Two-Lane Blacktop is not the piece of disposable drive-in fare it appears to be - it has a quality that sticks with you, a sense of sadness and disenchantment that approaches hard-scrabble poetry. Monte Hellman has created a movie that succeeds almost entirely via tone. It's not the sort of movie that connects to us in the usual ways, through melodramatic artifice or overt displays of emotion. The key to its success is that it never really connects with us at all - it remains abstract, wrapped up in its own little arcane, ritualistic world. Yet there's something familiar about this place too, the sense of disconnectedness and longing. Despite the movie's fetishistic, self-absorbed quality, there's a universality that is undeniable. We might not be that interested in the arcana of life as itinerant drag-racers, but we can relate to their need for a meaningful experience and the sadness of their ultimate failure to connect.
Hellman stages the action in such a way as to de-emphasize any normal sense of character and to point-up the relationship between the characters and their machines, which is the real theme of the movie. These people have no identity away from their cars - the two main protagonists, played by creepy singer-songwriter James Taylor and lunky Beach Boy Dennis Wilson, spend almost the entire movie talking about cars, driving or working on their jalopy (a souped-up '55 Chevy coupe for those of you keeping score). Taylor, the driver, is a crack drag-racer, his entire existence revolving around racing or setting up races or driving to the next race. The performance Taylor gives can only be described as detached, yet this druggy, cut-off quality is perfect for the character, who strikes one as the kind of fanatic who can only be really alive when he's doing the one thing he loves. He seems barely aware of the movie's female lead, a wandering hippie-chick who provides a moment or two of distraction from the road, the perpetual search for excitement, but can't tear any of the men away from their machines for long (not that she doesn't try). The movie is one big Kenneth Anger-like fetishistic male fantasy about cars, their power and speed, and the sense of identity one derives from possessing and controlling them.
This makes the movie seem like a bummer, but trust me when I say that it's not. It's an unconventional movie to be sure, but it still provides some conventional B-movie amusement along the way - primarily in the form of Warren Oates, who gives a vivid, fully-realized performance as a mid-life-crisis sufferer with a rather loose sense of the truth. This pathological liar in a banana-yellow GTO is a marvelous caricature of the classic American jerk. Oates, a brilliant sketcher of masculine bluster, creates one of his most memorable sleazy/sympathetic characters, a pitiful braggart who can't even fix his own carburetor when it springs a leak - the character's impotence being expressed in terms of automotive know-how, which is fitting given the film's gear-head ethic. Yet Hellman doesn't just laugh at Oates - he's broad-minded enough to see what the impotent nit-wit in the muscle-car has in common with his super-ethical heroes, namely this inexpressible yearning. These are not John Cassavettes heroes spraying their masculine angst all over the screen like palsy victims though. They're monosyllabic highway cave-men, half-civilized car-fetishists for whom women are inexplicable, unconquerable creatures, and for whom life is one big escape from something they can't even put into words. This non-verbal, semi-poetic quality of the characters is sometimes a little hard to swallow, but it's often funny too. It's like Kerouac if Kerouac had had a sense of humor.
In Easy Rider the motorcycles were symbolic of rebellion, the spirit of independence supposedly embodied by bikers, but there's nothing especially rebellious about the characters in Two-Lane Blacktop. Hellman's not trying to take an ideological stance like Dennis Hopper, who saw his biker-fantasy as revolutionary - his movie is less '60s than '70s, less hippie-era trip than post-'60s trance-out. It has more in common with Loving and Blume in Love than with Easy Rider, the sense of America as this great disjointed place where no one has anything to believe in except the next experience, the next empty affair or drug-party or drag-race. The car-crazies of Two-Lane Blacktop are not martyrs like the bikers in Hopper's trippy opus, they're lost souls like Nicholson's Robert Dupea from Five Easy Pieces. They're characters of a certain tragic dimension, but the tragedy is rather non-descript. There are no great flaming climaxes in Two-Lane Blacktop, nothing as trumped-up as the finale of Easy Rider, but there is this portentousness, this sense of doom hovering over the characters - and it's this sense of doom that keeps Hellman's movie from floating off into some romantic la-la land. Kerouac seemed totally committed to the idea of irresponsibility as freedom, but Hellman isn't quite so convinced. Taylor and Wilson, as Kerouacian as they are, are not blissful libertines but thoughtful sober people, and Hellman suggests some awareness on their part of what a dead-end their lives really are. As wrapped up in car-culture as the movie may be, it never quite buys into the myths of the open road. There's always this grain of doubt, and it's this lack of certainty, this touch of ambivalence, that makes Two-Lane Blacktop more than just some loud, grease-spattered B-movie highway extravaganza.
