What makes a man to wander? What makes a man to roam?
What makes a man leave bed and barn, and turn his back on home?
Ride away, ride away, ride away…
– title song, The Searchers
Blackness. A door slams; an engine starts. A bicycle, dimly emerging, rapidly diminishes: the camera is retreating, through a rectangular, screen-shaped, screen-sized aperture. Daylight: a garage door, drive, suburban house, left behind as the camera pans then speedily tracks forward on squealing tyres.
A contemporary Phantom Ride thus begins. Those Victorian films from an advancing vehicle celebrated the exciting danger of mechanical motion. They featured at funfairs alongside rollercoasters and Ferris wheels, anticipating affinities between cinema and theme park rides later exploited with Jaws and Jurassic Park. They exhibited film as attraction, spectacle and technology. Their present absence fascinated, rendering strange the everyday and familiar.
Duel, a made-for-television movie, drew reasonable audiences and positive reviews; but its scope, ambition and style were evidently suited for theatres. Spielberg, wanting to tell the story visually, rather than use wordy televisual exposition, had conceded minimal dramatic monologue at nervous executives’ insistence (Taylor 1992: 74). Spielberg subsequently directed dialogue scenes and voice-overs – largely superfluous, judged by some ‘embarrassing’ (Freer 2001: 26) – for an extended overseas edition. These were retained, against his protests, on distributors’ instructions. Despite these compromises, Duel won numerous festival awards and critical recognition. It grossed $8 million (over ten times its budget, already recovered with profit on delivery to ABC) in theatres abroad. In America it was eventually released after E.T. but suffered from cinemagoers’ reluctance to pay to watch a ten-year-old TV movie.
Spielberg’s Movie of the Week began on the highway. The theatrical version self-reflexively takes the experience out of the house and both alludes to, and incorporates as spectacle, the difference between television and cinema. The start, one of four added scenes, is in effect a reverse angle of the beginning and end of The Searchers. Darkness, shared by the auditorium, represents domesticity from which a frame opens – spreading over the screen and encompassing the spectator – onto the panoramic West: a landscape of intense light where desperate men engage in one-to-one struggles.
Speeding, the unseen motorist ignores a ‘STOP’ sign. Ensuing events suggest he has become complacent, cocooned in his ordered existence, about venturing into a competitive and alienated society, particularly – as hinted retrospectively – while angry. This equally connotes rebellion, a will to push boundaries and behave lawlessly. Duel does not endorse his suburban frustrations, which it arguably satirises. Rather, in withholding information about precise motivations and frequently adopting the pursuing tanker’s position, it sadistically delights in testing both the protagonist’s reasonableness and his resolve. It also becomes an attack on the spectator who, knowing little, is unable to judge with certainty – yet who, because unawareness removes potential obstacles, is facilitated in projecting conflicts onto the scenario.
It is difficult to imagine a narrative that did not involve characters, just abstract forces. (Eisenstein’s plan to adapt Das Kapital and Einstein’s suggestion to Popeye’s creators, Dave and Max Fleischer, that they should animate his theory of relativity, came to naught.) Abstractions do not inherently interest audiences. Narratives nevertheless personify abstract ideas. They probe experience in hypothetical scenarios whose outcomes do not seriously affect the audience. A human aspect personifies hopes, fears, desires, contradictions, confusions or aspirations, so these can be recognised and – perhaps – viewers recognise themselves in them. Partly motivating Duel, and sustaining involvement, is precisely what it never delivers: an identity for, hence a reciprocal relationship to, the tanker. The threat, conventionally defeated, escapes total mastery. Excess meaning remains: doubt whether what it represents, unspecified, has been contained. Certainly the car driver’s name – David Mann (Dennis Weaver) – encourages allegorical reading; but whether he slays Goliath for himself or the world’s salvation, whether his surname denotes universalised humanity or just peeved masculinity, is unresolved. Apart from its taut construction, the film benefits from these uncertainties – resistance to schematic interpretation, statement rather than solution of problems – consequently appealing to a wide audience.
Identification
If, as Metz (1975) contends, cinema spectatorship identifies with the apparatus, in a realist film the camera becomes my eyes and the soundtrack my ears. I disavow who and where I am and regress through the Mirror Phase into Imaginary unity with the screen. However, my Imaginary position has to be somewhere in relation to the events, observing from some relatively consistent and coherent viewpoint. This need not be singular; narratives externalise psychic conflict onto opposing forces.
Moreover, narrative progresses from disruption to closure by meting out story information gradually, withholding important matters for dramatic effect. One way films delay pleasurable mastery is restricting knowledge to that of one or more characters. Rather than omniscience, the film offers positions in the diegesis by constructing secondary identification with characters. Philosophical, psychological and political debates question how, why, to what extent, or even whether, this happens (Neill 1996; Barker 2000). Nevertheless, formal mechanisms narrate by positioning the spectator’s viewpoint in relation to that of characters. Duel closely aligns with the car driver. This point-of-view – the angle events are seen from – largely coincides with the metaphoric point-of-view, in the sense of opinion or judgement, implied by the invisible, absent narrator (an apparent agency, actually an effect – considered shortly).
The start implicitly presents Mann as generally law-abiding, peaceful and harmless. Unless contradicted, the ‘primacy effect’ prevails, establishing baseline characterisation against which subsequent information is judged (Sternberg 1978: 93–6). The tanker, if only by disrupting normality, although also through anonymity and embodying undesirable qualities such as dirt and pollution, is automatically – the moment it first overtakes – malevolent. There is no question of another side to the story, even though distaste of oil and heavy machinery arguably assume middle-class experience and accord with suburban neatness and consumerist ignorance of production. That there could be an alternative is, in fiction, illusory. Narration creates the allegiance, together with the story. The diegesis and its angle(s) of accessibility are inseparable: interdependent facets of the same construction. In fiction this does not matter inherently, although the extent to which the perspective implies a structure of sympathy, and naturalises it, is ideologically significant. For example, feminist readings concentrate on how mainstream films construct masculine versions of events, leaving feminine discourse marginalised, silent or absent.
As the journey continues through city streets, commercials and traffic reports align the spectator’s hearing with the driver, while the camera provides a visually analogous perspective. These also underline the banality within which the upcoming struggle occurs. There may, furthermore, be a nod here to one of Spielberg’s formative texts: Orson Welles’ broadcast The War of the Worlds (1938) simulated ordinary radio scheduling before a newsflash provided narrative disruption. (Welles pioneered layered sound and overlapping dialogue, among techniques Spielberg utilises frequently. Spielberg later bought Welles’ The War of the Worlds script, which, sealed with Citizen Kane and Casablanca (1942) in a glass coffee table, he displays alongside Kane’s Rosebud sledge. As a teenager he rented 8mm prints of the 1953 The War of the Worlds movie (Baxter 1996: 31, 110, 313), which, in 2005, he remade.) At a series of freeway tunnels, credits appear initially only over the dark frames; cinematic artifice self-consciously contrasts with an alternating ‘reality’ of space and light. Awareness of any of these allusions or performances of textuality – whether as a 1970s viewer or subsequently in light of Spielberg’s star persona – proposes ‘tertiary’ identification: with Spielberg, unknown ‘implied author’ or auteur known to stuff texts with quotations, in-jokes and references; in either case as a shared position of cinephilia, alongside the text and its ostensible address.
Point-of-view shots, forward motion and, soon, involvement in a narrative played out on a radio phone-in encourage primary identification with the camera position and secondary identification with the still-unseen driver. The continuing enigma of who is driving, and where to, simultaneously solicits active involvement. Restriction to diegetic sound – later, voiced-over internal monologues and incidental music occur – naturalistically establishes the narrative as plausible.
The first external shot of the car, behind barbed wire, introduces western imagery. Despite connoting the open road, it suggests entrapment and potential violence. On the radio a house husband complains about a census: married 25 years, he no longer feels ‘head of the family’. Masculine anxieties accompany a pan to the driver’s eyes in the mirror and a cut-in close-up of the radio – a subjective shot that sutures the spectator into the driver’s position, immediately followed by a close-up on him through the inscribed screen of the windshield. This brief sequence, directly before the truck challenges any notion of secure identity, is replete with Lacanian implications. The mirror, recalling a cinema wide screen, redoubles spectatorial identification with the specular Other through regression to the Imaginary. Equally, the shot through the windscreen – finally revealing the spectator’s surrogate – reflexively re-inscribes a surface between spectator and protagonist. This implies separateness, detachment, diminution (the audience can no more ease Mann’s plight than help Grace Kelly in Hitchcock’s 3-D Dial M for Murder (1954), when she reaches out into the auditorium); but distance also allows potential awareness of the film as text, part of the Symbolic order. This alternation, and associated tensions, remains a consistently central and distinctive element of Spielberg’s cinema.
Mann overtakes the rig as the radio complains, ‘She can be just so aggressive.’ This juxtaposition thematically connects the highway antagonism with gender. The visuals here being unremarkable, the radio becomes more compelling, so the spectator shares Mann’s surprise as the truck overtakes, cuts in and slows down. He overtakes it again. It hoots and flashes. The duel commences.
Vision
Pulling alongside Mann in a gas station the tanker dominates an oppressive two-shot. Mann cleans his glasses, inaugurating an ongoing Spielberg theme, clarity of vision. A zoom in on the trucker’s hand approximates to Mann’s perspective. Everything is viewed through screens, explicitly when suddenly the image, like the supposedly burning celluloid of Bergman’s Persona, blurs and runs: a forecourt attendant, now entering the shot, is washing the windows, creating a barrier to identifying the trucker. Cowboy boots alone are visible. Preoccupied by the feet, Mann declines a new radiator hose, responding distractedly to the attendant’s pleasantry ‘You’re the boss’: ‘Not in my house I’m not.’ Critics dismissive of Spielberg for making dumb action movies or children’s flicks might reflect that such emphasis on hands and feet, repeated in E.T., is this most cine-literate of directors’ borrowing from Bresson, whose creed equally summarises Spielberg’s practice: ‘Accustom the public to divining the whole of which they are given only a part’ (‘Notes on Cinematography’, quoted in Kelly 1999: 137). What are comic-book framings to critics unsympathetic to Spielberg’s efficiently storyboarded narration (Baxter 1996: 79), within a different interpretive agenda become aesthetic rigour, pure cinematography. Pared-down simplicity, characters isolated in metaphorical cells, voice-over soliloquies, existential struggle in ordinary locations: these are Bressonian in a movie five years predating Taxi Driver (Schrader and Scorsese’s rightly celebrated 1976 homage to Bresson, Hitchcock and The Searchers, the financing and editing of which Spielberg assisted (Smith 2001: 25–6) and which he considered directing (Argent 2001: 50)).
The attendant’s bell chimes repeatedly, almost subliminally, the truck having intruded aurally as well as visually by parking on the hose. A standard horror device – irritating, ominous, ongoing sound – this also recalls the bell when trains stop in westerns. The trucker’s arm, now in the foreground in silhouette, emphasising proximity while maintaining anonymity, reaches to sound the horn, imposing the truck’s presence and reinforcing ‘its’ impatience.
Mann, phoning home, adopts an exaggeratedly masculine posture, uncertainly raising one foot upon a table, but straightaway moving it for a woman to enter. Deep-focus, extended long-shots again diminish, and distance the spectator from, this character who, when behind the wheel, fills the screen and seemingly drives the narrative. An arm in the foreground – answering to that seen outside in the cab, actually the woman’s – opens a tumble drier. The shot continues, now through the circular glass door filling the frame. Mann literally is viewed through a female lens, this film repeatedly associating women, at the height of second-wave feminism, with household labour. His wife, her side of the conversation intercut, dusts the living room in a polka-dot frock and apron that parody 1950s commercials, with two children playing on the floor. Near the climax of the chase – just before Mann lures the tanker away from civilisation onto a quarry road, the deserted landscape of a Road Runner (1949–66) cartoon featuring only cable poles and tumbleweed – a woman is glimpsed pegging out washing. For the moment, he apologises for an incident Mrs Mann, fearing an argument, is reluctant to discuss. Evidently their relationship is uneasy. Though he wheedles the conversation forward, it turns to his supposed weakness. He asks, rhetorically, whether she expects him to fight an acquaintance who, she says, ‘practically tried to rape’ her in company while Mann stood by. She then tries to extract an undertaking that he will return punctually – ‘It’s your mother; God knows, she’s not coming to see me’ – before ringing off without endearments or farewells. The drier continues to be emptied in the foreground, emphasising separate male and female worlds: open road and home; violence, competition and nurturing, care. The travelling salesman has inherited the hunter/protector role. The truck hoots threateningly.
Focalisation
Mann is not necessarily aware of mythic reverberations or social significance in this bad day at work. Characters are textual constructs, not people, even if in film actual people impersonate them. Characters are clusters of meaning accruing to constellations of signs; characterisation occurs through interaction of performance, mise-en-scène and editing, constituting narration. Narratives are events undergone by characters. Characters, reciprocally, as textual embodiments of conflicting forces, cause or respond to events. It follows that they have no psychology other than that which the text creates for them, for they have no existence until activated through decoding. They have no past, no memories beyond what the text provides. For that reason, while psychoanalysis is powerful for investigating narrative structures and identifying symbolism, also for suggesting why spectators experience involvement and textual pleasure, psychoanalysing characters makes no sense. An assemblage of signs lacks a consciousness, let alone an unconscious. While one can usefully seek a text’s unconscious – its ideologically symptomatic repressions or denials – a character lacks inner life beyond what the text manifests. It makes little sense to speak of character psychology. To assume Mann is unconsciously motivated to restore his threatened masculinity, or that he is conscious his masculinity is challenged, is to project attributes, suggested by the narration, which would appear reasonable if he were real.
The narrator is the implicit agent relating or recounting events and, with them, attitudes. The narrator is not the author. If an auteurist reading distinguishes Spielberg as author, he nevertheless might have constructed any scene differently. The director is outside the text, however recognisable are traces of his presence. The narrator, however, is the imaginary selector and controller of the information – another product of narration, along with the characters and narrative, who would still be there if Spielberg were unknown. Whether Spielberg appreciated the allegorical or ideological import of his directing is immaterial. The narrator, however, as a consciousness embodied in, say, structuring parallels and oppositions that make allegorical reading tenable, is an imaginary personification of the narration; a seemingly coherent position, with which the spectator can engage, from which the narrative seems most comprehensible. Hence it is trusted.
This account of narration, defying the notion that spectatorship is passive, has been modified by theory and empirical audience research that question whether all spectators are interpellated into inscribed subject positions. Feminist criticism emphasises gender difference in media reception and, as will become apparent in relation to The Color Purple, factors including race, class and historical context also affect meanings that viewers construct. Texts do not position all readers in the same way or there would be little disagreement over their status or meaning.
Rather than attempt an overarching theory of narration and how it influences the spectator, more productive is concentration on specific textual practices. A useful concept is focalisation (Genette 1980). This explicitly concerns relationships between the narrator – ‘who speaks’ or, more accurately in film, ‘who enunciates’ – and characters, centres of consciousness – ‘who see’. Focalisation implies metaphors of looking through a lens: consequently angle, distance, focal length, inclusion or exclusion, filtering, clarity or distortion.
Whether the precarious state of Mann’s masculinity – deduced to be his personal weakness (a regressive reading) or symptomatic of social developments (a progressive reading) – is his or the film’s judgement is a question of focalisation. The narrator does not look or gain knowledge ‘with’ a character during narration, which even in flashback is always present tense. The narrator is elsewhere, recounting the story, already known, rather than living it, from a perspective outside and at a different time from events narrated. Viewers, however, can look ‘with’ and gain knowledge ‘with’ the character if that suits the narration, but can also know more than the character, or less. Hitchcock famously postulated a scenario in which a bomb under a table kills a character (see Truffaut 1978: 79–80). If he knows the bomb is there and we know also we may share his anxiety. But if the story demands he does not know and it blows him up the narration can present the event in alternative ways. The narrator withholds knowledge of the bomb: we witness a normal episode before being suddenly shocked. The narrator draws attention to it: we feel anxious and helpless, in suspense, not knowing whether or when it will explode. This controlled filtering involves two levels of knowledge: the character’s and the narrator’s, perfectly aligned or totally separate; their relationship can shift. Focalisation can switch freely between characters, be rigorously restricted to one or a few, or remain more or less aloof. Point-of-view alone cannot account for this.
Subjective mirror shots confirm internal focalisation as the truck forces Mann into increasingly deadly situations, causing him almost to lose control of his car. His masculinity bruised by his wife, he takes up the gauntlet and outmanoeuvres the truck by overtaking in a lay-by. Relaxed country music marks an interlude of normality once he pulls ahead and turns the radio back on after passing a sign for ‘Chuck’s Café’. Before reaching this haven (named amusingly yet ominously for Road Runner’s creator) the truck again tails him closely, edging him to ever-higher speeds. Internal focalisation through this single character nevertheless permits shots from the truck – close to the ground or near wheels to enhance the sensation of speed – or away from the duellists. Edited seamlessly into Mann’s experiences, they emphasise, and confirm the objectivity of, his terrifying pursuit.
Various state licences suggest the truck’s provenance is everywhere and nowhere in particular, part of a bigger picture than Mann’s circumscribed world of freeways and meetings. Diversion from his usual route has led him into a road movie, where truckers, personifications of Western individualism following their own rules, are redneck counterpoints to the countercultural anti-heroes of Easy Rider (1969), Two Lane Black Top (1971) and Vanishing Point (1971). As ninety miles per hour approaches, the non-diegetic sound intrudes – discordant, percussive jangling – before the tanker shunts the car, when squealing and strumming strings predominate. As an extreme telephoto shot renders the car and truck out of focus – so much for Mann’s understanding and control – music resembling Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho score (a film already evoked by the scenery and front-seat driving shots), frantically muddled, culminates in the car swerving into a truck-stop and demolishing a white fence: metonym for a tamed wilderness.
The wrong man
Politeness and concern prevail as an old-timer enquires, ‘You all right, Mister?’ Mann’s glasses have been dislodged, their association with vision, figurative and literal, emphasised as he blurs in the foreground while the old man, framed through the window, approaches, before the lens pulls both characters into focus – a psychologically effective portrayal of Mann’s coming-to after the collision as well as a return to normality. This is short-lived, however. Masculinity resurfaces in the contrast between Mann, crying, and the old man’s curt diagnosis: ‘Just a little whiplash is all.’
In the sanctuary of the café, a labyrinthine, hand-held, backward-tracking shot frames Mann in close-up, creating a very different mood from the fragmented editing of the chase. As he washes, mirrors affirm his identity. A voice-over soliloquy externalises his thoughts (previously spoken aloud). Essentially trite and redundant – taking over eighty words to reach the un-startling observation, ‘it’s like … back in the jungle again’ and to convey Mann’s belief he is safe – the device works less effectively than in Psycho. (Here Marion’s speculation about responses to her crime complicates the situation, confirms her motivations and conflict, and convinces because it plays as psychodrama using the characters’ own voices, jointly recollected with the spectator.) Nevertheless, Mann’s inner speech does tighten the focalisation essential to the subsequent scene, where restricted vision conveys paranoia, generating dramatic tension and forcing a crisis from an objectively uneventful situation.
As Mann sits down, suppression of his voice, quieter than the cook’s who inquires after his well-being (quieter than the entire dialogue track), enhances a distancing from reality, motivated by his condition. It intensifies visual impact as strangers, commenting inaudibly, appear to mock him. Their gaze, directly to camera, flouting classical continuity, stresses his vulnerability. Drawing attention to the camera, the spectator’s voyeuristic gaze compromises realism, shattering Imaginary involvement and encouraging colder, critical scrutiny of Mann’s fears. The gaze returns on the spectator, reversing normal power relations. Paradoxically the dislodged subject position more strongly keys with Mann’s sense of separation while sharing his anxiety for confirmation.
When he sees the tanker outside, a non-diegetic animal roar expresses his primal response as he peers around for its driver and evidence of conspiracy. Hereafter the psychological facet of focalisation predominates, which conveys a character’s knowledge and/or emotions (Rimmon-Kenan 1983). A rapid pan onto a pool game edgily emphasises visual distractions, the scene’s normality, that anyone could be the trucker, and Mann’s isolation in the background. It further disorientates by breaking continuity, not matching his look in the previous shot.
Mann becomes, as in Metz’s model, both voyeur – scrutinising the diners from inside his separate booth, staring through his fingers – and creator of the scenario as he projects anxieties onto presumably innocent people. The projected shadow of the ‘OPEN’ sign from the window onto the wall beside him echoes the analogy. The spectator’s surrogate, as curiosity and misgiving motivate a track past faces at the counter, blurred to emphasise anonymity, he remains sharply focused in the background. A beer-drinking ‘Marlboro Man’-type snaps into focus, an icon of American masculinity. Tense music underscores anxiety during a crane in on a pair of boots, which conventional continuity suggests belongs to the same man. He is a different cowboy: further disorientation. Cut-in reactions of Mann recall Hitchcock’s application of the Kuleshov effect in Rear Window. A pan to another pair of boots and a tilt up to the first man looking briefly back at him precede a zoom out to a second, then a third, looking over their shoulders and suddenly a disembodied nervous laugh – Mann’s? The waitress’s? – as cutlery drops onto his table from out of frame. After this Hitchcockian false alarm, he again is aware of men looking and whispering: understandable, given his unusual arrival and suspicious behaviour, creating a Hitchcockian ‘wrong man’ situation. One wears dark glasses, inscrutable like the traffic cop in Psycho; another is condensed into a single eye in close-up: vision, corollary of knowledge, equating to threat.
Mann’s voice-over rationalises why the truck turned back; the camerawork, conversely, becomes more erratic. Then, in controlled, decisive, subjective shots, Mann twice strides across to tackle his tormentor, only to have smoke blown in his face. These turn out to be fantasies, his projected desire and fear, interspersed with close-ups of his eyes, whereas he is too diffident even to ask the waitress for ketchup. The first suspect departs. The camera frames his crotch, signalling the phallic implications of the struggle, before panning to rest on Mann, who sees the cowboy run his hand along the truck, proprietorially. He leaves in a pickup. Mann’s napkin is in shreds.
Another drinker, previously unnoticed, wearing boots, is eating boorishly. Mann provokes a fight, and is ejected. The truck starts off-screen. Having placed himself outside civilisation, Mann is now the pursuer, on foot. But to no avail.
Mad north-northwest
Back on the road, Mann stops for a school bus needing a push. That its driver has not seen the truck reinforces doubts concerning Mann’s sanity. Children crawling over his car will not get down for Mann, further undermining his status, but instantly obey the bus-driver. Mann fails to maintain his objection that pushing the bus will jam his car underneath – which happens. Children jeer, pull faces, cheer him on, through the screen-like murky bus windows – an inscribed audience, ordinary kids, enjoying the adventure; but as a mirroring Other, in his vulnerable state their disrespect hardly helps his masculine competence. As the bus-driver attempts to free Mann’s car, bouncing on its front, Mann fusses, desperately grasping at bourgeois normality – irrationally, given it has been shunted at ninety, veered into a fence and voluntarily used in an unlikely attempt to shove a bus. After Mann’s faux pas in the café, the spectator is less likely now to accept his judgement, which imbues the scene with comedic undertones. This temporary shift in mood and focalisation makes all the more chilling the truck’s slow, deliberate reappearance, ominously silhouetted in a tunnel, unobserved by the characters. When Mann notices, its headlamps blaze: the eyes of a demonic predator. Genuine good intention, to move children to safety, results in him again appearing crazy. Jumping on the car, hanging from the bus, until he frees it, Mann visually reverts to ape.
Humiliation increases as the truck, during Mann’s getaway, graciously pushes the bus. Mann stops at a railroad crossing. Only paranoia would detect echoes of the gas station that morning in the train’s hooter and crossing bells. Certainly Mann does not seem to make this connection as cutaways to his surroundings convey ordinariness, boredom even, until suddenly the truck is ramming him towards the passing wagons.
After this encounter, Mann proceeds cautiously, permitting a van to overtake comfortably without incident. The truck, waiting, crawls out in front. Mann steers into a gas station and private zoo. A covered wagon emphasises the western dimension. Caged rattlesnakes enhance the menace. As Mann calls the police, bunting flickers in the wind, producing ominous rattlesnake sounds. The truck, stationary ahead, starts once more. Whereas surprise, as Hitchcock explained it, operated at the crossing, here the effect is suspense: the spectator knows more than Mann, who is occupied with bureaucratic niceties, while the truck snakes around towards him. In a splendid re-proportioning of the avian attack on a phone booth in The Birds (1963), the truck hurtles down on Mann, who escapes at the last second. It circles in pursuit, the shots ironically resembling the crop-duster attack in North by Northwest, which ends with the plane exploding into an almost identical truck. Accompanied by discordant Herrmann-style strings, rapid cutting – as in the Psycho shower murder – provides overwhelming detail yet disorients by obscuring the bigger picture as snakes, giant spiders and lizards escape, compounding Mann’s danger. Spielberg follows the Master but, unlike pastiche Hitchcock thrillers, adapts the techniques to his own sensibility.
In his car, hidden in a breaker’s yard, Mann sarcastically imagines his wife greeting him: ‘Hello, dear. Did you have a nice trip?’ Again the experience is measured against middle-class patriarchal expectations. Languid dissolves, concluding with Mann asleep, abruptly end with a loud horn – a train, not the truck – and his laughter merges with the clattering wagons: ‘ha, ha – ha, ha – ha, ha’. Whether the train and truck unite in mockery or his identity is unravelling is immaterial. He is on the edge, even if laughter brings relief.
Revelation
Resuming his journey, Mann slews the car sideways to a halt, oblivious to the near-collision this causes with a following car, as the truck once more awaits. As he screeches away, smoke spurts from the truck’s exhaust in the foreground, an excellent example of Spielberg’s economical and efficient use of synecdoche. The revving engine recalls a snarling beast. The truck creeps into Mann’s path, forcing a U-turn. Leaving the car, he strides towards the truck, low-angle close-ups emphasising western parallels as he adopts a gunslinger’s stance. The cat-and-mouse game persists as the truck slouches away, then stops again. Mann flags down an elderly couple. They seem harmless, the husband initially friendly, but the woman – perhaps disturbed by Mann’s wild-eyed unkemptness – refuses to become involved.
The truck reverses rapidly to scare the couple off, belatedly suggesting it is a metaphor for the need of Mann’s masculinity to assert itself – rather like Hemingway’s bulls – as much as it is his enemy. The old woman’s dress is the same colour as Mrs Mann’s, the laundrette woman’s, another’s in the roadhouse – and his car. Such similarities imply correspondence. Social incohesion, marital dissatisfaction, insularity of life experienced through a windscreen, are opposed to the Real represented by the truck, which now parks provocatively in front of Mann’s car, then chugs forward before idling just up the road. Panic, indicated by Psycho violins and discordant cow bells, seems to be followed by revelation. Three successive jump cuts close in on Mann, looking; a punctuation device, imitated from Eisenstein (and repeated, for example, in Jaws and E.T.), to stress the moment’s magnitude.
Duel – Mann and woman: the politics of gender
Instead of retreating, Mann strides purposefully to his car. A big close-up of his glasses on the dashboard relates his decisiveness to vision. Putting them on is presented in the mirror, almost an optical point-of-view. Bold contrasts between shots – now a big close-up of the glasses and the side of his face from a high angle outside the window – and coordinated, complex camera movements reinforce his deftness and confidence. The camera tilts along his seat belt and he buckles it: a sheriff strapping on his six-gun. He accepts the trucker’s challenge as a hand beckons, and deliberately passes.
Keeping ahead of the impossibly advancing truck, Mann sees a parked patrol car – an error shared by the spectator (a much-repeated Spielberg trick). When he briefly stops, the vehicle is advertising a pest-control service named Grebleips: spelt backwards, the director’s equivalent of Hitchcock’s personal appearances. Spielberg rewards attention and spectatorial complicity.
Mann’s folly almost finishes him when the radiator hose bursts. This he refused to change in an earlier attempt at control, over the forecourt attendant, by exerting supposed authority and masculine knowledge of cars and salesmen’s tricks. However, literally at the end of the road, he uses his personalised briefcase to jam the throttle and send the car towards the truck, which rams it – the car, rather than the gasoline tanker, exploding, a gag that plays upon Hitchcock’s distinction between suspense and surprise, and recalls his sense of humour – before both plunge in slow-motion over a cliff. Mann annihilates his nemesis and alter-ego – now almost revealed in shots from inside the cab, close-ups of hands and point-of-view shots of instruments, which mirror Mann’s portrayal – by jettisoning the objects (car and briefcase) that define his identity. Such metonymic condensation of an entire life or complex of values into an object is a recurrent Spielberg device.
The vehicles plummet to the sound of a dying monster from an existing movie, simultaneously suggesting a primal sub-humanity, ascribed to the totally anonymous driver, and sentience, ascribed to his anthropomorphised truck. Close-ups show the cooling fan inside the cab still rotating, blood or hydraulic fluid dripping off the steering wheel (the uncertainty serving further to elide the truck with its driver), and one of the wheels spinning slowly to a stop, suggestive of a creature gradually expiring. Meanwhile Mann, reborn as a man, jumps and gibbers like Kubrick’s apes in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), having triumphed in the use of tools, in this case vehicles, as weapons.
Although focalisation and change of pace mean that ‘an act that in real life could be construed as murder, is greeted with sighs of relief’ (Perry 1998: 21), the end is low key. Mann collapses and cries, sits and stares, backlit against the sun. Light, repeatedly to become a metaphor for cinema in Spielberg’s films, here suggests revelation after a journey that began in darkness. Yet the movie provides no explanations. These would be reductive and limiting. Clearly masculinity, in the feminist age, is an issue, and homosexual denial is another reading (Pye & Myles 1979: 225): ignore the voice-over, and the café scene resembles an attempted pick-up in a gay bar. So too is class (although Spielberg refused to be pinned down on this, prompting left-wing critics in Rome to leave a press conference in protest in 1972). Duel is a genre exercise, dexterously combining thriller, road movie and western. Certainly the commercial for haemorrhoids treatment at the start sets the new West – sedentary, pampered – against the old, traces of which Duel unearths. But equally interesting is the film’s experimentation, as with sound (which deservedly won an Emmy). Eisenstein predicted film’s subordination to theatricality with the arrival of talkies (see Donald et al. 1998) and, with a few exceptions, notably Hitchcock and Welles, was largely proven right in the Hollywood mainstream until Walter Murch’s pioneering work on sound design in the 1970s.
Duel is remarkably sophisticated, given the constraints of a 16 day shoot and an imposed episodic structure to accommodate commercial breaks. European critics responded to its craft rather than its symbolism. One of Spielberg’s strongest influences, David Lean, proclaimed this new talent; Dilys Powell’s Sunday Times review described Duel as ‘spun from the very stuff of cinema’; and François Truffaut praised it for achieving the ‘grace, lightness, modesty, elegance, speed’ the New Wave had dreamt of (quoted in Baxter 1996: 83, 84). Its allusiveness and playfulness, while permitting Spielberg to flex stylistic muscles and demonstrate versatility, are consistently purposeful, pertinent and never gratuitous.
Duel brought Spielberg – veteran of numerous amateur projects, a theatrical short and television productions – his opportunity to enter feature films. It also earned him, on his first trip abroad, lunch with Fellini (of whom, 32 years later, he was still to describe himself ‘a devoted fan’ in advertisements for a season devoted to il maestro at London’s National Film Theatre). Although he directed two more television movies, producers Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown were seeking go-ahead for The Sugarland Express (1974). This relationship led in turn to Spielberg’s break-through into the public consciousness with Jaws, the film that changed Hollywood – and Spielberg’s critical reputation.
