Cinema and gambling go together: like hangers-on at the races or Reno craps tables have no problem cathartically sharing in lucky streaks of others, we viewers get lost in the thick of the action, our mood rising and falling with the stacks of chips at our hero's side. And filmmakers are nothing if not gamblers themselves: moving fast and loose with huge wads of other people's cash, tangling with the odds, and making choices moment-by-moment that can make or break the bank.
Some films are just escapism, or a thrill ride away from ourselves but we can see ourselves in other films the way parents see themselves in children. I see old flames in the eyes of cinematic icons and I see my brother Fred in the dull lug wrench work involved with being a drag race mechanic in TWO LANE BLACKTOP, a mytho-poetic saga of masculinity that reverberates to my core, and shit. So how come both BLACKTOP and Altman's gambling drama CALIFORNIA SPLIT are so underseen? Doesn't anybody ever roll the dice no more?
I saw Nicholas Ray's LUSTY MEN (1952)--a story about the manly world or rodeo riding-and BLACKTOP Monte Hellman's COCKFIGHTER (1974)--about the manly world of cockfighting--a couple years back and wrote that I thought neither was on DVD in any reputable form due to their edgy titles (put together they read like a gay porn marquee). The problems besetting TWO LANE BLACKTOP (1971 and CALIFORNIA SPLIT (1974) are similar, but more of a legal rather than promotional nature, specifically: song rights. Apparently just having a Doors tune be heard while passing a drag strip car stereo can spin your film into limbo for generations to come. A bad spin of the wheel to be sure.
In the case of CALIFORNIA SPLIT, several sequences had to be removed or re-edited for TV prints due to song royalty issues--and then the remixed version caught flak from Altman purists--so on DVD it's practically a no-show. Lucky for us it's available on Netflix streaming along with a few other titles that seem to exist only there, such as LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR. I wish Tom Berenger would stop killing Diane Keaton and go after some of these AOR lawyers, though I guess they're dying quick enough on their own.
Robert Altman's CALIFORNIA SPLIT (1974) is similarly about the world of male bonding via "putting up or shutting up," and "laying it all on the table" and again there's no point digging for homoerotic subtext in a movie where the subtexts have been stripped down and exposed and nobody cares because once a subtext gets exposed it either "puts up or shuts up" and if it doesn't lay down on the table it's because nothing would stop it if it wanted to, and sometimes that's enough. As with much of Altman and Hellman's output, we're immersed in a niche culture with its own insular complexity: we watch the flashing of dollars and hear the overlapping numbers, "Three to one on Egyptian Femme in the ninth by 8 points," / "You got it, Brother," with awe from a distance, like a little brother tagging along. It seems like chaos, but the grace and quickness with which people willingly hand over huge piles of cash to each other is life-affirming. More than anything as far as plot or money or character, what's most important is the camaraderie, the flurry of activity that makes these guys feel alive.
One of the more artsily respectable of these "flurry of activity" episodes is the Rome stock exchange in L'ECLISSE (1962, above and below). You can argue here that Antonioni is criticizing capitalist greed in these scenes, but he's also marveling at the way idle humans can find something to get passionate about over nothing--for no one passes any actual money around at these stock markets. They just shout numbers: "20,000 Finsider at 20!" The effect is something anyone who's been in a foreign country and not known the language can understand and perhaps that's why subtitles make movies "seem" artsy while a film in English about gamblers or drag racers only "seems" trashy - and when either contradicts that expectation, we don't like it. A common currency breeds resentment, but a special private language shared only by your fellow degenerates creates a special nook. There's no race, age, class or gender distinctions, only who's got the cash to back up their line of bullshit.
Basically, if you're a musician everything you do all day is just preparing for showtime, and until then you just kind of keep yourself in a calm, alert state. You try to avoid getting too drunk or too stoned or too tired to play well, not just for you, because you're a team. The people who rely on you are right next to you and the personalities interlock: the dynamic of the mechanic and driver in BLACKTOP is similar to, say, the drummer and guitarist, or roadies and singer. Taylor and Wilson are eerily calm as befits the type who has learned to spend these idle stretches deep within. They are road-tested traveling troubadours who know how to focus in one one thing and let the rest of the world flash by. They talk about cars if they're racers or "how'd we sound last night" if they're musicians... you have to put up with hearing how each of them sounds on the soundboard tape as its played in the car all day long until the next gig, and you forced to listen to every little bass guitar fuck-up you made because you were too drunk and trying to show off, Erich!
By comparison, Warren Oates' GTO-driver is hopelessly insecure, challenging Wilson and Taylor in a race, apparently for friendship rather than monetary interests, but of course neither team can admit that. Oates' idea of taking "the girl" and going somewhere like "Chicago or New York" is the plan by which all his dreams will come true--the "We're retired in Florida now, Mister" dream of EASY RIDER, but she's not buying it, just as Captain America didn't--and neither, once the dust of his bullshit settles, is Oates himself.
Existence on the road is all these people seem to have - they have no address, no home other than their car, or-- in the girl's case--someone else's car. Stretched out along Route 66, they're vagabonds on wheels, sleeping in shifts or just hanging out in some no-horse town at the best time to be hanging out in such towns, dawn. GTO's patter indicates he's aware of this perpetually displaced vagrancy while fundamentally unable to "accept it" and stop the idle chatter. He tells his disinterested hitchhiker passengers that these boys he's racing with "get hysterical... They run right over ya if they get the chance; but they can't stand up to the 455 no way." As if anyone even knows what that is, as if even he knows.
Some movies can portend to be about everything cosmic and cool, but really be about the director's insecurity, like Woody Allen's. Monte Hellman's are the reverse: they're about male insecurity burying itself in a spiritual discipline -- Zen and the art of the Chevrolet, and at their core reveal only a transcendental quietude worthy of Ozu or Bresson. And much as I love EASY RIDER, you can see the difference as clear as night and day between the judgmental redneck bashing of Hopper's film and the way Wilson quietly changes his license plate when driving through the deep south because he doesn't feel "safe," letting you infer deep suspicion towards out-of-staters, but sparing us any actual redneck violence.
The film's focus on the art of driving is a spiritual thing that the truly enlightened, deranged, or anyone experiencing a mid-life crisis or lysergic epiphany can understand: the thing in itself doesn't matter so much as the doing - in this case the fast-talk distraction that comes from winning money, watching races and fights and admiring each other's vehicle or poker chips. Anything can become poetry with the proper attention: the roosters fighting in slow motion in COCKFIGHTER for example. The beauty of the road is the way constant motion can breed deep inner stillness, time and responsibility escaped through some motorized loophole. Who wins the race or fight hardly matters to Hellman? All we know is: destinations are for chumps.
Foreign films' subtitles create the same disconnect as the intense focus and foreign-ness of "carspeak" or "cockspeak." We need to be plunged into foreign situations, like kids greedily absorbing the strangeness with no intention of judging it. Make it too unfamiliar to ever breed contempt, and its art.
But it's lost, a lost art. The only ones who've come close to being believable in carspeak in the last few decades is Vin Diesel--who was able to carspeak for most of FAST AND FURIOUS without it sounding tacked on, and Heath Ledger as a zonked board waxer in LORDS OF DOGTOWN. But look what happened to them? Five to one Diesel never makes it back, either; I'll put 35 at five to six he doesn't - even money he does but grows hair on that bald dome and gets pudgy and starts playing street thugs. Yep, I won that bet. Won it flat out, in a poker game, used to fly jets... for pink slips. It don't mean nothin' either way. Fade to Burn, George. And don't roll no post-op credits.
0 коментарі:
Дописати коментар