Continued from part two.
What kind of bread do you want
Mark has fled the campus. Open the scene with an extreme close up shot of his face shielded with sunglasses, tinted green with the windows of the bus on which he is riding. Then a medium shot with the same tones flashed with an occasional touch of red from outside the bus. Close up then of Mark, natural tones, the green window behind, the bus driver announcing “Rockway and Curvy (?), end of the line.” As Mark exits, following after a woman in a bright red dress (this bright red color had been swallowed on the bus by the green tint) we see outside the windows a 7 Up sign and Seaside gas. The bus is 5847. Two benches at the bus stop have on their rear advertising for mortuaries. “Dunaway and Douglass, Hawthorne’s Preferred Mortuary” and “McCormick Mortuaries, Inglewood, Hawthorne, Westchester”. The bus pulling away, we see in the background on a truck an older gray car much like the one that Daria is driving. A Standard gas station sign is beyond that.
Mark is observed then walking toward a car sales lot and a Bank of America sign showing a setting sun receding behind hills. This setting sun is nearly identical to the one on which the film will end. We’ve already seen in the Sunny Dunes offices a model for a billboard with what is perhaps the Sunny Dunes logo, a bright red sun setting over high hills or mountains.
He cuts to the right.
We see a curious duplication of a bank billboard on the left, to do with “new checking plans”. Perhaps another Bank of America ad. And beneath it is another billboard with the same 4 figures, a man, older woman, younger woman, older man, but there is no script on this board, only the picture. No words. In the distance is an ad for “Challenge Cottage Cheese” and a sandwich spread.
The camera then shows us to the right the side of a building covered with a 7 Up ad along side one for “Old Charter” bourbon, a man and woman piloting a boat with, again, a red and gold sunset as background.
Rounding the corner to the front of the store, we see a hitchhiker. A mechanic in white overalls exits the store with a bottle or canister of some type in his hand and promptly, intentionally drops it in the street’s gutter as Mark passes, then the mechanic simply walks off. Mark enters the store passing a wall covered with comic books and alcohol. Another 3d ad for perhaps Old Charter bourbon is placed front and center of the camera, dominating the scene, a woman and man on a red sailboat, orange and red hues of the setting sun behind them. Outside had been the Old Charter ad with text. Inside is this other version with Antonioni only showing the image. No words. The boat and water motif that enters continues to the film’s end.
Next to this are blue and white cans of Iris products. The first reads baby kosher pickles with no image, the next can is the Iris brand that shows oranges and a glass of orange juice but no identifying text for what the can contains. Again, we had the ad or brand with text and then no text, no words. Beyond or more cans of Iris products showing both images and id text: orange juice, fruit cocktail, tomato juice. We hear it being asked what kind of bread is wanted.
We then see the shopkeeper behind the counter making sandwiches for two individuals in white mechanics uniforms, one of which has a name on it and the other not. Above them are numerous ads for coke. A giant cigarette spews plastic smoke. “Hero bread,” one of the workers guesses. The other asks for rye with a lot of mayonnaise. Mark squeezes between them to reach the payphone located in a small end nook with yet more coke ads and ads for alcohol, Schmidt’s, Smirnoff, Country Club. As he dials, one of the workers asks, “Why so light on the meat, Bob?” He’s on no diet. Bob says if he wants extra he pays extra. The other replies that they’re paying, don’t sweat it, as the shopkeeper sprays oil on the out of a diner style squeeze bottle with nozzle spout. Antonioni grants a pointed close-up of this mundane motion and I realize that it continues the motif of the fire hose, the garden hose that was spraying water on the camera, the motif enlarged and transferred now to the action of squeezing the oil out of this bottle.
Cut to Mark’s roommate diving to answer the phone. He asks where Mark is and Mark says Hawthorne. The roommate tells Mark he needs to cool it. “Somebody called and said you’re on TV. Was it really you? On the news. He said the guy looked just like you.”
Mark replies, “Morty,” then pauses, looks behind him at the workers, then hangs up.
Next shot, Mark has moved away from the phone, standing beyond the workers. He says he’d like to ask a favor of the shopkeeper, who replies, “Sure, shoot.” And despite his having likely heard the worker being denied more meat unless he paid for it, despite his face now being apparently premium news (or a face that looks like his), despite the fact he might want to keep a low profile, he brings further notice to himself by asking the shopkeeper if he will trust him for the price of a sandwich. The shopkeeper replies no, not that he doesn’t trust him personally, but if he trusted him then he’d have to trust everyone in the whole world.
Exterior. Medium shot of a large wordless ad showing passengers on a plane beside an ad for Best Foods Sandwich Spread. We had briefly seen this ad from inside the store and above the image were the words “Jet Delta to Dallas…Most Non-Stop…” So we know it has script but for all intents and purposes Antonioni has converted it into a wordless sign, just as he had done with the dual ads showing the 4 individuals, one of which had the ad text, the other which didn’t. No words. The camera travels left to a green bush just to the left of the sign and beyond that to the Best Foods Sandwich spread sign, zooms out so we see Mark from behind, gazing at the signs. Switch now to a front view of Mark seated before the Seaside gas station at the foot of a giant fiberglass statue of a muffler man between whose legs is an official smog inspection station sign.
After a moment Mark rises and wanders past the store’s pink front, and this time we see a long necked giraffe in the dark of the doorway, a freestanding ad of some sort. Coming to the corner he looks up and sees an airplane flying above, which passes behind the earlier mentioned dupe of the bank billboard ad. Buried beneath it is a restaurant parking sign which is largely obscured.
Some of these signs were found, some were probably altered slightly. I’ve read an interview in which Antonioni made mention of installing signs next to the airport. We don’t know which he installed but we can bet this was at least one of them.
Much is made of the signs in the film as representing Antonioni’s contempt for American consumer culture but more is involved.
The first sign we see in the film happens to be at the activist meeting, the upside down “Join Us” sign. I was reminded of the signs at the protest march in “Blow Up”, which looked to be only a protest march against nuclear armaments (expressed in only one sign by a mushroom cloud or really “Blow Up”) but more was involved as one of the signs read simply “NO, NO” and another read only, “ON, ON”. One could say it was an accidental reversal but I don’t believe it was. Another of the signs read “Go Away” and it was during a scene in which Mark was being stalked and so was more a commentary on the immediate situation rather than nuclear armaments. Who was being told to go away is another matter. Signs led us through that film, led its protagonist. Signs lead us here as well and comment on the situation in often cryptic ways, foreshadow, and teach us to look beyond the words to the images themselves being signs communicating information.
So, the first sign was the “Join Us” sign at the meeting, which was upside down and an “On Strike” sign beside it. Not part of consumer culture at all. In the next scene, the only observable sign was the one we could only see partially, a man’s jaw (resembling Rod Taylor’s) and the world “Key” below it, which was followed by Rod Taylor appearing and the camera showing this in combination with the security guard’s keys. Then, in the third scene, one could say consumer culture entered with the cow (Federally Inspected Meat), the Farmer John’s pig sign (though no words) followed by the onslaught of signs experienced during Mark’s drive through the city on the way to the picket line.
How does he respond to the signs? Well, he evidently ignores the “Join Us” sign, which is commented on as being bourgeois independence which will get him killed. He ignores a stop sign on the way to the picket line and runs it. When he leaves his house to go down to the strike we see he has ignored a “No Parking” sign.
If one will remember, when Mark had dropped his friend off at the picket line, we had observed a blind man passing a man carrying not a sign but a leafy branch. One could say Mark seems to be as a blind person, not simply a potential revolutionary but one who acts as he does as he simply does not see the signs around him, but I’m not ready to make such an analysis.
Surrounded by expressions and signs of flight, Mark’s about to get an idea.
Red and green car dealer windmills circulate before the camera, the color red furiously predominating as a police siren is heard in the background. A painted family in red shirts stares down expectantly at Mark from the crown of the Statue of Liberty in an ad for “United to New York, Let’s get away from it all.”
Mark follows an incoming plane across the street to a small airport, several smiling black women in a cream colored auto having to screech to a halt as he’s jaywalked out in front of them. He enters the yard of Bates Aviation Inc., passing a child seated on a bike at the gate. Watches a small evidently executive jet arriving which spills out a couple of brown suited businessmen. Out of all the small, private planes, the door is open and unwatched to the “Lilly 7″ which is a pale pinkish-cream color decorated with pink stripes. N6835R.
Perhaps the “7″ of the Lilly 7 is foreshadowed/repeated in the occasional focus on the “Fresh up with 7 Up” ads. Later Mark will be asked why he stole the plane and he will say he needed to get off the ground. And I think, ah, 7 Up. And it’s an amusing little coincidence that Mark’s name is Mark Frechette.
A propeller belonging to either a plane or a boat was an outstanding object in “Blow Up”. It was found in an antique store after the fateful event in the park, the making of the photographs which will later be blown up and up and up to reveal the dead man. Thomas had said he couldn’t live without it but when he attempted to put it in the back seat of his car the owner of the antique store had protested his car wasn’t a delivery van. It was on his way home from this, after a business meeting, that he passes by the protesters, one of whom put the “Go Away” sign in the back seat of his car. The sign had blown out of the back of the car.
A sign in the distance for American Federal shows money blowing up and about in the wind, reminding of the Desert Springs “You Are What You Eat” billboard with the money in the salad bowl before which Daria had briefly parked in the desert in order to look at her map.
Mark climbs in, cuts on the plane and begins rolling off. (I’m not sure but we may be afforded a glimpse of a clock on the extreme left of the plane’s control panel, it reading between 11:55 and 12:00.) A mechanic in a white Bates uniform comes running forward to ask where does he think he’s going. Mark nonchalantly replies he’s just taking a little scenic flight and asks if the man would like to come along. “No thanks,” says the mechanic and returns to his work while Mark taxis down the runway, the flight controllers yelling at him to abort flight. He narrowly avoids a collision with an incoming plane and is as unconcerned as he was when he ran the red stop light.
As he soars into the air, the city becoming smaller and smaller beneath him, he smiles and the spare music track gives us a clip of the Grateful Dead’s “Dark Star”.
Check out the single clover leaf of an interstate over which he soars.
Check it against the highway we were given the earlier aerial of where Daria exited to look at the map, confused as to her location.
The “You are what you eat” salad bowl of money had appeared in conjunction with the partial cloverleaf interchange in Daria’s scene. With Mark, it appears immediately before he takes off from the airport and the similar interchange is shown.
We see next two stadiums (circular and oval) and then another view of the interchange which is shown now as a double cloverleaf.
Beyond is the brown smog of the city suggesting also the desert, as if it is just beyond. And with the next shot we indeed have what at first seems to be Mark soaring over the pale brown-tan of the desert, his path intersecting with Daria’s car below, but instead it simply turns out to be another aerial shot. Daria eats an apple as we hear Pink Floyd’s “Crumbling Land”.
…in a smile I saw a single eagle in the sky
wheeling, soaring, gliding high.
Something like that
Cut to the office of Sunny Dunes, one of the executives on the phone, standing before an image of Phase II Future Development. Hear being said in a meeting, “Well, I don’t know, are we satisfied with the cost projections in the first phase?”
“Steve can answer that.”
“Ah yes, we’ve funded for two hundred million, set aside 40 against contingencies.”
Called to the phone, Lee says, as he takes it, “Wait a minute, why tie up 40 million dollars for contingencies? What contingencies?”
“We found certain areas where there are differences in the water table. Soil tests have shown density factors that increase…”
Realizing it’s Daria, Lee says he’ll take the call in his office.
Says one of the executives, as Lee exits, to the sole female executive, “Oh, Edie, we can’t make exact estimates until Phase I is 65…”
Cut to Daria looking at a framed picture of a soldier in the jungle in Vietnam, his baby picture and a picture of him in a baseball uniform also stuck in the frame. A clown figure stands alongside on stilts. A black vase with white plastic flowers reads in part, “Lay…This is…the Old…Priv…” Plastic toy miniatures of horses stand beyond. We see another large vase holding plastic flowers, the ceramic of this vase inset with buttons and stones from costume jewelry.
In his office, Lee approaches his desk on which rests a report titled “Alpine”. Picking up the phone he asks Daria what’s up and where is she. She replies she’s in some ghost town and was just calling to say she might be a little late to Phoenix as she’s looking for a little town that sounds something like Glenville or Ballyville “or something like that, something with a ville in it.”
The camera now shows Daria is standing in an old bar, a picture of cattle grazing on the wall.
“You know the desert, does that ring a bell?”
“A ville? A ville? Wait a minute, hold on.” Lee puts her on speaker and goes to an atlas. “A ville. What do you mean, like a Danville?”
“No way, in the desert. Danville’s in Connecticut. Or maybe it’s hill? Something hill.”
“What do you want to go to a town you don’t know the name of for? Have you got somebody to meet?” he inquires with a touch of jealous concern.
“My friend said it’s a fantastic place for meditation.”
“What do you do in a meditation?”
Another view of Daria shows on the opposite wall the picture of a screaming mountain lion.
The lion recalls the momentary flash of the image of a mountain lion in the Sunny Dunes commercial and the slaying of the Black Panther.
Postcards but none of them gives a clue as to where she might be, one of them reading “Colorado” and another showing Saguaro cactus.
“You think about things,” Daria says.
“You think about…Daria, look, give me the number you’re calling from and I’ll try to find out the name of the town and call you back, ok?”
“Oh, no, you’ll probably have a helicopter sent out here to pick me up,” Daria replies as she notices on the wall a small hinged board that reads, “In case of FIRE raise this flap,” three stick firemen below holding a spraying fire hose, one with an axe, which brings to mind the fire hose before which Mark had been standing in the meeting, and the hose in the commercial film.
She raises the flap and laughs when she finds it reads, “Not now, stupid. In case of fire!”
The operator comes on the line asking for 30 cents for the next three minutes. Lee tells Daria to give him the number, hang up, and he’ll call her back and that way he can pay for the call. Instead, Daria replies, “See you in Phoenix,” and hangs up while behind Lee Allen we see through his window down to the street and a “Udrive” sign next to a parking lot.
Taking a drag on his cigarette, Lee turns, exasperated, to look out the window.
Cut to an older man at the bar, dressed in a plaid shirt and cowboy hat, a beer before him, taking a drag on a cigarette. The owner stands behind the counter drawing a beer for Daria. As she sits at the counter before her hamburger, beside the older man, we see a pool room beyond. Daria asks the older man if he knows of a place called Glenville or Ballyville or something like that. He shakes his head no.
The owner says, “Ballister?”
“That’s it.”
A shot of the owner with a red circle haloing his head reminds me of the circlets of radishes in the salad bowl ad. Beside him is a stand of pocket watches.
“Sure do,” he says, “you’re standing in it. You didn’t come here to see one James Patterson, did you?”
“How do you know?”
“You look like the type. Well, you can tell him for me he’s going to be the death of this town. He’s going to ruin a piece of American history.”
“Jimmy?”
The owner leaving the bar area, she follows him to the other side of the wall where there is a lunch counter. A “Frostie” sign is the most conspicuously placed ad among the few observed. As she walks around the lunch counter an old, toothless man wearing an SF cap reaches out and stops her, mumbling, “Do you remember Johnnie Wilson?”
“Johnnie Wilson? No.”
“That’s me. I was middleweight champion of the world in the 1920s.”
“Middleweight champion of the world?”
“That’s right.”
“That’s great.”
“Thank you.”
This isn’t the only reference to the 1920s in the film. There is also one which occurs toward the end of the movie.
The owner steps out of the kitchen, behind the counter, carrying a coffee cup the same color pink as the Lilly 7. “On account of being a do gooder,” he says. “He brought these kids out here from Los Angeles. Said they were sick. Emotionally sick. You know what that means?”
“The Tennessee Waltz” has begun playing in the background.
Daria shrugs.
“Well, if Los Angeles don’t want ‘em, why should we want ‘em?”
The camera cuts to a shot of the yellow wall on which are taped numerous cards, including a paper version of the “In case if fire!”
At that moment something crashes through the window.
The hole is high in the door, but the next shot shows it as low. It is a replay of the broken window at the building on campus, through which the police officer had tossed the tear gas can. In the campus scene we were first shown a broken window from the interior of a building, it being low in the door. Then at the building where the shooting takes place we see a broken window which is high in the door, and it was this through which the gas was thrown. Here instead we see first something crashing through the upper part of the door, then the next shot shows the hole is now in the low part of the door and the area of the initial crash is covered by an ad dangling from the door frame, that ad swinging with the force of the crash.
“Goddamn it!” The owner grabs a bottle from behind the counter and rushes to open the door, passing a small 7 up ad, and exits onto the porch. “Goddamn criminals, coming around here again and I’m s…” His voice trails off as he throws his bottle which breaks in the middle of the street.
This connects with the earlier store with the 7 Up sign, from which emerged a worker in a white uniform who dropped a bottle in a gutter for seemingly no reason as Mark approached.
Dust radiates from the crash of the glass, reminding of the smoke from the tear gas canister.
…when an old friend I happened to see.
I introduced her to my loved one,
and while they were waltzing,
my friend stole my sweetheart from me.
Daria having followed the owner, he says well he guesses she can see for herself, that window cost him 30 bucks. He steps back inside and we get now an exterior shot of the place, “Rumpus Room” and “Market” painted on its front, a fiberglass cow advertising ice cream situated on the roof. Daria’s car, curiously, is the only one outside though there are 4 other customers inside the building.
Mark, hearing that the protesters were to be forced out, had gone down to the college to see for himself, and here Daria is told she can see for herself, at a place called the Rumpus Room, rumpus meaning riot.
I remember the night and the Tennessee Waltz,
now I know just how much I have lost…
Daria turns and sees through tears in a remnant of brown canvas wrapped around the shell of a crate, eyes peering out at her. They’re five children. As she approaches, one of them pops, with a bang, a plastic bag, and they run off, she calling, “Hey! Listen!”
The plastic bag popping with a bang connects with the earlier gunshots at the strike.
Daria stands beside a white pole reading, “Old Parker Rd.” looking after them, then follows across the street to an overturned gray car under which some children are hiding. Next to this is a boy in a white t-shirt plucking on the strings of a busted piano. The children under the car throw a rubber hose at her as she nears.
We see the auto from the rear, license plate HDJ 506. The interior of the decrepit shell of an auto is a bright red. Daria opens the car door and 7 push out past her.
She yells at them to come back but they yell no and, laughing, continue on. She approaches the boy in the white t-shirt, Olympia lettering on its back, and asks, “Hey kid, where’s Jimmy?” He simply looks at her and mutely returns to plucking at the piano.
Daria crosses a RR crossing and approaches a raised platform to which she’d seen the children run behind, perhaps all that remains of what was once a building.
The stair rails leading up to the platform echo the stair rails observed in the security monitor at the Sandy Dunes building before Daria meets Lee.
Daria climbs onto the platform, as do the children. Soon she is surrounded by a gang of about ten or eleven boys, none of whom is likely over the age of ten. She asks, “Where’s the man who brought you here? Doesn’t he stay with you?”
“Can we have a piece of ass?” one of the boys says.
She laughs, “Are you sure you know what to do with it?”
“Yes.”
One boy communicates with the others by making a fist and drawing it down (this fist connects back to the Black Panther fist in the strike poster), then deliberately, slowly points a finger down then up. In response, the boys attack Daria. She laughs at first, asking what they’re doing, but as they push and pull on her, grabbing at her dress, she flees.
The Tennessee Waltz still plays as she, freaked out, climbs in her car and drives off. The camera closes in on the windows of the Rumpus Room, one painted, “Pool Room” and the red circle of an Olympia beer sign beneath (“On tap, Olympia, It’s the water”) and a “Lucky Draft” sign in the other. Zoom in through the window to the old fellow in the plaid shirt and cowboy hat who she’d first spoken with, he lifting a new beer to his mouth, seemingly oblivious, or deliberately oblivious to anything going on around him. The scene closes with the end of the Tennessee Waltz.
One is likely supposed to feel empathy for and most sympathetic with the Black Panthers and the youth culture, yet here we have children who have been supposedly rescued from Los Angeles by one of Daria’s friends but who seem to have been given no guidance in their new home, virtually abandoned there, and have formed a little gang of tyrants while James Patterson is off perhaps meditating somewhere. This scene is a replay of the protesters, the strike and the shooting. A different place, different circumstances, different individuals, but motifs inconspicuously link events, different cultural and age groups in conflict, no communication had between them, past, present and future in strife.
It is peculiar that Daria has strayed here looking for a town with a name ending of ville or hill, when instead she was seeking Ballister and landed there accidentally, nor would she have known she was there if the bar owner hadn’t intuited it was Ballister she was seeking.
(Note: Thanks to WRomanus for pointing out it was Ballister that Daria lands in. I had misheard and originally had Hallister.)
Via the siting of the pole reading Old Parker Road, and finding it and an intersecting road that crosses a nearby RR, one finds that the scene was shot at approximately 7500 U.S. 95 in Vidal, California.
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Continue to Part Four
Zabriskie Point, Part One
Zabriskie Point, Part Two
Zabriskie Point, Part Three
Zabriskie Point, Part Four
Zabriskie Point, Part Five
