Saw Two-Lane Blacktop, a spacy, breezy film which is loosely about two guys in a grey car racing against some cravat-ed dude in a yellow car from California to Washington DC. The film is really about singularity of mind and focus however. It's like one of those samurai or cowboy films about the purity of mind that comes from a singular focus. For the samurai it's on sword-fighting; for these dudes, it's racing cars.
The film let me in on what it was thinking by making the race a kind of battle between style and substance. They in the grey car are the substance: their car is not pretty, but it's fast and they are of one mind. The diver of the yellow car is style: he lies constantly to the hitchhikers he picks up, he uses drugs to stay awake during their race, and is clueless about how to navigate small-town America.
The race is the engine of the plot, but it's not the main point of the film. After a few minutes of racing, the grey and yellow teams meet up to discuss routes and to give each other advice on engines. It's not about the competition: it's about travelling and moving fast and building the best car you can. Why building the best car you can? Why not? If we must invent our own meaning in this world, then a car may as well do. The driver of the yellow car picks up a hitchhiker who mournfully explains that we all only have like 30 or 40 more years left, so it doesn't matter where he goes. The driver does not understand him, so the hitchhiker symbolically commits suicide by asking to be let out.
The film is spacy and slow. Because the main characters are some kind of automotive monks, there's not a lot of dialogue and we spend a lot of time floating down roads, looking under hoods at gas stations, eating burger at a diner. My personal taste is that there should be more consideration for others in the world. Single-minded devotion is all well and good, but you eventually have to sacrifice for that single thing, and I just hope it's worth it, although I suspect that it never is (he typed, completing his 1,250th movie review.)
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