1970s America. Hellman’s casting of nonprofessional performers and the film’s fidelity to real-world locations and their inhabitants add crucial dimensions of realism. Speaking of the film’s documentary quality, Hellman dubs it “a time capsule. The route that we were following was the original Route 66. . . . [I]t pretty much doesn’t exist anymore. . . . [The film is] a record of a time that was very important in American history, and has been lost.”23 The diners, gas stations, and parking lots the protagonists pass through are as authentic as they are unremarkable, landmarks as indicative of the contemporary experience of American youth as the Coca-Cola signs that frequently adorn the walls.
Hellman could not have made the film in this way had Hollywood not been broadsided by the success of Easy Rider. Hellman acknowledges such a debt when he says, “the end of the ’60s was a . . . fortunate time to be making films, purely because of one movie—Easy Rider.”24 The influence of Easy Rider reverberates through Two-Lane Blacktop, but the color and dynamism of the earlier film are noticeably muted. Two-Lane Blacktop offers a dim reflection of Easy Rider’s drug-addled joie de vivre, after a prolonged two-year comedown from Hopper’s giddy high. Where the spirit of Easy Rider is personified in the fast-talking hyperactivity of Hopper’s Billy and Oates’s GTO, Two-Lane Blacktop’s temperament is closer to Fonda’s Wyatt and Taylor’s driver: softly spoken, seemingly unconcerned by worldly affairs, aloof, and vaguely damaged.
Style and Subversion
Hellman did follow Hopper’s footsteps in one regard: editing. Hellman’s loose and freewheeling directorial approach not only freed him to experiment with his performers and use of locations, but also left him with an abundance of filmed material. As had been done with Easy Rider, Hellman originally turned in a much longer first cut: three and one-half hours in this case, despite a contractual obligation to deliver a film under two hours long. Much like Easy Rider, one of the first scenes to be excised was the original opening. As such, Two-Lane Blacktop begins in media res, with the driver and mechanic taking part in an illegal street race that is quickly interrupted by the police. This sequence is in fact a stitching together of two different scenes from the initial cut. Like Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces, Two-Lane Blacktop refuses to mete out expository information, demanding that its audience employ a certain amount of guesswork. But where Five Easy Pieces delivers a modicum of narrative satisfaction by eventually revealing the true nature of Bobby Dupea’s origins, and Easy Rider deliberately restricts its characterizations to the level of archetype, Two-Lane Blacktop offers no such clarification. The consistent feature of its mode of storytelling is frustration.
The film opens with the standard animated logo of the revolving Universal globe, accompanied by the roaring of a car engine, suggesting the high-octane thrills promised in the trailer and tagline. The first scene depicts, in a detached, pseudo-documentary style, the 1955 Chevy taking part in a drag race that is cut short by the arrival of the police. This sequence quickly establishes the mode the film will follow throughout its duration, as documentary-style, handheld shots taken in low-light conditions are intercut with longer wide shots recorded from fixed camera positions. After Taylor’s driver watches an initial street race, his Chevy lines up for the next race, excitingly leaping off the mark, then reversing back into position. A static long shot gazes down the stretch of road upon which the race will take place. The adjudicator’s torches change from red to green, and the cars take off, Hellman holding on this long shot as the cars disappear into the center of the frame, racing toward the vanishing point of the straight stretch of road. The next shot finds the camera positioned at the side of the roadway, with the second race adjudicator at the right edge of the frame. The Chevy and its competitor race into frame left, the Chevy crossing the finish line first by a nose. Only at this point does Hellman cut to the interior space of the Chevy cabin, with a point-of-view shot depicting the driver’s field of vision as his car decelerates after the race and an oncoming police car comes into view. Hellman forgoes crosscutting between the two competitors, the interiors and exteriors of the cars, simply holding on a long shot of the two vehicles disappearing into the distance. The inert approach excises the kind of excitement that might be expected from the opening sequence of a film that is ostensibly about street racing. Hellman sets the tone by establishing a dramatic moment of cinematic action that is subsequently truncated and subverted by the mode of its representation, setting up the audience with a particular set of expectations, which are then confused by stylistic modes of (in)action.
After invoking and then subverting a number of generic signifiers, the film drifts aimlessly through a number of non-narrative scenarios for its first half hour, depicting episodes from the daily life of its protagonists without clear causal salience. These instances play like the most directionless moments of Easy Rider projected at half speed and might be procedural in nature were they not so thoroughly free from context or exposition. The mechanic changes the tires on the Chevy, banters with a gas station attendant, and makes small- talk with the driver and the girl. A clear plot objective is established at the thirty-minute mark, when the driver challenges GTO to race to him to Washington, D.C., for pink slips. Hellman himself says of this moment that “the real start of the movie . . . is when they make the bet,” a statement as misleading as his film.25 All of Two-Lane Blacktop’s formal systems work to undermine this narrative objective. The inexpressive performances of Taylor, Wilson, Bird, and the majority of the nonprofessional extras inhibit the generation of drama, the exception being Oates, whose manic performance is riddled with deliberate inconsistencies and anachronisms. The camera regards its subjects from a deliberately detached distance, with minimal editing. Scenes that would provide particular thrills within a more generically consistent mode of stylistic representation pointedly undermine and work against viewer expectations in Two-Lane Blacktop.
Midway through the film, the occupants of the Chevy and GTO converge on a small Oklahoma town in the early hours of the morning to repair the carburetor on the GTO, only to be interrupted by a local police cruiser, prompting Taylor to flee, with the police in pursuit. Formally, the film subverts generic expectations, as the shot framings and mise-en-scène downplay what is seen of the car chase, regarding the on-screen action from a distant, fixed position as the cars disappear over the horizon. The absence of soundtrack music and the complex editing further dampen any excitement in the scene, and a hard cut elides the outcome of the car chase altogether. Hellman truncates the moment of generic excitement, cutting from the chase to a static shot of the driver standing at the counter of an automobile parts shop. His arrival at this destination, and, more pressingly, his evasion of the police pursuit, is never acknowledged. Hellman instead sees fit to hold on this wide shot for twenty-eight seconds as Taylor places his order, and the store attendant looks the part up in his inventory, fetches the item, and begins writing out a receipt for his customer. No verbal reference is made to, nor any dramatic emphasis placed on, the fact that the driver has just evaded the police car. Hellman chooses to cut away from the origin of narrative action (the car chase), replacing it with the mundane activity of Taylor buying mechanical parts at an indeterminate point of time after eluding the police.
This subversion of generic expectations is at odds with the promotional materials that accompanied the release of Two-Lane Blacktop. Sold to its prospective audience with an emphasis on high-speed thrills, Hellman’s film is, in execution, glacially paced. This is not without precedent. Peter Stanfield has noted a similar disjunction between marketing and content in a radically different context: the late 1950s hot rod film cycle, describing “the extraordinary mismatch between the thrills promised by the sales pitch and the pedestrian action of the films themselves.”26 Further misleading prerelease expectations was the fact that Two-Lane Blacktop was anticipated by a modicum of hype in strange places: in April 1971 the front page of Esquire magazine preemptively proclaimed Two-Lane Blacktop its “nomination for the movie of the year” and “the first movie worth reading,” publishing Rudolph Wurlitzer and Will Corry’s screenplay in full as its feature cover article.27 This prominent endorsement was accompanied by the casting of popular rock musicians Taylor and Wilson and an exciting trailer that emphasized the street racing content. All of these promotional factors were obvious ploys directed at the post–Easy Rider youth market. But Two-Lane Blacktop was not the film the studio material purported it to be, with Hellman’s sparse, meditative style making even the most introspective moments of Easy Rider look like The Great Race (dir. Blake Edwards, Warner Bros., 1965). And this comparison assumes that youth-cult road movie fans made it to the cinema at all; Oates would later publicly complain that the film had been underpromoted, missing its audience altogether: “Nobody’s spending any money on advertising!”28 The situation was not helped when Esquire unprecedentedly withdrew its “movie of the year” nomination for Two-Lane Blacktop in its September 1971 issue, just months after the film’s commercial and critical failure. Attempting to distance himself from the film his publication had so loudly championed, Esquire editor Harold T. P. Hayes slammed the film: “The screenplay was wonderful . . . but the film is vapid: the photography arch and tricky and naturally, therefore, poorly lit and unfocussed; the acting . . . amateurish, disingenuous and wooden; the direction introverted to the degree that fundamental relationships become incidental to the film’s purpose. The script has become a victim of the auteur principle.”29 This final sentence indicates an exhaustion with the very kind of directorial freedom that is ordinarily considered a major hallmark of the New Hollywood moment.
While there are differences between the screenplay and the final cut of Two-Lane Blacktop, they are not nearly so dramatic as Hayes’s editorial would have one believe. In terms of plot arc, Hellman faithfully reproduced Rudolph Wurlitzer and Will Corry’s screenplay, which appeared in Esquire. The director’s main omissions fall into two categories, the first being expository details of the day-to-day lived experience of the Chevy’s driver and mechanic: sleeping bags, campfires, wrangling the financial conditions before a street race, and spoken references to cars. The second category of excised material involves the development of the romantic relationship between Laurie Bird’s girl and James Taylor’s driver. Indeed, considering that Hellman initially chose Wurlitzer to rewrite Corry’s draft of the screenplay because he was impressed by a group sex scene in the writer’s novel Nog (1969), Two-Lane Blacktop, like Easy Rider before it, is in many ways a remarkably chaste film. Sexual activity is limited to offscreen moaning from Bird and Wilson, overheard by Taylor outside their motel room early in the film, and a single onscreen kiss shared by Taylor and Bird much later. By contrast, in Wurlitzer’s screenplay the Taylor and Bird characters impulsively and wordlessly have sex on the first night she joins their journey, while the mechanic lies nearby in his sleeping bag. Later in the screenplay, “The Driver unbuttons the Girl’s blouse and kisses her breasts,” in the presence of the mechanic, GTO, and a watching farm boy in a country field.30 The frank and unabashed sexuality of Wurlitzer’s screenplay more firmly aligns Two-Lane Blacktop with a youth-audience exploitation angle. Wurlitzer’s screenplay is also full of impenetrably technical mechanical jargon, such as, “I ain’t sure if each lobe of the breaker cam is passing under the rubber block on the point arm. You know what I mean?”31 Despite its impenetrability, such language could be perceived as a deliberate attempt by Wurlitzer to authentically engage with an obsessive youth car culture. Where such dialogue does appear in Hellman’s film, it is in a markedly truncated form, delivered with such detachment that it is difficult to imagine any excitement being generated among rev-heads in the audience. Hellman’s systematic underplaying of such material is just one example of his continual subversion of generic expectations. Thus, according to Kent Jones, the “flavor and color of street-racing life and the road, evoked so beautifully in Wurlitzer’s script” is replaced by “a trancelike absorption in movement and ritual.”32
Some of Hellman’s deletions from Wurlitzer’s screenplay barely alter the shape of the narrative but nonetheless shift the emphasis of the film. For example, toward the end of Wurlitzer’s screenplay, following a near-collision with a fatal road hazard, the mechanic reveals to the girl that he and the driver submitted phony pink slips to GTO as their stake in the race. This information recasts the film’s dramatic arc in an entirely different light, the unsporting subterfuge causing the viewer to reevaluate the stakes of the car race that has motivated the entire narrative.
Needless to say, the disappointment that Esquire’s Harold T. P. Hayes finds in the disparities between Wurlitzer’s and Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktops likely stems from the tone and mood of the interpretation, a direct result of the creative freedom afforded to Hellman in the wake of the success of Easy Rider. Hellman’s subversion comes to the fore during Taylor’s mad dash to catch up to Bird after she leaves the Memphis racetrack with GTO at the film’s climax. To compare the sequence as described in Wurlitzer’s screenplay with Hellman’s rendition of the same series of events is to find two very different modes of emphasis. Wurlitzer’s screenplay, in part, reads:
The Car. The Driver keeps the Car flat out at 147 m.p.h. His hands clench the wheel. His mouth is tight with anxiety. The Mechanic, unable to look at the Driver, watches the road. His face is grim, even frightened. The Driver is taking chances: Passing a truck at the top of a hill. Blasting through a small town at 140 m.p.h. Taking corners on two wheels.
MECHANIC (as the driver squeals around a corner): Easy . . . Take . . . It . . . easy. You’re gonna kill us.
The driver doesn’t hear.33
At this point in the film the narrative has already provided the high-stakes impetus for the action, as the finish line for the race draws near and Taylor’s driver decides to win back the girl. Reading the script, one might imagine several possibilities for excitement to be generated through formal means: whip pans of the Chevy racing through the countryside, undercranked footage of the road flashing past, frantic crosscutting between the interior and exterior of the car, intercut with close-ups of the driver’s steely, focused gaze, steering wheel death grip, and the mechanic’s sweating brow, all set to an urgent soundtrack. Wurlitzer’s penultimate sequence evokes a sense of climactic, high-speed excitement.
Hellman’s filming of said sequence utilizes the stylistic characteristics he employs throughout the rest of the film: wide framing, minimal editing, and the absence of nondiegetic sound or music. The mechanic’s line, “easy, easy, man, you’re going to kill us,” is delivered in an interior shot of the Chevy after a cut from a similar shot from inside the GTO. The lack of an exterior shot of the Chevy prior to the mechanic’s line means that the sound of the engine is the only indicator that the driver is in fact driving recklessly. The subsequent shots of the Chevy overtaking another vehicle at high speed, and a shot of Taylor’s face as he drives, are so underexposed due to the low light shooting conditions that it is difficult to appreciate the peril inherent in the dangerous overtaking maneuver. While the squealing tires, thundering engine, and honking horn aurally indicate danger, the film’s visual style remains routinely understated. The crosscutting to a point-of-view shot looking out from the windscreen of the GTO, with Oates driving relatively lackadaisically through a woodland environment, further arrests narrative momentum. The unhurried sensibility is emphasized by the almost comical lounge muzack that plays from the car stereo. By deliberately undercutting narrative drive through deadpan representation of crucial narrative moments, Hellman deflates any superficial sense of suspense, simultaneously piercing and exposing generic convention. Similar games play out in the way the contemplative, zen-like The Shooting quickly abandons the western generic formula in favor of absurdist abstraction. Hellman freezes his narratives at moments of existential crisis, dwelling within the dilation of cinematic time and character inaction.
In Blacktop’s climactic sequence, all four characters converge on a diner in the early morning, and Hellman employs subtle but complex camera positioning and staging to frustrate narrative momentum, overriding the ironic intent of Wurlitzer’s screenplay, as the film’s narrative goals are arbitrarily dismantled and abandoned. Characters enter, move through complex spatial configurations, and depart the carefully composed cinematic space of the diner like the comings and goings of a screwball comedy, but with none of the snappy narrative momentum that is a hallmark of that cycle, as Hellman continually derails the dramatic tension of the scene. Ostensibly the sequence is one of complete narrative dissolution, in which the goals of the protagonists are totally abandoned, but in Hellman’s rendering the characters are as impassive as ever. Committed to studiously minimal camerawork and editing, employing cutting and camera movement sparingly, Hellman incorporates conventional stylistic practices of the Classical Hollywood lexicon, such as the shot-reverse-shot, eyeline matches, and the close-up reaction shot. Yet Hellman puts these devices to thoroughly subversive use, employing reaction shots with no reaction, curtailing any sense of emotion at the very point of dramatic crisis, and allowing his characters to file out of the film itself. Hellman cuts to new configurations of the diner’s space, flagrantly violating the conventions of Classical Hollywood continuity editing. Momentarily disorienting cuts to new perspectives of the location confuse the spatial relationships of his characters. Hellman prominently frames anonymous new characters, prefiguring the narrative importance of the motorcyclist who will soon whisk the girl out of the film, disrupting the momentum of the narrative at crucial plot points. At the moment of narrative climax, Hellman allows time to stretch out, with lengthy silences, pauses, and unmet gazes. In Wurlitzer’s screenplay, this sequence of events reads like rapid fire:
The boy at the counter slowly pays his check and stands up. He looks directly at the Girl. She returns his look. He goes outside. GTO stands up and goes to the men’s room. The Girl stands up and walks out the door, after the boy. The Mechanic and Driver watch her go over to the GTO and get her laundry bag. Then she goes over to the motorcycle and gets on the back behind the boy.
GTO comes out of the bathroom in time to see the Girl ride off on the back of the motorcycle. The Mechanic takes a sip of the Girl’s coffee. They both stand up and walk out the door. GTO pays the check and walks outside.34
In Hellman’s rendition, this straightforward series of events plays out over close to three minutes of screen time, making the viewer keenly aware of the inexorable passage of time, as character relationships are torn asunder, regarded with a sense of resigned indifference. In the process, Hellman defuses much of the ironic tone of Wurlitzer’s screenplay, most notably in the curt farewell between Wilson and Oates and the lack of a parting acknowledgment between Oates and Taylor. Where its very brevity is notable in Wurlitzer’s text, in Hellman’s film the moment is lost altogether in the apathetic malaise of the scene, taking the film a step further into subversion, forgoing irony in favor of a lack of narrative closure altogether. Hellman’s directorial method yields a rich sense of place and a studied expression of a single mood or tone, at the expense of narrative momentum or readable character psychology. Such distinctive aesthetic outcomes were only possible thanks to the permissiveness of Hollywood’s brief dalliance with the cult of the auteur. Although, contrary to popular belief, both Hellman and Hopper were rigorously frugal in their early directorial efforts, the long intervals between their subsequent projects and their eventual adoption of international production models indicate that over a greater span of time, Hollywood did not look kindly on their unconventional production practices.
The directorial freedom afforded to Hellman by Universal permitted him to radically shift the tone of Wurlitzer’s script in the transition from page to screen. Like Easy Rider, Two-Lane Blacktop reached cinemas whittled down from a much longer cut. Like Hopper’s, Hellman’s production practice was typified by improvisation and the whims of inspiration. In attempting to release a film that tapped into the Easy Rider youth-cult audience, Universal gave Hellman a greater degree of freedom over his small budget than would traditionally be afforded to Hollywood productions. Furthermore, like Hopper’s experience on Easy Rider, the location-based shoot was a blessing, playing out far from prying studio eyes. When Hellman subsequently turned in a film that seemed even stranger than the film Universal hoped he would emulate, the studio had no recourse but to continue to market the film to its initially targeted youth audience. Hellman’s artistic ambitions failed to match the commercial prospects Universal had in mind for Two-Lane Blacktop, and the situation was worsened by the studio’s decision to highlight the film’s nonexistent generic content in its marketing campaign, despite its director’s deliberate subversion of generic convention.
Such narrative gestures have become one of the defining hallmarks of the films that have been retrospectively enshrined in the New Hollywood canon, and Two-Lane Blacktop has itself been the beneficiary of such reappraisal in recent years. For the centrality of generic frustration to this body of films, Todd Berliner highlights The Godfather Part II (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, Paramount Pictures, 1974), “hinder[ing] narrative momentum and scuttl[ing] numerous opportunities to generate suspense and excitement” as a typical gesture.35 This charge could be leveled verbatim at Two-Lane Blacktop. From its misleading trailer to its tagline slogan, “You can never go fast enough,” Two-Lane Blacktop prepares its viewers for entry into a particular generic universe, which the film proceeds to strategically dismantle.
Character and Culture
The formal style of Two-Lane Blacktop consistently downplays the generic expectations generated by the subject matter of the film. The unfolding story line leads only to dead ends, making Two-Lane Blacktop a film of narrative frustrations and contradictions. In his influential early account of the period, Thomas Elsaesser writes that the film offers “only the merest shadow of an intrigue, [as] the action provocatively avoids . . . interpersonal conflicts . . . and finally, the film toys with goals . . . in an almost gratuitous, ostentatiously offhand way.”36 The race to Washington, D.C., that motivates the action of the entire film is arbitrarily abandoned without fanfare at the film’s end. The relationship among driver, mechanic, and GTO is represented in conflicting ways from scene to scene, displaying sportsmanship and generosity toward one another in one scene, then cutthroat ruthlessness in another. Oates’s wily GTO spends the entire film picking up hitchhikers and regaling them with impossibly contradictory tales from his life story. By turns he reveals himself to be an air force test pilot, a gambler who won his car “shooting craps,” a test driver from Detroit, a failed television producer on a location scout for a “down-home movie on fast cars,” a car salesman, and a concerned son on his way to Florida to paint his ailing mother’s house. It is through the impossible contradictions of these multiple personas, fabricated in an attempt to impress each of his passengers, along with the cache of audiocassettes that he keeps on hand (“rock, soul, hillbilly, western. What’s your taste?”), that the hollowness of GTO’s existence comes to light. The elaborate backstories that he spins only serve to highlight the paucity of legitimate expository information provided about his character, and the audience is unable to determine which, if any, of the words from his mouth are truthful. GTO is ultimately defined not by the lies he tells his passengers, but by his car. GTO’s banter with Taylor’s driver initially consists of attempts to intimidate his opponent: “If I wanted to bother, I could suck you right up my tailpipe”; “all that speed is going to run over you one of these days. You can’t be a nomad forever. Unless you flow with it, like me.” These attempts at macho posturing are further misdirections from a character embroiled in a race that he is seemingly fated to lose, his off-the-lot Pontiac indistinguishable from any other, contrasting with the lovingly restored, obsessively stripped-back Chevy. “There’s lots of cars on the road like yours,” Taylor condescendingly tells Oates in their first conversation. Later, when Oates takes his first ride in the Chevy, he is alarmed that the car doesn’t have a heater. “It slows it down,” explains Taylor. Clearly, this is a race that GTO and his leather seats, car stereo, wardrobe of multicolored cashmere sweaters, and portable bar cannot hope to win. The generation gap renders him unable to keep up with his younger competitors, and in the rare moments when his mask slips, we glimpse the desperation of an untethered man compelled to fictionalize every aspect of his being. In his final scene in the film, at an indeterminate point of time after the race has been abandoned, GTO picks up some soldiers and begins telling them the story of Two-Lane Blacktop, in the process erasing his own role and casting himself as Taylor’s character: “I was driving a ’55 stock Chevy cross-country and I got in a race with this GTO for pink slips. I beat the GTO by three hours. Of course, the guys in the GTO couldn’t drive worth a damn. Well, I’ll tell you one thing: there’s nothing like building up an old automobile from scratch and wiping out one of these Detroit machines. That’ll give you a set of emotions that will stay with you. You know what I mean? Those satisfactions are permanent.”
Oates’s performance, perversely enough, offers the most richly drawn individual in a film populated with bare sketches. Like Nicholson’s George Hanson in Easy Rider, Oates’s performance outsizes the film, casting its shadow over the other performances, even as Oates works with the subtler shades afforded by the limited palette of Hellman’s more subdued film. Older still than Nicholson’s Bobby Dupea, GTO is nonetheless equally ill at ease with his station in the world. So uncertain is he of his own identity that only in the liminal space of the road can he find any state of being that he can bear to inhabit. Too old, perhaps, to ride one of the customized motorcycles of Easy Rider or the ’55 Chevy, he turns to the dignified, socially sanctioned vehicle of choice for those experiencing midlife crisis: the muscle car. Yet his desperation to become whomever he thinks his passengers expect him to be suggests that perhaps ultimately he is no more comfortable on the road than he was in his previous life, whatever that was.
Taylor, Wilson, and Bird give uniformly blank performances, the actions of their characters predominantly limited to standing idly by and watching impassively as a parade of inconsequential events unfolds before them. Paul D. Zimmerman effectively summarized the style of these performances in his unfavorable Newsweek review of the film: “They are a strange race, these three in the car, the cool new breed of young people who signal instead of talking—a back rub means a night in bed, a simple shake of the head cancels a life together, a shrug and a few steps lead to a change of partners.”37
Bird’s character is another of Two-Lane Blacktop’s misdirections. Initially positioned as a heterosexual love interest for the male protagonist as she might be in a more conventional road film, their nonrelationship becomes the antidramatic crux of the remainder of the film. Acting as inexpressively as the men she accompanies, Bird’s character exudes an aloof sense of cool; she is consistently unaffected, unimpressed, and unmoved by her surroundings. Hellman typically refuses to aestheticize her as a romantic or sexualized object. She is afforded more agency than the female characters of other contemporaneous youth road movies, entering and exiting the film on her own terms. She is heard having sex offscreen with Wilson’s mechanic and shares a driving lesson with Taylor, which is as sexually charged as it gets in the narcoleptic Two-Lane Blacktop, culminating with a kiss. For the most part, however, the film gives Bird little to do but lounge in the back of the Chevy (which has no back seat) and occasionally vacillate toward Oates’s GTO. Crucially, the driving lesson represents a qualified potential entry point to the otherwise rigidly patriarchal street racing world. In one scene, Bird’s character knowingly acknowledges the inherent sexism of the film cycle itself, when she complains, “Why can’t I ever sit up front? What is this, anyway, some kind of masculine power trip? I’m shoved back here with these goddamned tools.” When the mechanic replies that they will “need bread to do a little work on the carburetors and check out the rear end,” Bird retorts with, “I don’t see anybody paying attention to my rear end,” a statement that simultaneously asserts her command of her sexual agency, flags her own potential sexual availability, and critiques the fundamental sexlessness of the film.
Yet Bird is not entirely marginalized to sexualized terms, as are the female characters in Easy Rider, if for no other reason than that Two-Lane Blacktop is a predominantly asexual film. Lacking the technical or mechanical skills that might allow her to participate in the obsessive and masculinely gendered world of Taylor and Wilson, the film offers her little alternative but to adopt their mode of aimlessness until she decides to leave. When she does so, wordlessly walking out on Taylor and Oates and taking up with a motorcyclist she has never met before, it is as impulsive an action as when she first silently makes her way to the back of the Chevy while Taylor and Wilson sit eating in a diner. When she temporarily leaves Taylor for Oates at the Memphis racetrack, and the driver insists to the mechanic that “we have to get back to her,” it is surprising because at no point in the film has he demonstrated any emotional attachment to her—or to anything else, for that matter. Taylor’s insistence that they return to her is at odds with his persistent nonchalance, and in this moment the serious intensity he usually reserves for his car is turned toward her. Yet this is simply another one of Hellman’s curveballs, as Taylor tracks Bird down only to watch impassively as she slips away again, and the film ends. Lost, lonely, inarticulate, and anonymous, Bird’s final exit goes unremarked upon by the film and its characters, her bag of accumulated possessions left discarded in the parking lot as she rides away with the motorcyclist. The fact that the real Laurie Bird served as a prototype for the character of the girl and subsequently committed suicide in 1979 after minor appearances in Hellman’s Cockfighter (New World Pictures, 1974) and Annie Hall (dir. Woody Allen, United Artists, 1977) suggests that the moments of distant sadness that she intermittently reveals throughout the film may have been among the most authentic captured by Hellman’s documentarian eye.
The characterizations in Two-Lane Blacktop continue the trend established in Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces away from the Classical Hollywood imperative to establish consistent, simply drawn characters that propel narrative action. Where Easy Rider suppresses its characterizations in the hope of offering universal (and ideologically ambiguous) points of commercial entry identification, Five Easy Pieces withholds expository information in order to reverse audience expectations. Two-Lane Blacktop challenges its audience not only by holding its characters at a psychologically unreadable distance, but also by having them act in puzzlingly contradictory ways. Thomas Elsaesser writes that in Two-Lane Blacktop, “Hellman has made, and doubtless intended, an anti-action film, deliberately playing down an intrigue that might goad the spectator into involvement or a plot that could generate a psychologically motivated causal web of action and romance.”38
But Hellman’s film goes further than merely representing inaction, as it deliberately excises expected moments of action and knowingly subverts the expectations of its viewer. It is a slow film about fast cars, a car race that is never finished, a love triangle populated by individuals who can barely rouse interest in one another, starring a pair of rock stars who never sing. The financial success of Easy Rider went hand in hand with the sales of its soundtrack album, a best seller that provided a ready-made entry point to the film for its young, music-savvy audience and a lucrative ancillary revenue stream. As in the musical, the song sequences in Easy Rider occur as discrete, sectioned-off, noncausally related segments of spectatorial pleasure. In Two-Lane Blacktop pop songs never dominate the soundtrack, obscured beneath dialogue or car engines as they play on car radios or jukeboxes, never elevated to nondiegetic status. Although Wurlitzer and Hellman’s song selections were often as hip as Hopper’s (The Doors, Kris Kristofferson, and Arlo Guthrie are all featured), a soundtrack album was never issued, and no songs by Taylor or Wilson were used in the film. The only character who does sing onscreen is Laurie Bird, who offers a tuneless a cappella rendition of the Rolling Stones’s “Satisfaction.”
Like Easy Rider, Two-Lane Blacktop is ostensibly about characters on the road bound for a fixed destination. As existential dilemmas derail the expected narrative progression, both films ultimately reveal the journeys to be entirely arbitrary. Billy and Wyatt take to the road looking for some kind of abstract experience of lost American freedom, but the protagonists of Two-Lane Blacktop have no such lofty ambitions. For the antiheroes of Easy Rider, their journey eastward is a definitive gesture severing ties with mainstream society, bankrolled by the proceeds of their drug deal. The driver and mechanic of Two-Lane Blacktop subsist self-sufficiently on North America’s underground street-racing economy. Across the United States youths gather by night, congregating around fluorescent outposts of light in the wilderness to unspeakingly play out their roles. Somehow Taylor and Wilson are sufficiently attuned to this subcultural pulse, following it across the country and deriving their income from it. The relationship the driver and mechanic share with this dispersed fraternity is similar to the uneasy standing between Billy and Wyatt and the hippies they encounter at the commune. The Chevy’s driver and mechanic are perpetual outsiders, unable, due to the nature of their nomadic existence, to form even the most fleeting of relationships. Their interactions with fellow members of the street-racing subculture vary from displays of bravado and competitive posturing to a kind of begrudging, and necessarily unspoken, solidarity.
Easy Rider begins with its characters at the logical end of their story, attaining financial independence through their successful drug trafficking enterprise. The film then wanders with them through a series of self-contained, stylistically discrete vignettes, as the story unravels around them. Two-Lane Blacktop eschews Hopper’s favored mixed modality, never breaking its realist aesthetic mold. The events depicted self-consciously replicate the rhythms of real life and refer in absentia to the artificiality of the expectations generated by generic structures. Looking back at the film, Hellman says that “what made Two-Lane Blacktop interesting for me was the fact that it didn’t really have a story, it had just the barest bones of a story, and it became about day-to-day life, and there was no real change; it really ended the way it began, we just stopped.”39
The End
Those expecting a generically coherent ending for Two-Lane Blacktop would have been sorely disappointed. After offering a series of frustrations through the absence of expected generic and visual tropes (no exciting car racing sequences; no conspicuous exploitation of drug use; and limited sexual activity, violence, and rock music), the film comes to a point where it is unable to end but does so anyway. In its final shot, Two-Lane Blacktop breaks with realism for the first time and, in an overtly Godardian/Brechtian gesture, allows the film to burn in the projector.40 How else to end a film that has excelled in quashing the expectations of its car-mad youth audience, than by not only refusing to conclude the story, but also halting the progress of the final car race in the film itself, further avoiding fulfilment of the most straightforward of generic elements? Where Billy and Wyatt are dealt fiery onscreen deaths as the film around them attempts to account for their generic transgressions, in Two-Lane Blacktop Taylor’s visage is conflated with the artifice of the medium that has recorded his image, as the film itself incinerates. At the close of Two-Lane Blacktop, “the end of cinema,” which Jean-Luc Godard had proclaimed with his Week End (Grove Press, 1967), finally makes its way to Hollywood. To end his studio film in such a provocatively deconstructive manner was the final act of subversion from Hellman. But Universal would have the last laugh. When preparing prints of the film, the studio projectionist was so aghast at the sight of the frame dissolving that he cut the final shot from the studio print.41 For this reason, it is unclear whether or not Universal studio head Lew Wasserman ever saw this concluding sequence of the film. Nevertheless, he had seen enough to instill in him “a deep-seated personal dislike for the film” and ensure that the road to release for Two-Lane Blacktop would not be an easy one.42 Perhaps this was payback for Hellman’s frequent clashes with the studio during production, his insistence on shooting sequentially on location, and his decision to use car audio over the Universal studio logo at the start of the film.
Reception, Reappraisal, and Permanent Satisfactions
Upon release, Two-Lane Blacktop flew under the critical radar of the mainstream press; where it did register, it often prompted an uncertain reception, although Oates was consistently singled out for praise. Variety, in fact, forecast “strong b.o. outlook, not confined just to youth-film situations” and praised Oates for carrying the film “like a champion in an outstanding performance which should be recalled when it is appropriate to do so,” invoking comparison to Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (dir. John Huston, Warner Bros., 1948).43 Paul D. Zimmerman too credited Oates with “steal[ing] what there is of the picture almost by default.”44 Zimmerman took issue with Hellman’s low-key directorial style: “Hellman turns the voltage so low that one is tempted to take the film’s pulse to see whether the projector is still rolling.”45 Elsewhere, Zimmerman criticized Two-Lane Blacktop for its derivativeness amid the youth-cult cycle: “The movie itself, however, is a modest effort—with much to be modest about. It is the ultimate now picture, a celluloid summary of every trend in current cinema—the well-travelled metaphor of the car race as a search for the self; the wandering hero cut loose from mainstream society; the concentration on the super-cool codes of the youth culture; the rock hero as movie star—in this case soft rocker James Taylor and Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys; and the all too common critique of dominant American values like winning and striving.”46
Roger Ebert, in a tentatively positive review, concurred with Zimmerman’s sentiments, stating, “unless I missed the point, it doesn’t have much of anything new to tell us.”47 Time magazine went further, praising Hellman’s attention to detail in a film that is “immaculately crafted, funny and quite beautiful, resonant with a lingering mood of loss and loneliness. There are extended pauses and dialogue exchanges full of deliberate paradox. Few film makers have dealt so well or so subtly with the American landscape. Not a single frame in the film is wasted. Even the small touches—the languid tension while refueling at a back-country gas station or the piercing sound of an ignition buzzer—have their own intricate worth.”48 In the pages of Film Comment, Blacktop garnered a passing reference, and a negative one at that, some years after its release; in his news column in 1974, Jonathan Rosenbaum described Two-Lane Blacktop as “pretentious.”49 Yet it also formed the centerpiece of Elseasser’s influential 1975 “Pathos of Failure” piece in Monogram, one of the first notable attempts to codify the New Hollywood precisely by praising Hellman’s film for its unprecedented degree of abstraction.
Hellman’s film clearly engendered no sympathies at Universal when it failed to do strong business. According to Variety, Two-Lane Blacktop took $428,355 at the box office, rendering it the 169th-highest-grossing film of the year.50 After its initial release it largely disappeared, receiving only one television airing in the 1980s, and it was never released on video due to the reluctance of the distributor to clear music rights for distribution.51 As with Hellman’s The Shooting decades earlier, the lengthy period of unavailability did not diminish the memory of Two-Lane Blacktop, but rather helped its legacy to grow, as it became something of a lost film of the 1970s. Its eventual laserdisc release in the late 1990s was a deluxe affair. Its subsequent DVD releases, by Anchor Bay, Umbrella Entertainment, and Criterion, were even more lavish.
Of all of the films discussed in this chapter, Two-Lane Blacktop now appears to have achieved the highest degree of critical esteem. Easy Rider is often dismissed for having aged gracelessly, its impact more widely felt in the lexicon of pop-culture iconography than the annals of cinephilia. Five Easy Pieces is most fondly recalled for Nicholson’s performance. Two-Lane Blacktop, on the other hand, is increasingly celebrated as a classic of the era, regularly screening at film retrospectives across the globe and earning its own deluxe Criterion DVD release. Perhaps contemporary critics find their own satisfactions in filling in the gaps left in the ellipses of Two-Lane Blacktop by its refusal to adhere to generic conventions, admiring its meditative pace and its documentary fidelity to a long-since-passed moment in both American and Hollywood geography. In 2011 I noticed a free fashion/youth culture magazine in a local café. Entitled Strangelove, its cover was adorned with a publicity image from Two-Lane Blacktop.52 Once a cultural product of yesteryear is trotted out to sell the fashions of today, its imprint in the pop-culture unconsciousness is confirmed.
Where Easy Rider’s attempt to shoehorn existential aimlessness in with its mixture of exploitation cinema and avant-garde affectation was considered half-cocked by some critics, Hellman’s production methods on Two-Lane Blacktop instill in the film a stronger sense of authenticity. Hellman’s film embraces ennui so completely that it becomes a film without plot. Its characters are systematically stripped of motivation as their endless flight delivers them precisely nowhere. Two-Lane Blacktop is the final distillation of the Easy Rider formula to its barest zero point. Its slight form leaves us a compelling enigma; the reel becomes stuck in the gate of the projector, catches and burns, leaving future generations of critics and cinephiles to pick over the ashes.