Two-Lane Blacktop at 50 – Adrift on an asphalt… | Little White Lies

In Praise Of

Two-Lane Black­top at 50 – Adrift on an asphalt ocean

07 Jul 2021

Words by Johnny Restall

Shirtless man with long hair sits on a green vintage car against a blue sky with clouds.
Shirtless man with long hair sits on a green vintage car against a blue sky with clouds.
Monte Hellman’s cult road movie remains the per­fect encap­su­la­tion of 60s ennui and life on America’s margins.

Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Black­top has lit­tle in the way of plot; what sto­ry it does have seems to trade on the pop­u­lar­i­ty of 1969’s Easy Rid­er. Only one of its four leads was a pro­fes­sion­al actor at the time of film­ing, the rest being two musi­cians and a teenage mod­el. The action is under­stat­ed to the point of abstrac­tion. By all rights it should feel like a dat­ed, deriv­a­tive fol­ly. Yet the film has endured for 50 years as a cult clas­sic and a left-field crit­i­cal darling.

Rudy Wurl­itzer and Will Corry’s script con­cerns a cross-coun­try car race, but demon­strates no inter­est in petrol-head chas­es or stunts, stead­fast­ly refus­ing to yield to audi­ence expec­ta­tions. Instead, the loose nar­ra­tive serves as the frame­work for an exis­ten­tial exam­i­na­tion of the Amer­i­can Dream, mas­culin­i­ty, and the cur­dling hip­py ideals of its road movie contemporaries.

The style of Two-Lane Black­top is restrained and dis­tant, unob­tru­sive­ly observ­ing its char­ac­ters go about their busi­ness, allow­ing the pro­tag­o­nists to emerge organ­i­cal­ly with­out any expla­na­tion of their moti­va­tions. Telling­ly, none of the leads are iden­ti­fied tra­di­tion­al­ly – instead, their names derive either from what they are or what they drive.

Singer-song­writer James Tay­lor plays The Dri­ver, a with­drawn, tac­i­turn rac­er. He tra­vers­es the land­scape aim­less­ly with The Mechan­ic, played by Beach Boy Den­nis Wil­son. We fol­low the duo as they race against var­i­ous inex­pe­ri­enced locals; they seem to live for noth­ing but their car, but show lit­tle joy at their vic­to­ries. While it’s fair to say that nei­ther musi­cian is a par­tic­u­lar­ly emo­tive screen pres­ence, their low-key per­for­mances per­fect­ly match the vacant, iso­lat­ed world of the film.

They encounter teenage hitch­hik­er The Girl, played by Lau­rie Bird, and she begins to trav­el with them. While her moniker sug­gests she will sim­ply be a token love inter­est (and her pres­ence does cre­ate a cer­tain jeal­ous ten­sion between the male char­ac­ters), the film adopts a more ambigu­ous approach, with Bird’s com­posed turn lend­ing a haunt­ing qual­i­ty to what could oth­er­wise have been a clichéd and thank­less role.

Though Two-Lane Blacktops conclusions are less obviously violent than those of Easy Rider, they easily surpass that pictures force with a biting sense of sadness and desolation.

The fourth and final pro­tag­o­nist is War­ren Oates’ GTO, who chal­lenges The Dri­ver to an epic race along the tit­u­lar roads to Wash­ing­ton DC. As if to make up for the oth­er mono­syl­lab­ic leads, GTO is a brag­gart and a fan­ta­sist with an irre­sistible urge to talk, no mat­ter how hol­low his sto­ries are. Oates was one of the finest char­ac­ter actors of his gen­er­a­tion, and this may just be his great­est per­for­mance. He crafts an utter­ly com­pelling por­trait of a hope­less­ly lost and lone­ly man, a would-be adven­tur­er who sim­ply can­not out­run his own emptiness.

Their race soon reveals a run-down rur­al Amer­i­ca, cap­tured in washed-out tones by cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Jack Deer­son. The bleak roads, truck stops and bars encap­su­late a depressed blue-col­lar world, left behind by the cul­tur­al rev­o­lu­tions of the 1960s. Nobody appears to be ful­filled, or to real­ly belong there – not even the inhab­i­tants them­selves, frus­trat­ed and caught out of time.

The char­ac­ters should be liv­ing a key part of the Amer­i­can Dream, free and look­ing for adven­ture on the open high­way. Yet all they can find is an end­less noth­ing­ness. They are so alien­at­ed from their envi­ron­ment that they nev­er get any­where near their sym­bol­ic goal of the cap­i­tal. The pink slips offered as the prize (award­ing own­er­ship of the vehi­cles to the win­ner) are nev­er even mailed, and the race sim­ply wears itself out.

Despite their sup­posed free­dom, the men have sim­ply swapped one con­ven­tion­al con­ser­v­a­tive world for anoth­er. Their empire of cars is just as hide­bound, with cod­i­fied rou­tines, and new parts for­ev­er required to keep up with the Jone­ses. They even squab­ble over win­ning a kind of nuclear fam­i­ly for them­selves, fight­ing over The Girl more out of a sense of con­sumerist pos­ses­sive­ness than gen­uine pas­sion. They have no real idea of what to do with her as she drifts from car to car, sim­ply desir­ing own­er­ship of her for its own sake. She even­tu­al­ly leaves them all behind with a with­er­ing ver­dict: No good.”

Two-Lane Black­top opens with the monot­o­nous roar of engines over the Uni­ver­sal logo, sub­tly sug­gest­ing that its lone­ly vision may not just be applic­a­ble to the US. Leav­ing its char­ac­ters unmoored and going in cir­cles, the film stock lit­er­al­ly burns itself out at the end. Though its con­clu­sions are less obvi­ous­ly vio­lent than those of Easy Rid­er, they eas­i­ly sur­pass that picture’s force with a bit­ing sense of sad­ness and des­o­la­tion. In many ways, the film’s exam­i­na­tion of a world with­out cohe­sion rings just as true today as it did in 1971.

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