Zabriskie Point

Sometimes a sense of duty is misplaced. Last May I read James Joyce’s Ulysses simply because, as a literarian, I couldn’t realistically go through the rest of my life without having at least tried to read it. My labor was rewarded, but to what extent I still can’t determine. I have deep admiration for the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, but it took him ten years to find his mature style in 1960 and he went into decline after 1966. He signed a contract with MGM to make three English-language films. The second of the three, Zabriskie Point, is by general agreement, a precipitous comedown from Blow-Up, the first. Now that I’ve seen it, I almost wish I hadn’t. 

Though tempting, it is too easy to blame someone other than Antonioni for the failure of Zabriskie Point. One could blame Sam Shepard, who wrote the first treatment of the story suggested by a newspaper headline that Antonioni had read in 1966. And then four more people worked on the script, including Antonioni: his long-time collaborator Tonino Guerra, Fred Gardner (Franco Rossetti), and Clare Peploe. Peploe had introduced Antonioni to the music of Pink Floyd, who composed a full score for the film, only bits of which were used. Also credited are The Grateful Dead and The Rolling Stones, among others (there’s even Patsy Cline’s “Tennessee Waltz”). Antonioni commissioned a score by Herbie Hancock for Blow-Up, but only because he obviously loved swinging London and wanted to certify his affection with something up-to-date and beautiful. The chosen music for Zabriskie Point is as topical as it is time bound. It dates the film, 50 years later, as much as the film's anti-establishment hippie message. 

Spite was what kept Antonioni going for four years of production - spite for America. When it became clear what the film was going to be about, the “authorities” in California made legal attempts to shut down the shooting. (Ronald Reagan was the governor.) It’s better not to call the film’s “story” a story at all. It opens with a meeting of young people, led by a Black Panther-type and a woman denouncing the racist, fascist system. In the crowd of college student types spouting political slogans is Mark (Mark Frechette), who never manages to get a word in edgewise. 

Next we see Frechette driving an old pickup truck through Los Angeles. Random images of an ugly, consumer-driven American city (in contrast to a beautiful, consumer-driven Italian city). Antonioni’s eye used to find beauty in even ugly industrial landscapes. In Zabriskie Point the point he’s trying to make is that the billboards and images advertising plenty in LA are hiding a spiritual void. 

Another youth, a young woman named Daria (Daria Halprin), is introduced. She is having an affair, evidently, with a businessman (Rod Taylor, looking and acting utterly out of place). She drives across the desert to Phoenix where he has a luxe house. On the way she meets Mark, who in the meantime has shot a cop (though he tells Daria “I never got off a shot”) and stolen a plane. In Death Valley they get high and cavort. In Daria’s imagination, the two are joined in their lovemaking by several other couples, all rolling in the borax and alkali. For seven minutes. 

Knowing he’s an accused cop-killer, Mark wants to clear his name. So he flies the stolen plane (freshly re-painted by Mark and Daria, festooned with a 30 foot penis on the fuselage and bulbous breasts atop the wings) back to LA where the police are lying in wait for him. Daria continues on her way to Phoenix to her boss’s elegantly designed desert house, recessed among huge stones and organ pipe cacti. But she soon finds it all too disgusting and leaves. She stops her old Buick a safe distance away and (again in her imagination) watches the house explode several times from several angles. And then in slow motion. Then she imagines pool furniture exploding in extreme slow motion, clothing racks, a TV set, a loaded refrigerator. Debris flies upward and then floats downward and it’s all somewhat fascinating to watch. Just when you're beginning to think of Sissy Spacek as Carrie, it stops. Daria smiles, gets in the car and drives away. Roy Orbison sings the film’s Love Theme: 

Dawn comes up so young, dreams begin so young 

And if you live just for today the day may soon be done 

But there's a place where dreams always stay so young 

Unlike the “mod scene” in London, with which Antonioni was momentarily fascinated (probably because of its undercurrent of civilization’s end – a civilization Antonioni had grown to despise), here he is all-in with American youth and their centrifugal rage against everything. Regarding the counter-culture movement, the “tune in, turn-on and drop-out” hippies, Roman Polanski cogently commented that it could only have happened in the US, a country whose very prosperity could support so many people opting out of the rat race. But Antonioni was 57 when Zabriskie Point premiered, and, like so many men, Italian or otherwise, he was resisting his own physical decline by running in the opposite direction. Hanging out with kids one-third his age (Clare Peploe, his girlfriend at the time, was 30 years his junior) must’ve been invigorating, but the resulting film is so aimless and empty that it becomes hard to believe it took him four years to make it. 

The real problem with the film is not that Antonioni had, or thought that he had, a clean canvas on which to paint his pictures of America, that he was showing the Ametican scene with new eyes, so much of it was already cliché in 1970. And all the while he was looking around America for signs of its decadence, Antonioni neglected to look at American films. While he was shooting love scenes in the desert, several other films were stealing Antonioni’s thunder: Easy Rider was released in ‘69, which was purported to be an independent film but had Hollywood backers, and even such mainstream studio exploitation films like Wild in the Streets came out in ’68. The Trip (also by Peter Fonda) appeared in ’67 and Alice’s Restaurant also in ’69. 

I saw both Frechette and Halprin on Dick Cavett, taped after the film's disastrous premier, Frechette expressed his disappointment that he had looked forward to learning something at the feet of a great artist but came away empty handed. There are beautiful moments in the film, when Antonioni focuses on something and his focus forms a kind of halo around it. Like when Daria stops in that desert bar and is chased away by those creepy feral boys. The camera looks through the window at an old man at the bar, then moves closer and the lens zooms in so that the room around him appears to expand. It’s a lovely effect. But however much I am of the opinion that when Antonioni looked at something, it has been defined, I was sorry for the waste of his gaze.