Archive for ‘Cinema’
119 items.
NOTE: This section, part five, is unfinished but I’ve not had time recently to work on it.
Continued from Zabriskie Point, Part Four
No War, No Words
They are painting the plane. Mark remarks “they” might not even think it’s a plane but a strange, prehistoric bird spotted over the Mojave Desert with its genitals out.
When Daria says he’s just crazy enough to take it back to LS, he says one doesn’t just borrow a private plane for a joyride and never come back and express your thanks.
On the top of the plane were breasts and the number 1. The screen left side, upon which Daria had been working, we see shows an igniting match. The planes number has been used as a base and altered for a message, N6835R transformed into the phrase, “No war”.
We see Mark writing “Thankx” on the window.
We see a penis on the side of the plane upon which Mark had been working. Lilly 7 has been transformed into Lilly Freecome. The tail of the plane shows a dollar sign and the words “Suck bucks”. The plane’s number has been transformed to read “No words.”
The seating of the plane, from this angle, reminds of the sign showing the passenger seats outside the airport which we’d observed just after Mark had left the market and before getting the idea to steal the plane.
Daria asks Mark if he really thinks he has a chance. He says something about setting it down on the runway and having enough time to make it into the fields. From there he says he has it made, “back in time before they know what’s happening”.
“But why take it back? You could just ditch it here and ride with me to Phoenix. You don’t even have to take the risk of…”
“I wanna take risks. Isn’t she beautiful?” he says, surveying the plane.
We see that Daria’s side of the plane shows a bomb bearing the words “She, he, it”. Grass is painted all around. So, on the plane we have female breasts, a phallus and a dollar sign (along with the words “Suck Bucks”) which actually is much like the caduceus of Mercury, an there is one theory that it may have developed from that, Hermes being the god of not only tricksters, messengers (a psychopomp, guide of the dead) and thieves, but also bankers. Hermes is also the source of the word hermaphrodite in his united form with Aphrodite, Hermaphrodite being their child, which we see in the plane which one supposes represents the balanced masculine and feminine principles. Which takes us back then to the children near the RR crossing who had attacked Daria, and the curious up and down gesture made by one of the boys. That gesture is also a magical one representing “as above, so below”, again balanced properties, and also solve et coagula by which base materials are transmuted into gold via separation and being brought together, reduction to the prima materia, the stage of blackness and chaos followed by whitening, or the albedo, and unification.
It’s to represent this solve et coagula, and “as above, so below” that I think we had at the college the first sighting of a broken window in a lower pane and then in an upper pane, which I noticed but wouldn’t have thought anything about unless there had been, at Ballister, the breaking of the upper pane of the door’s window, which thereafter was shown as the bottom pane having been shattered. And who had broken the pane but the children, one of whom leads the others making the sign of “as above, so below” before rushing upon Daria. This occurring at a place with signs of Olympia (the ethereal home of the gods) but which seems intended to represent a sort of living hell.
The cone of the plane, done by the elder man, has been painted to remind of the black panthers, for it is a version of a panther, but with the pink eyes and mouth it also reminds of Mark’s statement that he had changed colors once but had changed back. The several instances of the sticking out of the tongues during the orgy scene seems also to be found here. The teeth are oddly crooked enough that they could be taken as recalling flames.
Cut to the propeller starting up.
Mark takes off in the plane, Daria waving goodbye.
1110 News
Shot now of three mechanics with a petrol hose standing before a plane at the Bates Aviation field–so, again, we think of the small sign at Ballister with the three firemen carrying the fire hose and other variations on the theme of the hose.
A plane takes off and passes a policeman with a man dressed in a blue striped sweater.
“Did you use the plane very often, sir?”
“Yes.”
The officer asks if it was insured for liability and theft. The man says of course it was. Thought it was a small plane, they don’t come cheap. And his wife loved it. They had it painted her favorite color, pink. Cut to Mark flying the not-quite-pink plane any longer. Then back to the air field and the KRLA 1110 NEWS station wagon. A reporter is asking a mechanic, “So you actually talked with the kid. What did he say?” The mechanic says he asked him if he wanted to go for a ride, acting like it was his plane. “You believed him.” The mechanic says he didn’t. “Then why did you let him go?”
A shot now of Daria driving, listening to the mechanic on the news. He says he didn’t know why he let him go. The reporter asks what he was wearing and the mechanic says he had on a shirt and dark hair and was about 30 or maybe younger, 20, 21. Daria laughs and switches to a station with music. “You Got the Silver” by the Rolling Stones plays.
Tell me honey, what do I do,
when I’m hungry, thirsty too…
Daria takes out an apple and eats it.
Cuts back and forth between Daria driving and Mark flying. She switches to another radio station that is advertising a rodeo with lots of “dusty fun”. More music. “Oh, I wish I was a single girl again.” She passes a pack of free running horses.
Bates Field again. A yellow barrel painted with red lettering, “No oil, please”. A police officer is walking over to a patrol car, gets in. We’re shown a line of patrol cars next to the KRLA wagon. Two photographers stand with a man before a large Marlboro mural showing a man on a bucking bronco. To the left is the large ad of the money floating in the air. Between is a painted sign showing a Continental airplane. One of them is saying the kid has to be out of his head.
The plane flying above the clouds. Daria driving. The control tower reports that the Lilly 7 has just been spotted coming in for a landing from the south. The police and reporters ready themselves. A man on the ground is radioed that he should “see this thing, you wouldn’t believe it.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing’s wrong. It just has all those funny jokes painted all over it.”
A KRLA helicopter cruises by. We see the plane now. Officers watch from their cars. As the plane comes in to land, police cars roar onto the field with sirens blaring. Mark wheels the plane about in a circle. The police fire on the plane. Silence.
The police approach the plane with arms drawn, then holster them. All peer in through the windows at Mark who is slumped over the wheel. One says for them to get ambulance and a tire iron.
There are no bullet holes in the windows. None of the windows is broken. I realize, as they pull in on the windshield, that some of the leafy greenery painted on the windshield are actually, mixed in with the painted ones, real leaves within the plane. And I think this point is a vital point in beginning to come to terms with this film…
Next we see Daria in saguaro cactus desert is outside her car listening to the news. “An apparent hijacking attempt has ended with one youth dead after repeated attempts by police to block the plane. Several shots were fired into the cockpit, by an unidentified police officer, killing the youth immediately.”
The station moves on to a song by John Fahey, “Dance of Death”. Daria sways slowly back and forth to the music. Suddenly she rushes to her car and rides off.
If we find water there, we can certainly find gold
Daria is in Phoenix. Despite Death Valley and Zabriskie Point being about 9 hours away, Daria, who would have left Death Valley in late afternoon, is in Phoenix before sunset which is a physical impossibility. I don’t think this is an error on Antonioni’s part, instead I think it says something of the nature of the story and its characters, that we can’t approach this film, ultimately, as literal, and Antonioni has left us what would seem a large and glaring “continuity error” to inform us of that fact if we are as yet unaware of it.
We view her driving out of a desert road and up the winding driveway to Lee’s desert estate.
The house is Boulderreign which sits on “Balanced Rock across from the Boulders Resort and Golden Door Spa at Black Mountain in Carefree, Arizona outside of Scottsdale/Phoenix.
She exits the car and we hear wind chimes as she walks toward the house. She hears the sound of water lapping and sees an entrance on her right to the pool area.
Cut to several women alongside the pool, one asking, “What was it like anyway?” The source of the splashing Daria had heard is a loose hose splashing aimlessly about in the pool. A phone rings. We hear one of the women stating that, “He is coming right over.” Daria enters the patio and passes unnoticed as one of the women promises to tell them everything that happened the other night. “Very interesting, you know, Nicki said she wasn’t there, but I walked out by the pool…”
She wasn’t there.
In a sense, we have entered the earlier commercial now with these women beside the pool. And we have here another occurrence of the hose/fire hose motif, the loose pool hose flapping wildly about.
Daria leaves the patio and crosses step stones next to a small waterfall. Beginning to cry, she steps into the waterfall, soaking her head, but only one side of her dress.
We see the wind chimes, their tones reminding of the boy plucking at the piano in the desert, a replay of that. Then beyond them, from Daria’s POV, Lee is glimpsed through the windows of the house, and the house appears encased in rock, as if it is part of the scene, the wilderness.
A meeting is taking place inside. Daria has watched in silence, she unable to hear, of course. A servant bringing drinks for the men, as she turns away to leave, the focus brings into focus Daria looking at her reflection in the window.
We now enter the interior and the ongoing meeting.
“Well, Lee, if these are your final conditions I don’t see how I could possibly submit them to our associates. This proposal is just unacceptable.”
“Well, Jack, you know as well as I do that the price of anything is never high or low except in relation to its potential use, right? Well, the only question is, is this land of value to your people or not?”
“Frankly, I don’t think that it is. We don’t want to get in over our heads any more than you people do.”
In the shot above, numerous guns appear to be pointed at Lee.
Daria enters the house but remains clear of the others.
Lee and his associate leave the group of men they’ve been speaking with, passing a small cannon, one of the men behind them saying, “He talks about prospective use and speculation. We shouldn’t pay any more than speculation prices.”
“What do you think, counselor, should we call their bluff?” Lee’s associate asks him.
Lee gestures to his associate for silence, finger to mouth, as they exit onto the balcony.
A woman approaches the pair, distracting the associate. Lee turns and sees Daria in the room behind him. Excited, he enters and greets her, takes her chin and turns her face toward him. Noticing her wet dress he laughs and asks, “What happened to you, did you try to go swimming?” He grasps her shoulders warmly. “Anyway, you arrived. That’s what’s important, isn’t it. Now listen. Go downstairs, change clothes, your room is the first on the right at the bottom of the stairs.” He guides her past a series of blue plates depicting sailing scenes (one reads July 1927). The idea of the house as a ship takes us back to the earlier emphasis on the ads of “Old Charter” bourbon, the couple on the boat with the sun going down behind them, the pilot’s wheel before them, the pilot’s hand on the wheel. That image, too, is now being played out.
Daria descends the stairs, looks up, Lee places a hand on a pilot’s wheel from a boat which is at the height of the stairs.
At the bottom of the stairs Daria tries first one door, which is locked, then another. It opens but she closes it without entering. We hear footsteps. A servant woman enters through the door Daria had just tried and found locked. They smile at each other. The servant woman continues up the stairs. Daria flees outside, climbs in her car and rides down the driveway. Still within sight of the house she stops and looks back.
This is a decisive and even traumatic moment for Daria, else she would not flee as she does. I feel we have been returned to the scene in which Daria, as a temp worker, approaches security at Lee’s building and asks to be permitted on the roof to retrieve her book. Another security worker, a woman, had approached to say she’d found an unlocked door and had secured it.
We have a shot of the balcony, empty of people, a National Geographic on a table beside a lit cigarette abandoned in a tray. We see the area where Lee had just greeted Daria. It too is empty. We see the room in which the meeting was being held. It too is empty and eerily silent.
Despite the meeting room appearing empty, we now see the reflections of the men in the lake of the development map in the room. The men who had voiced skepticism, to whom Lee has been trying to sell the project, are speaking.
“Now, we realize it’s got great potential with the arena, the pier, etc., it blends itself with casual living, yet it’s affluent.”
“As a matter of fact, I’m quite enthusiastic about this whole project. But the next thing you know we’ll be finding gold on this property…”
As the man says this we see Lee’s reflection in the black reflecting lake, his fingers moving to his mouth, appearing anxious, concerned.
“…if we find water there, we can certainly find gold.”
“Well, in this country, water is gold.”
“The development of an air strip or roads, the marina development, and the shore areas, would of course be a subsequent fact of the entire project.”
El Dorado.
In silence, the house appears to blow up.
Daria had been facing the house. She looks at the sleep shirt Mark had given her, steps out of the car and walks a couple of steps toward the house. As she stares at it, sound enters and we have many more images of the house blowing up, a mushroom cloud forming over head.
Then, separately, the refrigerator is shown blowing up. Fire consumes the screen. We see the house ablaze.
Then move from the house blowing up to seeing various furnishings, appliances and other things blowing up. The patio furniture. A closet of women’s clothing. A television and chair. Refrigerator again. Meat, vegetables, fruit, cereal. They float so slowly down against the blue background that at times they appear to be in water.
Books blowing up, the music playing underneath, Pink Floyd’s “Come in Number 51, Your Time Is Up”, shifts gears and moves from what had been meditative tones to a near scream.
Cut to Daria smiling. The sun setting now, casting a red glow over the scene she climbs back in her car and drives away. The camera turns to the sun setting behind the mountains.
It is the same setting sun as earlier shown in the Sunny Danes billboard model in the Sunny Dunes miniature terrarium at the office complex, the same setting sun as seen in a bank after Mark departed the bus beside the mortuary benches, the same setting sun as seen in the “Old Charter” alcohol ads of the couple on the boat. Considering that terrarium, the miniature model of Sunny Dunes, much as in “Blow Up” we’ve had the grain of a photo becoming larger and larger and larger, Daria sinking more deeply into the scene, the story evolving, continual replays of motifs, permutations of motifs, until finally…
Blow Up.
Which isn’t literal. Despite Antonioni’s noted hatred of American commercialism, that is not all this finale, this scene is about. It is not Daria, in a pique of rage and grief, imagining the destruction of the house and all it represents. She has already been in the “blow up”. She was standing within it when inside the house. Her looking back upon it from outside is a point of illumination, as with the character of the photographer in “Blow Up”. This “blowing up” is instead her own experience, something she has just been through.
(And, as noted above, I’ve not finished with this last part of my notes and analysis, but I’m busy working on other things and will have to return to this later…)
Zabriskie Point, Part One
Zabriskie Point, Part Two
Zabriskie Point, Part Three
Zabriskie Point, Part Four
Zabriskie Point, Part Five
2Comment
Continued from part three.
Member U.S. Championship Sleeping Team
Cut to the shadow of a plane roaring over the railroad track. Mark. The train honks and he waves at it.
Daria’s car on the road.
An extreme long shot of the plane flying over the desert. The plane and its shadow intersects with her car, which we realize is stopped, passing directly over it.
Next we see Daria bent before a yellow water tank that reads “Water for radiators only”. As she refills her radiator and closes the hood of the car, gets back in it, the plane turns back in the distance.
She is driving down the road as the plane comes zooming overhead from behind, buzzing her car. “Jesus, what the hell was that? Fuck!”
We see the plane turn back around and again, from the rear, buzz her car leaving only a few feet allowance.
Again, the plane comes around and buzzes her car, only this time from the front. The plane pulls back around and buzzes her again. This time, Daria fascinated and smiling, saying, “What the hell was that?” stops the car and steps out on the side of the road. She throws herself on the ground as the plane buzzes her a fifth time, and she stands and throws desert and after it, irritated.
The next shot, Daria is writing in the sand. The next shot is slightly above the writing and we see a circle with perhaps spokes on the inside and then two F’s. She’s written apparently “Fuck off.”
Up in the plane, Mark takes a red shirt from the back seat and tosses it out the window. It floats to the ground and Daria runs across the sand to retrieve it. She reads the writing on it, Member U.S. Championship Sleeping Team, and then waves it at him, laughing.
The plane departs. Next, Daria is driving down the highway accompanied by music. Coming upon the plane, which has landed, she pulls off the highway where there are two sign boards but no ads, no lettering, no images.
Daria exits her car and approaches Mark, the red shirt in hand. “Thanks for the nightie, but I don’t think I can use it.”
“Wrong color?”
She says perhaps wrong sex and hands the sleep shirt to him. Nearby is a shack out front of which is an old man with a number of paint buckets. Curiously, in this place of no signs at all, it would seem his profession is that of the sign painter.
Mark asks Daria which way she’s headed. When she replies, Phoenix, he asks why, saying there’s nothing there. He tells her he’s having some trouble, and since she’s come along with a car and nowhere to go, maybe she can give him a lift to get some more gas. She asks how far and he tells her the man says maybe 20 miles. Daria agrees to take him.
Refer back to the film’s opening. During the opening credits, the first words heard were “Well, as far as that” as on the screen was shown a shot of Mark under the title “Zabriskie Point”. That voice was not Daria’s, but it connects with this, with Daria asking how far, for they will next end up at Zabriskie Point.
As they approach Daria’s borrowed car she mentions that the radio said someone stole a plane in LA that morning. “Did you really steal that thing? How come?” she asks. Mark tells her he needed to get off the ground.
Death Valley and Ancient Lake Beds
The car coming upon Zabriskie Point, turns off the highway and drives up a winding road to it, past two bright red portalets.
“This is an area of ancient lake beds deposited five to ten million years ago,” Daria reads off a sign. “These beds have been tilted and pushed upward by earth forces and eroded by wind and water. They contain borates and gypsum.” The sign further reads, “The tall yellow pinnacle is Manly Beacon,” but Daria doesn’t read this aloud. “Borates and gypsum?” Mark replies it’s two old prospectors and she laughs. They sit on a wall overlooking the desert. Daria asks how the plants make it in the sand, saying they’re so beautiful. When Mark doesn’t answer she asks him what does he do beside flying airplanes? He says until the day beforehand he drove a fork lift truck at a warehouse.
“Done other things.”
“Been to college?” she asks.
When he says some, she asks him if he left because of grades. He says extracurricular activities, like stealing hardcover books instead of paperback, making phone calls on the chancellor’s stolen credit card number, whistling in class, bringing illegal things onto campus like a (inaudible).” She asks what’s wrong with that and he says, “We did it in the road.”
“Yeah, they finally kicked me out after I broke into the Dean’s office and reprogrammed the computer.” He made all the engineers take art courses.
Mark leaps down to the desert off the wall and Daria jumps down as well, Mark saying, “She’s gonna follow me down.” She asks him to tell her the rest of his criminal record. He says he once changed his color but it didn’t work so he changed back–suggesting he felt as if he had joined the Black Panthers.
She asks, “Did you hear that the Mexican air force is bombing the grass along the border?”
“I wonder what else is going on in the real world,” he replies.
Mark asks if she heard any news about the strike. She says not much, that she prefers music. He replies it’s like they don’t even report it anymore unless two or three hundred people get hurt. “Yeah, some kind of record,” Daria says. “Or a cop,” Mark says.
Daria replies a cop did get killed and some bushes were trampled. “I was trying to find a rock station. I think they said the guy who killed the cop was white.”
Daria’s flippancy, seeming to equate the killing of someone with the trampling of bushes, is jarring. One will notice the subject of an individual having been killed by the cop never comes up.
“Ooo, white man taking up arms with the blacks. Just like ol’ John Brown.”
Daria laughs and wanders away. She asks if he wants to go down by the riverbed. Calling, “See you at the bottom, he runs down the hill to it and at the bottom collapses and doesn’t move. She yells down to him, alarmed, “Hey, whatever you name is, hey, tough guy, are you all right?” He indicates he is. She follows down a less steep grade after going to her car for some marijuana.
She asks him if he wants some smoke and he replies, “You know you’re talking to a guy under discipline.”
“What’s that?”
“A joke, I guess. But this group I was in had rules about smoking. They’re on a reality trip.”
“What a drag. Let’s go find some shade.”
Smoking, she asks him, “What do you mean reality trip? Oh yeah, they can’t imagine things. Were you in with that group? Why didn’t you get out?”
He says he wasn’t really in with them, that he can’t stand their bullshit talk, it bored the hell out of him, but when it gets down to it you have to choose one side or another.
She replies, “There’s a thousand sides, not just heroes and villains.”
He asks what her name is, she tells him, then he tells her the point is if you don’t see them as villains you can’t get rid of them.
“You think if you can get rid of them we’ll have a whole new scene.”
“Why not? Can you think of any other way we can go about it?”
“Who’s we? Your group?” she asks rubbing his chest.
“You and me, babe.”
She laughs. “You and me!” Climbs on top of him. Then stands and looks into the distance. She asks him, “Don’t you feel at home here? It’s peaceful.” He replies that it’s dead.
She says, “OK, it’s dead. So, let’s play a death game. You start at one end of the valley and I’ll start at the other end and we’ll see who can kill the most. We’ll start on lizards and snakes and then move up to mice and rabbits. At the end, we’ll count up how many deaths each of us has, and the winner will get to kill the loser. Did I make a mistake? You don’t want to play that game.”
He says he doesn’t want to play any games at all.
As they walk he remarks it was nice of her to come with a guy who doesn’t turn on. She says she’s pretty tolerant. He asks what she’s doing out there. “Phoenix, was that for real?” Daria replies her boss wants her there for some conference. “You are pretty tolerant,” he says.
She wants him to pretend his thoughts are like plants. What does he see, neat rows or wild things like ferns, weeds, vines? He says he sees a jungle. She says it would be nice if thoughts could be planted in one’s head to get rid of bad memories, like a happy childhood and groovy parents. Only good things.
“Yeah,” he says, “and forget how terrible it really was.”
“That’s the point. Nothing’s terrible.”
“Far out.”
She says sometimes she feels like screaming her head off. He tells her to go ahead as it’s no man’s land, there’s nobody around, nothing.
“But someone will…”
“Who, a ghost, dead pioneer?”
He yells and it echoes. She twirls then yells also but not as loudly. They run up and down playing on the dunes. He turns a somersault.
They rest. “So anyway, so anyway, so anyway,” she says, ought to be one word and the name of a place or a river. The Soanyway River.
He explores an old mine and brings out a mineral he supposes was left by an old prospector. “Borate?” she asks, licking it. She looks at him through it then kisses him. “Is that gypsum?” she asks pointing out a white substance.
“Well, it ain’t table salt.”
They lie down and he asks her if she’d like to go with him. “Where?” Where ever he’s going.
“Are you really asking?”
He rubs her back. “Is that your real answer?” Strokes her hair.
Her hair undone, he says several things to her but we don’t hear what, only whispers. They begin making love as music enters, and undress.
Our first glimpse of another seeming couple is brief and disorienting as they look very much like Mark and Daria, but we only glimpse them less than an instant so don’t get a good look and are only able to tell that they are beige, dust covered, appear to be sleeping or even dead.
The camera returns to Daria and Mark but soon the couples begin to multiply, tumbling playfully down the hills, most dressed in beige tones that blend in with the landscape.
At the end we have a final shot of a scene filled with lovers.
Much is made over the “orgy” but we only see a few breasts, a few bare “rumps”, some kissing, a lot of twining of couples, some of threesomes, almost all dressed. A woman sticks out her tongue in play several times, serpent or cat like. One nude threesome gives the impression of having oral sex while Daria buries her head in Mark’s crotch then comes up for a kiss. Which is when we have the end shot of the desert hills covered with couples, most dressed, as the dust begins to rise in the rear and Daria turns her head to look as if over the scene. If one will notice, there isn’t one instance, I don’t believe of simulated intercourse.
Return to Mark and Daria resting, Daria gazing out over the landscape, pensive.
All that is seen is crumbled earth.
The dust blows over Daria and Mark as well.
The camera pulls back to show a torrent of footprints left in the sand.
“Zabriskie Point” is a beautiful film with some iconic scenes, but it has its problems, which have really begun taking some interference toll here. This scene at Zabriskie Point in some respects is attempting to offer ideas with which “The Passenger” neatly begins. The invisible agent (not thriller political) which works in the background has already been brought up in the meeting at the beginning of “Zabriskie Point”, and is expressed also in “The Passenger” which begins with Locke in the desert seeking contact with an isolated militant group. Being led into the far outback, Lock asks his guide how many people will be there, the guide responding he will be told when he gets there, and we see that the surrounding rocks are shaped to suggest facial profiles gazing on. Abandoned by this guide, after his vehicle becomes stuck in the sand dunes, a despairing Locke eventually makes it back to his motel where he recollects a conversation had with the man whose identity he is to assume. Locke had said he believed the desert to be beautiful, while Robertson said he wasn’t sure about that, instead it seemed to him to be waiting. Locke says he prefers men to landscapes and Robertson tells him, “There are men who live in the desert”, and even as he speaks we see in a window a mask-like face composed of shadows, in the plaster wall. The face isn’t an accidental anthropomorphism, it’s plainly evident when enlarged. The mimes in “Blow Up” functioned too as representations of invisible forces, as does the theatrical group in the desert where it seems the signs that overcame the landscape in the city, which became less dominant in Ballister, are finally absent here. The mimes in “Blow Up” helped introduce ideas of paying attention to “signs”, the seeming randomness of one’s environment, which the prevalent and overpowering signs in the city do here, so I think that by the time we reach the desert, rather than simply reveling in the absence of humanity and commercialism, we are instead intended to be sensitized to seeking out the wordless signs in the landscape and interpret also the actions of Daria and Mark in respect of this. After all, just prior to ending up at Zabriskie Point, where do Daria and Mark meet but at kind of the last outpost of an observable billboard-type sign upon which there is finally nothing, and yet the property apparently belongs to a sign painter who befriends and helps the pair.
El Dorado
Cut to a clear day, no blowing sand. Dressed again, Mark and Daria recline on the sand speaking. Mark tells Daria that he always knew it would be like this. “Love?” she asks. The desert, he replies.
The words are no sooner out of his mouth than a tourist family pulls up in the parking lot with their El Dorado camper pulling a boat.
Through a window covered with garish tourist stickers we view a child eating ice cream.
The parents walk to the edge of the lookout and the husband says someone should build a drive-in up there, that they’d make a mint. The wife asks why doesn’t he do it, and he scoffs. The camera returns to the desert and we have a loud sound of aircraft as the camera finds Mark and Daria climbing a hill. Then we hear a motor revving, the camper taking off as Daria and Mark crest a hill beyond which we see several seeming water tanks.
In one shot, the camper pulling away shows the red portalets behind, and up above this on the hill are Daria and Mark are walking. Hearing another engine, Mark runs into the men’s portalet. Daria starts for the women’s but a police car pulls up before she can enter. She steps over to speak with the officer who asks her if she’s having trouble. She says no, she was just going to the bathroom. He asks where her car is. She says she left it with her driver’s license, bank Americard, social security number, traveler’s checks, birth certificate, “and…uh…”
The officer turns and looks out over the desert. Smiles and shakes his head. We see behind the portalet Mark pulling out his gun, pointing it at the officer, cocking it. The officer returning to his car, Daria sees Mark with the gun and steps between the two, both shielding the officer from Mark and preventing Mark from being perhaps seen by the officer.
“Man, you’re really crazy,” she angrily says, returning to Mark. “Is it loaded?” Mark says no and opens the chamber dumping bullets on the ground. He buries them under the stones with his shoe. “Digging for water?” Daria asks. He tells her he’ll bury it. She asks why he asked her about the strike, was he there? Yes. “The guy who killed the cop…,” she says, then starts, for the first time it occurring to her it might have been Mark. He says, “No, I wanted to but somebody else was there.”
“But they said that…”
“They? Who’s they?” Marks interrupts. Which seems to refer back to Lee Allen driving to the office and saying, “Who’s we?” to an associate who appeared to be speaking about an article on multi-millionaires.
“On the radio.”
“I never got off a shot.”
She stoops and picks up the bullets telling him he’ll need them as he’s going to a have a hard time making them believe him. He says he’s not going to try. She asks why, saying she believes him. He doesn’t answer.
She suggests that they go back to the car, that he should drive out of there, cut his hair and no one would recognize him. “Do I need a hair cut?” No, she says he looks beautiful.
Zabriskie Point was named after Christian Brevoort Zabriskie, who was once a mortician, than later was vice-president of the Pacific Coast Borax Company which mined borax from Death Valley.
Part of the history of Death Valley, preserved in Manly Beacon, is not only the mining but the stranding of a number of Forty-Niners there who were rescued by William L. Manly and John Rogers. Manly and Rogers were among the party, on their way to California when they became lost. Manly and Rogers trekked out on foot than returned hoping to rescue the others, which they managed to do.
I bring up the history because of the arrival of the family towing the El Dorado camper and the boat, El Dorado meaning “gilded one” and referring most frequently to a place of fabled wealth and opportunity, such as the 49ers were seeking with the gold rush. The legend was born of a tale of the chief priest of Muisca who was said to be covered with gold dust during religious festivals in which he would ride to the middle of Lake Guatavita with golden offerings and other jewels which would be dumped overboard in propitious sacrifice to the god.
If one found El Dorado one would find the source of the gold, and if one found the lake in it would be generations of golden offerings for the taking, so it bears mention that a point has been made of Zabriskie Point’s history as a lake area and that Mark and Daria have been frolicking about an ancient lake bed.
Milton wrote in “Paradise Lost”:
…The Tempter set
Our second Adam, in the wilderness;
To show him all Earth’s kingdoms, and their glory.
His eye might there command wherever stood
City of old or modern fame…nor could his eye not ken…
El Dorado. But to nobler sights
Michael from Adam’s eyes the film removed,
Which that false fruit that promised clearer sight
Had bred; then purged with euphrasy and rue
The visual nerve, for he had much to see;
And from the well of life three drops instilled.
So deep the power of these ingredients pierced,
Even to the inmost seat of mental sight,
That Adam, now enforced to close his eyes,
Sunk down, and all his spirits became entranced;
But him the gentle Angel by the hand
Soon raised, and his attention thus recalled.
Adam, now ope thine eyes; and first behold
The effects, which thy original crime hath wrought
In some to spring from thee; who never touched
The excepted tree; nor with the snake conspired;
Nor sinned thy sin; yet from that sin derive
Corruption, to bring forth more violent deeds.
The never-land of El Dorado which was shown to Milton’s second Adam, in the wilderness, just prior to a deeper vision instigated by the influence of the instillation of three drops from the well of life.
Speaking of wealth, I don’t know if it’s purely coincidence that Daria means “wealth”, and seems to also mean “sea”, or if Antonioni’s selection of Daria as the girl may have partly had to do with her name.
Haides meant “invisible”, referring not just a place but a deity whose name was also Pluto, “wealthy” for, though he was a death god, a god of the underworld, he ruled over the underworld riches of the earth, its minerals and the fertility of the soil. As Daria and Mark have been roaming Death Valley, all this should possibly be taken into consideration.
Continue to Part Five.
Zabriskie Point, Part One
Zabriskie Point, Part Two
Zabriskie Point, Part Three
Zabriskie Point, Part Four
Zabriskie Point, Part Five
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.
Continue to Part Four
Zabriskie Point, Part One
Zabriskie Point, Part Two
Zabriskie Point, Part Three
Zabriskie Point, Part Four
Zabriskie Point, Part Five
Continued from part one.
Book and Key
A marble lobby and a young woman in counter culture beads, purple top and pants, sandals slapping the floor, running past a row of elevators to an information desk, a female security guard in black and white and little red tie also approaching and reporting that there was an open door on the third floor but that it’s secure now. The young female, Daria, with her long, straight hair parted down the middle, has the appearance of the quintessential natural, “hippie” girl of the time which would have been profoundly out of place in this setting which would have expected female employees to be dressed in skirts and heels and have pouffed, shellacked hair. She asks the dull and robotic male security guard if the door is open to the roof, then if she can go up. She had left a book up there at lunch time. He says no, it’s against company rules, asks what book, then brusquely challenges why doesn’t she eat in the cafeteria, as on one of the monitor screens a female security guard passes another in a hall (the two women look identical in their uniforms), the one asking the other how her day off was, to which the response is fine, and the first woman promises to see her later. This distracts the security guard’s attention from Daria.
The scene between the security guard and Daria isn’t overdone. Interactions between authority/law and free agents were as confrontational and suspicious of nonconformity then, much as in the present, though noncomformity is more expected now rather than being so strange as to be jarringly alien. Dependent on the observer, Daria’s appearance would have been viewed as either dangerously or attractively exotic and indicative of a character with little regard for authority.
Daria asks who could give her permission and the security guard gestures to the security monitor of the South Side Fire Passage which shows a man in an elevator. As he exits, the guard stands and greets him.
Antonioni has moved from the selective focus on the word “key” on the billboard behind the guard (the words beside it being obscured) to the focus on the actual keys the security guard wears, thus placing special emphasis on the idea of the key. This will occur throughout the film, elements introduced via words and then repeated physically, apart from words.
The cleft chin, shape of mouth and nose of the man on the billboard, above the word “key”, much resembles that of Lee (Rod Taylor) but we will later be granted another view of the billboard and find that otherwise the graphic doesn’t look like him. We will later see that the “y” begins the word your, and from this we can guess that the sign reads “key to your future”.
Rather than being put off by her appearance, Lee Allen (Rod Taylor) is obviously attracted and takes an immediate interest in Daria, politely asking if he can help her. She relates she was taking the place of someone’s secretary that day and had left a book on the roof. So, she does secretarial work? She flirtatiously explains it’s not really her thing but she does it when she needs the bread.
Mark has been associated with the fire hose in the opening scene and here Lee is introduced via the South Side Fire Passage. The theme of the hose and fire in various permutations will carry on throughout the film.
Sunset Boulevard
A startling cut to a meat truck sign–a cow above the words “federally inspected meat–that pulls away to show behind yet another painting of a cartoonish farmer tossing corn and squashes to a horde of pigs, which in this context is grotesque. The camera pulls back and reveals this second painted scene to be part of a massive mural that encompasses the entire side of a building past which Mark is passing in an old red Ford truck.
Another shot shows another side of the building decorated with the lettering “F-J”, trucks parked beside it with “Farmer Jo… Meats” on their sides. Antonioni doesn’t situate the trucks so we are able to read the rest of the name at this point .
As the truck screeches around the corner, a loud and jarring pig’s squeal enters, corresponding with the screech of the tires, and the camera zooms in on one of the figures on the mural, the one behind a figure 4 shadow cast by the telephone pole, and shows it is a L’il Abner style hillbilly in rags making off with a black pig, an angry farmer chasing.
This looks like it is very possibly the Farmer John’s located at 3049 East Vernon Avenue in Vernon California. (If the map street view doesn’t load in, refresh.)
The truck passes the parking lot, an individual on a motorcycle exiting, continues down another street by two police officers on motorcycles. Mark attracts notice to himself by flashing a peace sign at them and then having passed the officers, conscious they are still watching him, changes to an upraised middle finger.
Sounds of clanging, squealing steel and mechanical synth boings as Mark and his roommate continue past a succession of signs that consume the screen. “Bethlehem Steel Corporation, Los Angeles Plant”. “Ladewig Company, Water Meters, Valves” address 5608. “Danola Ham & Bacon”. “Brown Bevis Industrial” at 6550. “Pacific Metals Div.” “Heller Machinery”. “tc transcon Freight Liners”. “Conway Coating Co.” Delta. Railway cars. Power lines.
After the signage and industrial montage, an extreme long shot with deep focus piling more billboards, signs and telephone poles one on another is replaced by a deep focus long shot of palm tree lined Sunset Boulevard. The red truck, intentionally runs a red light at Sunset Boulevard, Rodeo Drive and Benedict-Canon, and narrowly avoids a collision at the intersection marked with a sign reading “Benedict Canyon Closed at Hutton Dr.” A yellow convertible pulling up alongside the car that nearly collided with the truck, a young blond woman in the convertible waves. Mark laughs, excited rather than unnerved by the close call. Mark’s roommate asks him what that was about and Mark explains it was a girl, Alice, from his long gone past. “My sister.” The battered red truck thus belies a likely upper middle class background from which he has alienated himself.
Intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Rodeo. If the street view doesn’t appear, refresh.
The roommate pulls out some paper and begins filling it in. He explains it’s an OR form in case of a mass bust, that one will be released early if it’s filled out in advance.
“Be prepared, is that your slogan?” Mark asks. His roommate replying it’s just being realistic, Mark retaliates that the day they don’t count on losing is the day he’ll join the movement. The roommate says that joining isn’t a matter of choice but survival for many. Mark replies that’s what he means, that it’s not a game. He says he’s tired of it, kids rapping about cops and violence. “That chick at the meeting said people only act when they need to, but I need to sooner than that.” They turn a corner coming up behind a red VW. Across the street a sidewalk is filled with an orderly picket line, some individuals carrying signs of which we’re not afforded a good glimpse (“Don’t Cross Any Lines”, “School’s Out”), while one carries, in lieu of a sign, a leafy branch that obscures his face. As Mark passes, the individual carrying a branch passes a blind man with a cane walking in a line going the opposite direction. The only individual to turn and look in the direction of the truck (and the camera) is the blind man. Is it because his blindness and thus his sensitivity to sound alert him to the truck or because he’s not blind at all? Whatever, it’s another occurrence to take note of, especially in conjunction with the man who carries the branch which likely is intended to symbolize the voice of the natural environment taking the place of words.
Mark’s roommate gets out of the truck saying his line is going to be in front of the administration building all day. “Maybe,” Mark says.
Alias
We view a middle aged woman smoking and hear radio communication in the background, “Control 1 to 1L Pi 1. You are now clear, 1L Pi 1. Continue patrol.” A police station. Mark approaches the window to inform his friend was arrested this morning and asks if his case is cleared yet. “One of the collegers?” the officer asks. The officer tells him to take a seat, that his friend is being booked now. When Mark asks how long this will take, he’s told it could be five minutes or five hours. We see it’s 3:00 p.m., one of the few times, perhaps the only time, we’ll have a good look at a clock in the film. Mark steps back outside to watch a police helicopter taking off.
Cut to a crowded cell. Then a line of college students. One with a bloodied head stands before a sign that reads “No guns beyond this point”. The white bandage wrapped around his head, saturated red, reminds me of the girl in a red bandana worn Indian style in the opening scene of the meeting. An officer pats down a college professor who gives his name as William S. Pollit, takes his glasses and tie. We see standing beyond the girl with the red bandana. Does Pollit have an alias? No. His profession is that of an associate professor of history, but the recording officer says this is too long and he’ll instead put down, “Clerk”. When the professor says that some people need medical attention, the derisive reply is, “You didn’t say you was a doctor.”
More buses of arrested students pull up outside. Cut back inside the station to the girl with the red bandana standing next to a priest in a clerical collar. Mark enters and a moment of acknowledgment passes between Mark and the girl. He tells an officer he’s there to post bail for his friend. He’s told to beat it. He says he thought…and is curtly told, “You thought? You thought you were special?” Mark sees his roommate, and there seems to be a continuity error here in that when he arrived at the picket line, his friend was wearing a light colored shirt, but is now wearing the same burgundy red shirt he’d been wearing at the meeting. Mark yells out and asks if there’s anything he can do to help, at which point he’s yanked inside the barred door and also arrested.
His name? He gives himself as, “Karl Marx.” The officer types, “Carl” after asking how to spell Marx.
Nothing smaller than a 38
Cut to the truck pulling up outside a motel and car wash behind two police motorcycles.
The camera pulls back to show Mark and another friend entering a gun shop as two officers exit, at least one of them carrying a rifle case. An orange moving van with a “1″ over a highway pulls up and blocks the window.
The friend says they need guns right away and are told the way the law is they buy the guns but then it’s checked out with Sacramento to see if their records are clean. They can pick up the guns in 4-5 days. The friend says but the law was made for peace time and this is an emergency. Mark explains they live in a “borderline” neighborhood and that they have to protect their women. “I sure as hell am going to see that you don’t go defenseless,” the shopkeeper says, and tells them that for their purposes he recommends nothing smaller than a 38. He takes out of a cabinet guns that he hands to each.
The interior of apparently another gun shop, Mark carrying what appear to be shotguns wrapped in brown paper and his friend with a smaller parcel. Out the front window, across the street, we see what is perhaps an Ace Hardware store, though all we can make out is “Ace H”. As they leave, the shopkeeper steps out from behind the counter to tell them, “One other thing about the law, so you can protect your house, if you shoot them in the back yard be sure you drag them inside.”
The “Ace” brings to mind the opening credits and the line, “They’re taking our nags, ace”, to which was replied, “Yeah, and making damn good targets of themselves. Let ‘em have it.” These lines had stood out as they were obviously acted and stilted. One of the voices may have been Mark, but I’m not certain of this.
One may not have noted that the pair enter one gun shop and exit another, instead believing they had moved only to another part of the same shop. The pink motel beyond the first gun shop also blends with the pink tone of the second gun shop.
But, when they enter the first gun shop there are signs showing the numbers 31, 35 and 20-something. After being told that they should use nothing smaller than a 38, one will see that in the exiting shot there are no numbers in view smaller than a 38.
Become an independent man at Sunny Dunes
Corporate world interior with the bold yellow, blue and red graphics of a chart on the wall. A man in thick black rimmed glasses watches something off screen intently. There follows a quick succession of shots of men in suits watching an off screen video of mannequins enjoying the life in Sunny Dunes.
“Enjoy the relaxation of outdoor living, bask in the desert sun by your own private pool.”
We glimpse in a terrarium a small model of a Sunny Dunes billboard showing a red sun setting over the mountains.
“Why be caught up in the rat race of city life when you can enjoy life the Sunny Dunes way? Play tennis on emerald green lawns.
“Drink fresh mountain water from oaken buckets. Breathe the unpolluted air of the high desert. Take your son quail shooting in the wide open spaces. Who knows, you might even bag a mountain lion.”
Images of a male mannequin hunting with a boy mannequin in the desert. A ridiculous bird shakily floats in the sky. A stuffed mountain lion. The male mannequin pointing his shot gun. This is followed by a male mannequin holding a hose spraying water upon the camera. These images strongly tie back in with the activist meeting. The American mountain lion is also a panther. The garden hose links to the fire hose.
“Get out in the sun and water your own private garden.”
“Become an independent man. Forge a life of your own like the pioneers who molded the west.”
“You girls will really enjoy the fully equipped Sunny Dunes kitchen. Plenty of space for cooking for Junior and that man of the house.”
“Play a round of golf on the regulation sized Sunny Dunes 9 hole golf course.”
One can see from the two following images how the scenes are shot and edited so that the real seems to be interacting with the artificial Sunny Dunes representation of a desirable reality, the craft of the commercial appetizer not only designed to lure prospective owners but emanating out of and responding to the dreams of the Sunny Dunes executives.
“And you can putt to your heart’s content on the special practice putting green. So stop driving yourself crazy in that miserable, crowded city. Move out today and start your life over with a Sunny Dunes house in the sun.”
As the camera pans to show finally the television screen all in the room have been watching, a man in a helicopter appearing on it, the female narrator asks the male narrator if he’s taken up flying. He responds that no it’s him personally scanning potential Sunny Dunes lots. “Just call Sunny Dunes 84 -868.”
“What’s that again, Bob?”
“That’s Sunny Dunes Land Development Company, Box 82, Los Angeles, California.”
Who’s We?
Down from the sky, back to the LA streets and its signs which we view through the front window of a vehicle–Richfield, Standard–the rear view mirror flashing glare and images of traffic in the middle of the scene. A radio news announcer is heard. “…the long awaited freeway connecting the central Los Angeles area to the foothills has moved over 50,000 residents to (unintelligible) locations…”
“…while the homes (unintelligible) and businesses in the route have been moved or destroyed according to figures received by the housing administration. Now here’s…”
Again, we are given a rare glimpse of a clock and have scarcely enough time to see it and that it reads just past 2:30 before it shifts fully out of focus, the camera bringing into focus Lee Allen’s eyes in the rear view mirror. Then, as the camera cuts to show, from the rear, Lee driving, a passenger reading some type of circular, the radio does a peculiar overlapping of the newscaster’s voice–”Viet, Viet, Vietnam”–though nothing odd happens on screen, then resumes the newscast with a story about Vietnam.
“…the toll of U S citizens killed in Vietnam is nearing 50,000, 100 thousands of our young men returning to hospitals…”
“Did you see this?” the passenger interrupts.
This overlap is difficult to explain so I filmed it (as best I could) on my iPhone. Click below to view/listen:
The anomaly I think is one not to be overlooked as it would have had to been intentionally recorded. It, and the glimpse of Lee in the rear view mirror, split the two pieces of news, the first which has to do with over 50,000 and the latter which has to do with nearing 50,000. This overlap, which couldn’t have happened on the radio, is one of at least a couple of impossible elements Antonioni has in the film, much as is found in other films of his, for instance “Blow Up”. In the opening meeting, a fluid and uninterrupted dialogue had occurred over Mark moving from a standing position by the fire hose to a seated position elsewhere. Here instead the visual remains constant while monologue stutters and repeats itself. “Zabriskie Point” is less a thriller and mystery than “The Passenger and “Blow Up”, but the audience is still given the jittery impression of unstable situations and shifty circumstances that were Sherlock Holmes on the scene he would be able to logically sort out and expose in a quick couple minutes chat by the fire side. But Sherlock Holmes was never that logical, privy to considerable knowledge the the audience never had but was made to feel, by the author, they had in their pocket all along.
The passenger: “We have 7 (unintelligible) now.”
I’m unable to tell what he says exactly but the article seems to be about multi-millionaires, showing also the words “to nine figure”.
“Who’s we?” Lee asks.
“California. (unintelligible) just has 4. New York still has the most.”
On the radio, “Another outburst at California State College…”
Lee may reply, “It’s still Friday,” to which the other man laughs.
They pass a billboard of a pilot’s extended arm, showing his wrist watch. “27 times a day to New York. American Airlines.” The wrist watch shows the time as 9:20, prompting Lee to check his own watch. I don’t know if it’s coincidence or not that the 9:20 is a near mirror image of the 2:30 but I suspect it is not coincidental.
The news broadcast continues with a story about a campus incident to which responded over 200 policemen, highway patrolmen and sheriff’s deputies, 25 students being arrested along with 3 faculty members “believed to be members of a militant organization on campus” as the car pulls behind a yellow cab advertising on its rear, “Need a job? See me or call…” alongside a Majestic Meat Packing Co. truck. As the taxi changes lanes,we see a red car before it…
KNOX
Cut to Mark sitting on the bed inside an older somewhat rundown home typical for student/artist housing. A U.S. flag dyed blood red hangs on the wall. The radio newscaster is finishing a story on the protest, “…luncheon yesterday, and said the time has come to remove the campus problem students. KNOX checks the weather from the KNOX weather tower…” The news turning to the weather, Mark’s friend who had been with him when purchasing the guns cuts off the radio, Mark saying that he needs to go down there “to see for himself”. The friend straps on his wristwatch. His other roommate making a call, Mark tells him to keep the line free, that he might have to call back. Mark takes a pistol from a cupboard and slips it into his boot under his jeans.
We’re shown Mark exiting the house, running across the driveway to where his truck is parked behind a building on the next lot though there are “No Parking” signs on its rear. He drives off.
The point has been emphatically made, repeatedly, that Mark is seeking visibility, confrontation.
Where’s Daria?
Lee’s car pulls up before Sunny Dunes Development Co.’s skyscraper. The Rod Taylor site gives a Nov 24 1968 news article as stating the exterior of the building was the freshly minted Beneficial Plaza building, 3700 Wilshire Blvd.
There has been no music apart from that during the opening credits. As Lee enters the lobby, we having his viewpoint of the security guard at the reception desk, the large billboard through the window beyond, Muzak styled string music begins. The guard comes from behind his circular station to greet him and we see the billboard beyond reads “Investment Counselors, Key to Y…”. Lee takes an immediate left before the elevators and walks past what appears to be a room filled with computers. Cut to a wall of stock exchange developments. Lee glances up at a screen showing news on Caesar’s Palace, looks over the numbers on the stock board. Behind we hear someone making a phone all, “…well, its’ getting real hectic now, I’d like to see you pick up something…”
We are returned to the office in which the video on Sunny Dunes had been shown, the executives declining another view of either that or another commercial. Out the window we clearly see a “Jesus Saves” sign which strikes as amusing as other signs out the window have been banking, and so many of the signs in the movie have to do with savings. Lee Allen enters and when asked if he wants to see the commercials he declines, saying he has a conference to go to. It’s asked when his plane is leaving and he says in a couple of hours.
Aerial shot of a highway in the desert. Folk rock music.
…he don’t care what the people say,
getting everything together,
telling everybody got to get away.
Leaving in the morning at the break of dawn
carrying a pocket of seed
Sure to get ahead at everything he done
getting everything he needs…
Daria pulls off the interstate and up before a billboard advertising Desert Springs Saving and Loan which displays a huge salad bowl filled with what appear to be cucumbers, red circlets of radish and dollar bills, “You are what you eat. Try our salads. Save at Desert Springs Saving and Loan.”
She examines a map that reads New Mexico but it is obviously Arizona (perhaps a combo map). She’s looking at the area on Interstate 17 between Phoenix, and Flagstaff, perhaps somewhere in the New River or Black Canyon vicinity. It’s difficult to tell.
Had she left LA early in the morning she would likely have taken Interstate 10 to Phoenix, it being the most straightforward path. Though if she had gone up Interstate 15 she could have then taken 40 through the Mojave Desert and then down 93 to 17 to Phoenix. By Highway 10 the journey is about 6 hours. On 15 to 40 the distance through the Mojave to Kingman, Arizona is about 5 hours then 4 hours after that to Phoenix.
The best time distance from Los Angeles to Zabriskie Point is 5 hours. Then from Zabriskie Point to Phoenix, Arizona it is about 8 to 9 hours.
Daria clearly seems to believe she is outside Phoenix, the way she is checking the map, turning it side to side, and looking out the windows as if to see if the desert roads match the map. Finally, frustrated, she tosses the map in the back seat and returns to the highway.
Back to Lee Allen in his skyscraper office with its stunning view of downtown LA and the Art Deco Richfield Tower which was torn down shortly thereafter.
Movie Locations instead of the Beneficial Building gives the Sunny Dunes office as filmed at the old Mobile Oil Building, 612 Flower St. and Wilshire, it now being Pegasus Apartments, and that it was here from which one viewed the Richfield Oil Building. The exterior of Sunny Dunes was obviously not the Pegasus Apartments so perhaps it was at the Mobile Oil Building where the extra floor was built for the office, while the exterior was shot at the Beneficial Building.
It’s stated another for was built for purposes of the movie and one can see perhaps why, the eye level with the angelic figures and trees being perfect.
Lee contemplates the phone, makes a brief call, then calls his receptionist, Natalie, to ask where Daria is. The receptionist says she hasn’t seen her so he asks her to try her home. He sits, thinks a moment, picks up some papers to look over them. We see Natalie at her desk dialing Daria then she phones Lee to inform him that she can’t contact her. She postulates, “Perhaps she’s sick…” Lee interrupts her, hangs up, and then calls Daria’s number himself. A man answering, says, “Goodbye,” which takes Lee aback only briefly. Lee identifies himself as calling from Sunny Dunes and asks where he can reach Daria. The man replies he has no idea, he’s just crashing there, but she left early that morning.
Lee sits forward, alarmed, “Left? What flight did she take?” No flight, she took the man’s car. Lee demands to know who he’s speaking with and the man hangs up on him with the salutation, “Hello.”
Another view of Lee’s office showing Indian pottery in a glass case. Bronze horses also decorate his office, and desert sage (I think) preserved in resin blocks.
Another view of Lee with the large cactus behind him. Distracted, he is obviously thinking less of business than he is of Daria, and attempts to reorient himself, cutting on a recording of a board meeting.
“3 million more people here in the next 10 years?”
“Oh, standard research shows this to be even higher.”
Lee’s voice: “Are these figures for the whole state?”
“No, just southern California.”
“That means development of at least a quarter of a million acres.”
“Our position in the market would create a capitol expenditure for us of five billion over a ten year period…”
Join Us
Close-up of a gas mask on a police officer. A row of officers with batons. Chairs overturned on a walkway, a table, with smoke drifting past, a green filled with students beyond. Scene of the police in their riot gear now accosting students, pushing them back. Students yelling. Then general mayhem on the green before a building on the roof of which are a number of students surveying the scene. View from inside the building which has been taken over by the activists. View from the interior of another building in which a lower pane of window is busted out of a door (perhaps intended to be perceived as the same building). Students yelling “Power to the people.” A man with blood pouring down from around his ear. A medic attending to another. Yet another student on the ground, head bloodied, attended by a photographer. A police car with siren blaring pulls up and officers piling out yell for the area around the building to be cleared. A few students run behind an exterior wall of a building across the plaza from the other building.
The Wikipedia page on Zabriskie Point gives the campus scenes as filmed at Contra Costa College in San Pablo, California.
We see Mark arriving, descending an exterior staircase. He drops his coat and continues. We see what seems to be a POV shot of him looking over the area where the students have hidden to the police and the building beyond.
The police announce on a bullhorn that the individuals occupying the building are in violation of section 415 of the penal code and that they know they are armed. They demand they throw out their weapons and give themselves up or they will be forced out.
We are shown a handful of black students inside the building, only five, standing before a drawing of Bruce Lee on green paper that has been clipped out oddly
We are shown the empty reading room littered with leaflets. The sign “Reading Room is for those who want to study,” reminds of the opening meeting and the man who had resembled Mark who’d asked, “But why, why stop the students that want to go?”
Another reference to the meeting is the “Join Us” poster in the front window.
Police officers approach the building. One stands to the side of the door. He looks at the camera, then moves in and tosses a tear gas canister through a broken window. We see it roll on the floor, spark, smoke pouring out. Four of the activists emerge and lie on the ground. Briefly from the POV of the building we see beyond them a bright red protest poster lying face down on the ground behind the police. A red book rests on the ground next to the activists.
The last activist to exit stumbles out holding the front bottom hem of his shirt.
An officer yells out he has a gun, another shoots. The man falls. As predicted by the Sunny Dunes development commercial which showed the possible “bagging” of a mountain lion by an eager gunman, a “panther” is killed.
Mark has been shown coming down the other side of the Liberal Arts Building. Observing the shooting, he reaches for his gun but before he can remove it from his boot a shot rings out and the officer who had shot the activist is felled.
Mark briefly puts a hand over his face, then turns and flees, retrieving his jacket as he runs.
Continue to part three.
Zabriskie Point, Part One
Zabriskie Point, Part Two
Zabriskie Point, Part Three
Zabriskie Point, Part Four
Zabriskie Point, Part Five
Going to go ahead and put this up as is, knowing full well I’ll eventually return to it and rework parts. This isn’t a review and not even a full analysis of the film. Antonioni’s films are rife with themes, peculiarities and incongruities which largely go unnoticed due his deft care in handling them and the abundant and rich audio and visual textures in which he immerses us, but they are also responsible for the sense of mystery that defies a traditional expectation of resolutions, infusing Antonioni’s films with enigmatic mythic purpose. And myth is never hampered by logic.
* * * * *
Opening credits
Open with a music track of drums, distant feminine voice as instrument (Pink Floyd’s “Heart Beat, Pig Meat”), whispers, a jittery camera that, in a series of close-ups, focuses in here, there, on young people who appear to be at a school lecture.
Female voice: “Well, as far as that…”
The title, Michelangeo Antonioni’s “Zabriskie Point”, appears over a close up of Mark Frechette, seemingly seated.
The camera takes its time focusing in on a raised hand, zeroing in on the watch.
The soundtrack repeats the female voice saying, “Well, as far as that…”
An organ enters.
Male voice: “…they’re so freaked out they cannot sit up straight in class…”
Female voice: “What’s happening in school…”
Amongst the staccato of voices which come and go we are able to pick out a few words. In the mix are sounds, voices and music clips from radio programming.
Male: “…motor manufacturers in these states report life expectancy for engines…”
Female: “…we’re robots…”
Female: “…the only reason…”
Male: “…my listeners…”
Male: “…actually codes are both a curse and a blessing in New York. Dry cleaners, they’re charging…”
Female: “…press conference on…and they said they found…”
Male: “…they’re taking our nags, ace.”
Male: “Yeah, and making damn good targets of themselves. Let ‘em have it.”
Female: “…violence, non-violence…”
Male: “Before the holidays…”
Male: “…the problem with drugs..”
The credits end on revolutionary Kathleen Cleaver.
I now see someone has posted the film up at Youtube. Here’s the first scene.
The enemy is invisible. Things happen, they don’t know where, they don’t know how. People do things and the people who they have their attention focused on are being nothing but distracting attention
The male individual seated beside Cleaver, perhaps a Black Panther, speaks. Instead of a lecture or classroom, the scene is of a meeting of student activists.
Black Panther: “That’s the same old jive you’ve been running down for the past 300 years. You all so wise…why didn’t you join us back in the beginning…nah, you just go back and tell them sorry this motherfucker is closed down, on strike, jack…”
A round of approving applause.
A white girl speaks: “…like ending ROTC…”
Another black male: “You want to off ROTC all you have to do is go down to the ROTC building, take a bottle, fill it full of gasoline, plug it with a rag…”
This is met with voices of dissent.
White male in purple shirt next to a girl with a red bandana tied Indian style about her head: “Yeah, man, but what if you want to end sociology.”
Black Panther: “A Molotov cocktail is a mixture of gasoline and kerosene. White radical is a mixture of bullshit and jive…”
A round of applause. A shot of the room then a medium shot of Mark standing next to a fire hose with his roommate, who’s dressed in a red shirt, and another friend in a gray shirt with whom he’ll later be seen purchasing guns. This friend has on a watch which seems to be nearly identical, perhaps the same watch, as on the upraised arm that was earlier focused upon.
White female: “You know, I don’t have to prove my revolutionary credentials to you. You know, there are a lot of white students already out on the streets fighting, just like you guys do in the ghetto. And you know there are a lot of unhappy, dissatisfied white people who are potential revolutionaries.”
Black Panther: “You know, you’re dealing with things that are really irrelevant, you’re going back to the same…you get busted for grass and that makes you a revolutionary. Nah, when the pig is busting you on your head, busting down your door, stopping you from living, you can’t get a job, you can’t go to school, you can’t eat, that’s what makes you a revolutionary, dig. That’s why black people are, what you say, in another bag…”
White female: “…you’re talking about talking to white students…I think a lot of us understand, a lot of us have understood what makes black people revolutionaries, but what’s going to make white people revolutionaries…”
Male: “Yeah, that’s the question for me also…”
Kathleen Cleaver: “…the same goddamn thing that makes black people revolutionaries…”
White female: “But it’s not happening the same way…”
Cleaver: “You just wait, it will happen, you don’t have to do anything to instigate it, what you can do is prevent it, or you can break it down, but you can do something…going pellmell into fascism…”
Close-up profile shot of Mark listening.
Cleaver: “…I mean the pigs are on the campus now…what do you want, them sitting up in the classroom…”
Cut to another student listening.
“…you want them in your door, you want them standing on the street every time you walk by…”
A muddle of voices over.
Another woman is saying, “…get to that…” as the camera pans left away from the individual it had been holding on after Mark Frechette, who is seated to screen left of Cleaver and the Black Panther. There is a brief moment in which the screen is absolutely black, then returns with the below dialogue, focused on a young man listening who has dark hair, is dressed in a white shirt over a black turtleneck. His looks are different from Mark’s but his coloring and the sideburns are the same. We will see later he is seated to screen right of Cleaver.
Cleaver: “…what we’re saying is this school is going to close down, period, there ain’t nobody coming in this school unless they come at their own risk, and once they decide they want their school back open, they’re going to open it on our terms…”
White male in white shirt and black turtleneck: “But why, why, why stop the students that want to go?”
The camera goes to Cleaver, near yelling now.
Cleaver: “Because they’re in our way. Because they prevent us from getting what we deserve, we have tried all other means, we’ve pleaded, we’ve written programs, we’ve done this, we haven’t gotten anything…”
Next, the camera focuses in on Mark Frechette standing before the fire hose, whose expression is one of frustration, then does a swift pan right, and one would expect it to then focus on another individual, but panning right the camera focuses again in an extreme close-up of Mark Frechette facing left on the screen, seated in a chair, nonchalantly lighting up a cigarette. An ellipse of time via the screen being briefly nearly imperceptibly consumed with the white blur of an intervening shirt (which must be the point when the cut was made), a hint of doubling, and the smoke and fire of his cigarette a response to the fire hose. Another medium shot shows him sitting a couple of chairs away from his friend in the red shirt.
The earlier black screen anticipates and balances the white screen created by the white shirt. Was it the white shirt of the man in the black turtleneck? There’s no telling. But the thing is it’s a cut that creates an irrational, illogical event which we don’t notice. There has been an ellipse of time where in mid-monologue Mark is moved from one place to another with no break in speech. We are not to expect a logical stream of time and event from Antonioni in the film, we can’t look for it. Indeed, there is one very obvious and unavoidable discontinuity in place and time in the film that stands front and center which I’ve never read anyone questioning, which the very title pinpoints. Zabriskie Point.
There is no way possible that Daria and Mark ever meet each other at Zabriskie Point.
Cleaver: “…the whole basic point of any form of guerrilla confrontation is that the enemy is invisible. Things happen, they don’t know where, they don’t know how. People do things and the people who they have their attention focused on are being nothing but attracting attention…”
The sense of invisible elements at work and distractions taking our attention away from these is a common theme in Antonioni’s work, and he here couples this with Mark.
White male: “But I don’t think that’s the stage we’re at yet, we’re just beginning to involve people..
Cleaver: “…if you want to shut this school down, what do you plan to do…”
Male: “…we do not have white support on this campus yet, and until we do…”
Cleaver: “Wait a minute, the Black Student Union ain’t running no performance…depend on that to shut this school down…”
White male in white shirt with green collar: “But this question about the enemy being invisible. I think you’re wrong, in terms of white support, I don’t think it really matters that much because if we’re successful tomorrow…”
The camera returns to the fire hose and there is a blond man standing before it now.
“…what will happen is the cops will consider every student, every single student, whether he’s on the picket line, or whether he’s one of us or not, every student an enemy, and once that happens, I think, eventually, if we can keep up the pressure, then it will be a popular…”
At this point Mark’s friend in the gray shirt steps forward with a coffee cup and gestures to a female, saying they’ve run out of coffee. Her head slightly ducked, in the spirit of new found feminism, she says, “Can’t a man make coffee around here, any more?”
Male: “I say that we form 4 or 5 attack squads of our own to be stationed just outside the campus and when the cops move in on the strike lines they form a diversionary force behind the cops so the picket lines have time to get out of their way…”
Cleaver: “Wait a minute, now wait a minute…”
Someone else suggests using cars to form an effective blockade on the campus.
Cleaver (skeptically): “Ah, strategically, uh…”
All laugh when it’s suggested he use his own car.
“It’s a Ford Falcon, man, go ahead, you drive it up, Jack, I’ll tip it over.”
All talk over one another so that no one can tell what anyone else is saying.
Black male: “There’s only one way to talk to the man and that’s in his own language. If his language is guns, we talk to him with a gun, it’s very simple…”
White male: “Are you willing to die?”
The camera goes to Mark Frechette and stays on him as another individual speaks.
“Black people are dying…black people are dying already in this country, black people have earned this leadership in blood, jack, we’re not going to give it up.”
Mark now speaks up: “Well, I’m willing to die, too.” Mark also stands, further bringing notice to himself.
Female: “Alone?”
All turn to look at Mark.
The black man in the white shirt, turned to look to the rear, who is dominate here as he sits higher than the others, is the individual who is later shot. The camera’s line of sight is such that his positioning obscures, behind and beyond him, the individual in the white shirt and black turtleneck we’d observed earlier, following the blank black screen, who looks similar to Mark, seated in the corner to (our) right of the table beside the blond male in the blue shirt and thick black glasses. We’re never given a clear shot of the face of the black individual who is shot, but his build and afro are identical, and we’ve been briefly given the opportunity to observe, during the meeting, that this individual also wears a leather watch band on his right wrist.
Mark: “And not out of boredom.”
He turns and leaves.
Male: “Who the hell is he?”
Man in red shirt: “He’s okay, man, he’s my roommate. I guess meetings just aren’t his trip.”
Man in striped shirt: “Look, man, if he didn’t come to join us, he shouldn’t have come at all.”
Red shirt: “Why the hell not? How else is he going to determine…”
Male in white shirt with green collar: “Well, what is this, meetings aren’t his trip? What kind of nonsense is that? If he wants to be a revolutionary he needs to learn to work with other people. What is any revolutionary without his people? What was Lenin without his organization? What was Castro without his organization? Even anarchists spend most of their lives talking in meetings, for Christ’s sake.”
Black male: “You ought to take him and go back and start teaching him out of the red book. Teach him the first page that teaches about how there’s going to be a revolution there must be a revolutionary party. That bourgeoisie individualism that he’s indulging in is going to get him killed.”
Male in white shirt with green collar laughs: “Resolutely struggle against bourgeoisie individualism.”
The scene of the activist meeting has run about 8 minutes and 48 seconds, an extremely long period of time, even exhausting, for which reason I assume that more is at work here than what will seem to the audience an overlong documentary style presentation of a chaotic and muddled meeting, which at this point I believe is the idea being raised of that which distracts from the invisible element and its coupling with Mark, the idea also having been voiced that his individualism is what will get Mark killed.
We do see here also who is killed by the police officer, and it is possible that we, too, get a guess of who kills the officer, or at least who is seen at the strike who looked like Mark.
Continue to part two.
Zabriskie Point, Part One
Zabriskie Point, Part Two
Zabriskie Point, Part Three
Zabriskie Point, Part Four
Zabriskie Point, Part Five
Not having seen “Doubt” on the stage, and having read some reviews of the play that laud it over the film and remarks on some differences, I feel at a disadvantage discussing the film, but as John Patrick Shanley, the author, also directed the film, unless he privately changed the motivations of his characters during the shift from stage to cinema, then the unvocalized back story which cements the action should be one and the same. Even if the dialogue is different and the actors in the cinema version have colored and weighted the story elements differently than the stage version, we should find rectification in the film via Shanley’s symbolic choices and editing.
The opening story is this. One Sunday, the progressive Father Brendan Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) gives an impassioned and seemingly personal sermon on doubt, relating the tale of an experienced sailor who, having survived a ship wreck, finds refuge on a raft and sets his course by the stars just before a 20 day fog rolls in that will eventually leave the sailor in the troubled dark of doubting his course and his fate. During this sermon, the severe Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep) is drawn out of her seat and progresses up the side aisle intentionally terrifying children into alert attention. Though the Father speaks of the isolation of personal doubt, such as doubt as a consequence of knowing one has done something wrong, he ends on the note that doubt is as strong a bond between people as is certainty–and as the sermon ends we see Sister Aloysius staring fixedly at the priest from the side aisle, as if an oppressive shadow opposing his empathetic and consoling spiritualism.
During the sermon, one of the altar boys, Donald Miller, sees a pigeon fly into the dome of the church, the signal of a comforting Paraclete. A shy and introspective loner, the boy is so impressed by the service–and perhaps by the bird’s appearance as well–that afterward he approaches the priest to tell him that was quite some sermon. Father Flynn asks if it meant something to him and the boy replies he would like to “do that”, to be a priest. The Father reaches into a box on a high chest and pulls out a brightly colored toy, a ballerina whose spins are guided by a magnetic mirror. He entertains the boy with it then gives it to the boy as a gift.
The next day, as the students of her school line up in the courtyard, from her window the old guard Sister Aloysius observes the friendly Father Flynn inspecting the students. She sees him grab the wrist of one of the students, William London, to joke about his filthy hands, and she observes London jerk away. Based on this alone, but having had former experience in the matter, Sister Aloysius, who has little use for a progressive, friendlier church, becomes suspicious of Father Flynn and determines to be on the look out for anything questionable taking place at her school, fearing the children under her charge are under threat of a pedophile.
There is never any hard evidence.
By all appearances, Father Flynn’s style is only different from the “hungry dragon” he states Sister Aloysius to be. When Donald Miller returns, one day, from a meeting with the Father in the rectory, and has alcohol on his breath, this only hint at impropriety is explained away by the Father as his having called Miller to his office when he learned Miller had drunk the church’s wine. Rather than embarrassing the boy, at his tearful request, Flynn permits Donald to remain an altar boy. He tells Sister Aloysius that, for sake of the boy, he had hoped no one would ever learn of the incident and reprimands her for prying.
Donald is the first African American in the school. He is alienated from his peers not only through this but by being possibly homosexual. His father beats him. He is having difficult enough time and needs friendship.
Sister Aloysius remains convinced that Father Flynn has taken advantage of the vulnerable boy.
Sister James, who is younger, takes the part of the waffling audience, suspicious when she is in the company of Sister Aloysius, reassured when in the company of Father Flynn, buffeted by the confidences of both.
Though it seems a true Rorschach test regarding the impression of the viewer as to whether the priest is predator or mentor–and the writer/director, John Patrick Shanley, artfully arranges the elements so that the final resting point for every action and its reaction is ambiguity–it still seems to me that, though he only disclosed to the actors playing the priest, both in the film and on stage, whether the priest was guilty or innocent, Shanley likely has engraved this knowledge in the film, extra the dialogue and overt story line.
Must we know what the truth of the matter is? No. The point of the film is given to be doubt. Even if Streep covers us in her skin so that we divine just why she is so certain of Flynn’s guilt, there must remain doubt when no sound evidence is provided. Just as even if we are entirely convinced by Seymour that his character’s intentions are wholly honorable, and that he is only the victim of a 20th century witch hunt, we should again have for him the same doubts as we do for the sister. I say “should” because I, in fact, believe it is impossible to approach Streep’s character and Seymour’s with a balanced level of doubt. Streep must always be at the disadvantage precisely because Shanley has given us more of her, has shown us more of her nature, her character, her intentions. He has given us more of her personal world, her introspections, whereas Seymour’s character is all veneer. We never glimpse behind the curtain into his personal life, whereas we do with Streep.
“I will step outside the church if that’s what needs to be done, though the doors should shut behind me,” she rages. “I will do what needs to be done though I’m damned to hell! You should understand that or you will mistake me.”
If this is only a power struggle, she is willing to give up all that she has to oust Flynn from the parish.
Or are her suspicions the grotesque delusions of a woman who believes Frosty the Snowman is a pagan evil that should be banned from the airwaves. We even are given to know that she is a superstitious type, looking to the wind and blown out electric lights as signs supporting her quest and conclusions.
I’ve listened to Shanley’s interview with Charlie Rose on the play. He draws a comparison between “Doubt” and the “rush to war” with Iraq, saying that he didn’t want to write a political play but that he was inspired by so many people around him not giving room for doubt, that he preferred doubt over a “couch of convictions”. Assuming he had questions about the war, for he states he was troubled by people who expressed doubts being seen as unpatriotic, this divulging actually does more than hint at the innocence of a priest who is the subject of a witch hunt–and I certainly empathize with this. I, too, was troubled by those couches of convictions and doubters being branded as unpatriotic. But I frankly feel it’s a bit of a red herring here, and a little disingenuous his continuing on, in the same interview, that “there’s always something you want to believe” because “it serves some deep purpose or need”, even if this may be true for the majority, for there are truths just as there are lies and propaganda–as in the case with Iraq there were indeed truths buried by lies and propaganda. Just as I think it’s a little disingenuous his remarking that “there’s the wisdom to step aside from your emotions, to step aside from what you want to believe and look at the evidence before you and say I don’t have enough evidence to know this, so this in fact belief that I have is an emotion”. For later in the same interview Shanley states he was raised in an age of certainties, in the Catholic church which had a code of beliefs (certainties), a culture of manners, that much was taken for granted, and that such people are vulnerable to someone who isn’t thinking that way, a predator, and that people who assume that everyone around them is operating from the same base are “blind to obvious things in front of them”.
We can’t have one or the other in “Doubt”. We can’t have the audience beckoned to reflect on the fact that they are relying on emotion rather than fact, that there isn’t at all solid evidence, and at the same time have it be an audience that is wrestling with being “blind to the obvious”. In this way, I think certain discussions, as advanced by Shanley, on the play and film and its inspirations, though he has his purposes, are a rather raw and unfair gaming of the audience. By means of a story in which confidence isn’t assured on the part of the audience, to explore the positive and negative aspects of doubt is one thing. But it is another to artfully permit the audience to follow their own lead on the leash to a place of conviction, whether it be in guilt or innocence, then step to the side and say, in effect, this isn’t a story about these characters at all, but about how each individual member of the audience reached that place of conviction and how they are all wrong, every one of them, in not remaining in a place of doubt. This may be an interesting psychological exercise but only works so far before it becomes an unfair tweeking. We can’t have an audience that is at risk of of the guilt of both being blind to the obvious and of rushing to judgment, one way or the other, based on no solid evidence. In other words, an audience may misinterpret, but the author and director should not place the audience in a position of only being capable of misinterpretation, at least not in the case of a story where it is made known there is a truth and the director/author knows and is privy to this truth. At the very least, don’t be glib about it and assert, as Shanley does in the aforementioned interview, that the reason he’s made a film about doubt is because the world doesn’t need a story about how it’s bad for a priest to be a predator, as we already all know that is so, just as we know there were Nazis and they were bad. For not all of us do know that there are indeed predator priests, and not all of us know why it might be bad to cover up for them.
One could ask, then, how to make a film wherein the audience experiences absolute, unrelenting doubt, if it isn’t manipulated so the audience is only ever in a position of misinterpreting what’s presented? And I’d say, well, you can. With “Doubt”, however, instead you have polarization, the majority of the audience taking firm sides.
Or perhaps I’m only irritated that Shanley smiled throughout his interview with Charlie Rose, as if very satisfied with his game, discussing how he found very satisfying the arguments between couples following the play, and posing that the tension of doubt is a much more vital and lively position to inhabit rather than certitude.
This may be true in many circumstances, but Shanley has set up a situation in which he knows the answers but permits no investigation. Which is problematic. We are told we can only be wrong, no matter our conclusions, we are given no way to sort out this mystery which does have an answer.
Past a certain point doubt itself can become an excuse for the silent, defeated apathy of a public whose opinions are rendered meaningless by ever new twists of artificial facts intended to strand individuals in a quicksand of hopeless acceptance of any answer ever being elusive. Just as doubt can also become the excuse for a zealot’s intolerance.
When Sister Aloysius promises Donald Miller’s mother that she will leave Donald out of her efforts to remove Flynn from the parish, that she will not sacrifice him in her pursuit of the truth, though this is admirable and justified, the audience is deprived the route of investigation and is again gamed into an enforced ambiguity, Sister Aloysius proceeding only on intuition.
Again, must we know what the truth of the matter is? No, but I’m fairly sure that Shanley has inserted clues in the film that have nothing to do with the evidence or lack of it presented, or how we may be convinced by either Streep or Seymour. That doesn’t mean I think it’s possible to divine those clues with certainty, but I believe they’re there.
In the opening pages of the published script of “Doubt” (which I’ve yet to read but am ordering), Shanley dedicates the play to the devotion of nuns, balances this with acknowledging that time after time he was ejected from both sacred and secular institutions for reasons as to which he was unclear (but which one assumes were to do with judgmental authoritarianism sacrificing individuality), and highlights three admirable quotes: “The bad sleep well”, a title of a film by Kurosawa; Ecclesiastes’ “In much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow”; and Ptolemy’s “Everything that is hard to attain is easily assailed by the mob.” And, again, he asserts that the only answer to the play is to reside in a position of doubt, though Sister Aloysius does not sleep well, though she is sorrowful and aggrieved.
Reflection is a theme used in the film. We have it when Sister Aloysius suggests Sister James place on her blackboard a picture of the pope, not out of reverence but that its glass may serve as a mirror so that Sister James can see what is going on with the students behind her back. We observe it when, at the beginning of the film, the organist takes his seat in the choir loft and adjusts a mirror by which he can see the altar and the body of the church behind him. And we have it again when Father Flynn gives Donald Miller the gift of the toy that was a tiny ballerina whose alternately clockwise and counter clockwise whirling dance is choreographed by a magnet in a mirror.
There is one other dance in the film, and it happens to take place after Donald Miller is called to the rectory by the priest, this visit being one which Sister Aloysius takes as suspicious. While Donald is absent, his class moves to the gym for a dance lesson. “Blame it on the Bossa Nova” is the recording to which they practice.
I was at a dance when he caught my eye
Standin’ all alone lookin’ sad and shy
We began to dance, swayin’ to and fro
And soon I knew I’d never let him goBlame it on the bossa nova with its magic spell
Blame it on the bossa nova that he did so well
Oh, it all began with just one little dance
But then it ended up a big romance
Blame it on the bossa nova
The dance of love…
And when our kids ask how it came about
I’m gonna say to them without a doubtBlame it on the bossa nova with its magic spell
Blame it on the bossa nova that he did so well…
Without a doubt.
Father Flynn advocates love and insists Sister Aloysius has no compassion. Those who believe in his innocence view Sister Aloysius as a tyrant harboring a corrupting hatred. Sister Aloysius decries Flynn as being a person who misuses love and is utterly incapable of regret, for which reason she has hidden her compassion where he will never get at it.
Pedophiles, sociopaths and authoritarians don’t play by the rules and “hard evidence” is often difficult to come by because of their machinations and subterfuge. One of their boldest refuges happens to be doubt, which itself can be manipulated to be absolution. However brilliant the play’s dialogue (and it is, I’ve glanced at it and it is brilliant, superior the film), however devastatingly skilled Shanley is, I question whether it is somewhat unfair that the audience is emotionally involved in a film that is also exploded out of its story frame, ostensibly having nothing to do with characters and plot, and is instead an intellectual exercise in accepting the tension of doubt over a more comfortable couch of convictions.
As to whether Sister Aloysius has any doubts in her conviction that Flynn is a pederast, she does not.
Nor is she comfortable.
“In the pursuit of wrongdoing, one steps away from god,” she says at the end. “Course, there is a price. Oh, Sister James, I have doubts. I have such doubts.”
Some take this as her doubting her condemnation of Flynn, when it is not. Instead, pursuing her belief in Flynn’s wrongdoing, she has stepped away from simpler, easier trust. If to be in the presence of her god is to rest in security and love, then she has taken the course that she threatened Flynn she would pursue, if need be, to remove him from proximity to her students, stepping out of the confidence of an altruistic universe and into the paw of hell.
Was she right? Was she wrong? We can weigh the possibilities all we like and in the end, despite personal feelings as to whose character seems to play truer, not knowing ultimately too whether the performances and script were true to the mark or sacrificed telling bits for sake of maintaining ambiguity, one can really do little more than accept Shanley’s assertion that doubt is all that can be held in any confidence.
Shanley assures that this doubt is the livelier more invigorating position to inhabit. My life is one great big bag of doubt and I accept that; it’s how I daily live. But as one who has known individuals who were indelibly and terribly scarred by pedophiles who did take advantage of individuals assuming that everyone around them was operating from the same base, who were blind to obvious things in front of them, and as one too who knows the fatigue that comes of being made an outsider by fences formed of couches of convictions, I am only exhausted and enervated by “Doubt”. I wish there was less of the psychological exercise to it. Less of Shanley’s playing mate and checkmate with the audience, in order to keep them in the dark. Though I think it’s brilliant, I’m not altogether sure, for reasons given above, that it is honest with the audience, especially when Shanley repeatedly insists that he was not at all interested in the church scandals but rather–and I’m paraphrasing here–used them because they served as a good vehicle for exploring the fallibility of moral certitude.
I fail to understand how and why, if he had no interest in the scandals, he picked them as a vehicle when there are so many other situations from which to choose.
I wonder at any sacrifice of sincerity in broaching a subject he cares nothing about, in service of using it as a launchpad for the exploration of an intellectual exercise in embracing and maintaining the tenuous position of doubt.
“Let’s watch The Time Machine,” I’ve been encouraging H.o.p. for a couple of weeks, and he always declined, intent instead on working on his projects, not wanting to be distracted despite the fact it was directed by animator and special effects artist (hero) George Pal. Which surprised me as he loved Pal’s “War of the Worlds” and even did a short claymation several years ago attempting to copy a scene of a Martian emerging from his spacecraft.
Today, I finally just started the movie up and, as it turned out, the intro music was enough to catch his attention.
“Wow, I love the music,” he said, leaving his computer and shuffling over to mine as I was playing the movie on Netflix streaming.
I was curious what his response would be to “The Time Machine”, and how my memory of the movie would hold up as I’ve not had a full viewing of it since I was a child. The scene that had remained with me all these years was when the blond Eloi, sirens blaring, had become as somnambulists and walked en masse to certain doom through the mysterious sliding door of the Morlock den.
That memory which stayed with me was as if I’d not seen the movie past that point, for its chill was wholly concerned with the drone-like submission to the blank, black future beyond that door, as if I’d not ever learned what the Morlocks looked like (pretty cheesy, as were the Eloi in their bad blond wigs), never learned the end of the film. But I had seen the entire movie and the little that stuck with me of its resolution was again unsettled emotion, the unease of no certain outcome.
H.o.p. had seen, when he was seven or eight, clips from the movie so that he knew already about the Morlocks, a good deal of suspense thus absent from his viewing, and it was on these he focused as being rather frightening with their bright, shiny eyes, but not too much so, just enough to be kind of scarily enjoyable.
As I watched the film and we reached the stage where The Traveler begins his journey, I recollected the spinning orb of the sun and the mannequin who shows the passing of time with the change of attire in the shop window of the narrator’s store, Filby’s, across the street from The Traveler’s window.
But for me, as a child, the opening meeting of The Traveler’s peers at his home on New Year’s Eve must have been purely extraneous and I’d no recollection of it at all, nor did I have any recollection of The Traveler first exiting his Time Machine to encounter who he believes is Filby before the department store which is, incidentally, located next a clock repair shop. Remarking on the absence of his mustache he instead learns this is Filby’s son James, and that the elder Filby had died in the war the year before.
The position of the store in relation to The Traveler’s home is important, as is the red-haired Filby’s friendship with the doctor. The movie opens with Filby closing his shop and crossing the street to The Traveler’s house. The Traveler’s draw to focus upon this shop and its mannequin during his initial leaps through time is strong enough that when he returns to his time machine, so he may have again a clear view of the window he removes boards that had been apparently placed over his home’s windows following the elder Filby’s death.
Advancing to 1966, The Traveler finds the street in a commotion, people rushing to underground shelters, and his house is gone, replaced by a garden dedicated to elder Filby’s devotion to him.
Here we see The Traveler passing by a new flat screen “tubeless tv” just prior to meeting James Filby a second time. He also examines a sidewalk display of battery-powered razors with which he briefly shaves, an odd touch considering the destruction of the city directly follows.
Despite growing up during the Cold War near Hanford, where the plutonium bomb was born, I’d no memory of the 1966 atomic warfare scene in which The Traveler encounters again Filby’s son, now quite old, who is also fleeing to the air raid shelters. Though we see that Filby’s has become a large department store, James exits the same small shop his father had kept which has been preserved next the much larger, new store, and in the window of the older store is still the mannequin, and on the door of the shop is a newer version of a Red Cross poster, there also having been one on the shop’s door during the WWI scene. The Traveler, unaware what the air raid sirens mean, enthusiastic about the amazing progress that civilization has made, entreats Filby to stay and talk with him, Filby warning him that the sirens are for silly youngsters like himself who don’t know any better than to take cover, which refers to the future in which the underground Morlocks take care of the Eloi who have lost the ability to tend to their own needs or think for themselves.
Time and again Filby, then his son, attempt to divert The Traveler from his enterprise with friendly or concerned gestures, which The Traveler always turns away.
The apocalyptic special effects accompanying that portion of the film–the earth unleashing its fury in response to atomic warfare, volcanic lava flooding streets and moving about toy cars–seemed out of place with the movie on the whole and the subtler yet more impressive effects used elsewhere.
Some of the more impressive displays in the movie we see only briefly, such as the domed building in the land of the Eloi, the twin sphinxes guarding, and a pyramid shaped structure in the background.
When The Traveler is shown the old library in which are crumbling books which no one can read nor could read due their age, there is Egyptian statuary of a scribe, and again when he is shown the room in which are housed the memory rings which no one understands, there is more Egyptian statuary.
Though I enjoyed his acting, Rod Taylor amongst the Eloi unrolled as a rather weary romantic adventure, perhaps the excuse for the film’s existence considering that Wells’ elfin Weena was transformed into a nubile Yvette Mimieux, and I thought it curious that none of the battle and rescue scenes had stuck with me, instead only the Eloi’s spellbound, conscious-less march through the dark door.
Following the end, I read a few reviews from the time remarking on the film’s hollowness and that the ending was far rosier than Wells had depicted, but I instead understood how as a child I would have comprehended the end as so ambiguous that I’d keep no solid recollection of it.
Then I looked up the book online and finally gave it a quick read, which is easy to do as it’s pretty plainly told and not too long. I read of the entry to the underground world of the Morlocks’ watched over by the White Sphinx, the smile of which first appears friendly to The Traveler and later malicious and taunting, and how when The Traveler returns his heel is hurting him, both obvious references to the tale of Oedipus who is unable to alter fate, which every high school student is going to know who has had to study the book for a class and has referred online for canned notes for an essay.
The idea of this sphinx standing upon the pedestal above the entry to the Morlock’s underground world isn’t so obvious in the film, reduced to only a head, and because this head is glimpsed only briefly the viewer isn’t given much of an opportunity to decipher the environment.
Then I thought of Pal’s mannequin, the one in Filby’s shop window, which so captures The Traveler’s attention, of how she had been curious to me as it would have been impossible that she remained in that shop window for decades, of how it had been curious to me that Pal so focused upon her, even having The Traveler remark upon how he felt they were alike as they never aged. And it occurred to me that, for Pal, the mannequin upon whom The Traveler has had his eyes set since the beginning of his journey is a representation of the White Sphinx.
No sooner does The Traveler comment on his fondness of the mannequin and how neither of them age than Pal inserts a brief clip of the growth of several rosy red apples upon a tree limb, bringing to mind the fabled Garden of Eden, linking into The Traveler’s later conviction, upon reaching the world of the Eloi, that he has found paradise, where all needs are provided for and also none of the Eloi (whom Wells has cast as deity-like with that name) grow into later maturity and old age…because the Morlocks consume them.
One may even glimpse in Pal’s combination of the chariot and sphinx (perhaps even in Wells’) a version of the Chariot card of the tarot in which dual white and black sphinxes lead a chariot.
Wells takes The Traveler far far into the future, into a world where humanity as we know it no longer exists, where the White Sphinx may be perhaps glimpsed briefly as a winged thing screeching mournfully in the sky while The Traveler is beset upon by giant crabs. Then even further into the future still to the close of the world.
Pal refrains from this and instead casts The Traveler as a sort of serpent in the garden, a helper whose conviction is that the best thing for the Eloi is to awaken them, destroying the world of the Morlocks, forcing the Eloi into a position of thinking and taking care of themselves.
Though he had sought peace and paradise, had been horrified by war and attempted to flee it by venturing into the future, in his determination to assist the Eloi, as a means of introducing them to free will and waking them from thoughtless submission, The Traveler brings conflict and battle to their world. He acts as a Promethean light-bearer with his fire, a thing with which the Eloi were unacquainted until his arrival.
Having returned to his friends in 1900 and then leaving again, The Traveler is noted as having taken with him three books, Filby and the maid servant building a romantic story that certainly The Traveler has returned with those books to where he’d left Weena so that he may help the Eloi build a new world.
We are deprived of seeing whether or not he has returned.
“Do you think it could have caused a time paradox, him telling everyone about the future?” H.o.p. asks.
Return to the Zeiglers
Cut to the outside of Zeigler’s house. Then to the inside, Bill walking Zeigler’s assistant down the same hall in which he’d entered for the party. The decorations are still up in the area with the stairway, though only the Christmas tree and the cascade of white lights are lit. As they continue down another hall, we see the same style of bow decorations hanging as had been at Sharky’s (which was also the Rainbow costume shop). We had just a glimpse of these bow decorations in the scene at the first party in which Nuala and Gayle and Bill had been flirting, observed through a background door, down the hall, barely distinguishable through surrounding lights.
Passing under the bow decoration which had been seen at Sharky’s
He’s ushered through a left door toward the middle of the hall into Zeigler’s pool room/library which is lined with books, reminding somewhat of the library in which the man with the tricorner hat (Zeigler) had directed a model over to Bill’s side.
Zeigler greets him warmly, saying he appreciates his coming and that he’s sorry to drag him out. Bill says he was out anyway. Zeigler offers him a drink and Bill asks for some scotch. (In the screenplay ithe drink is identified as Napoleon 1935.) Bill tells him it was a terrific party and that he and Alice had a wonderful time. As they approach the red billiard table, overhung with green lights, Bill asks if he had been playing and Zeigler says he was just knocking a few balls around. When Bill says it’s good Scotch, Zeigler says it’s 25 year old and offers to send over a case. Bill declines. Zeigler insists. Bill emphatically declines. Zeigler laughs, playing with the cue ball, asking him if he feels like playing, and Bill says no, he’ll watch.
Zeigler says no, hesitates, says listen, uh, Bill, the reason he asked him to come over was he needed to talk to him about something. Awkward. But he has to be completely frank.
“What kind of problem are you having?” Bill asks.
Zeigler says it isn’t a medical problem, crossing before a large model of a ship. He says it concerns Bill.
Cut to Bill staring at Zeigler.
Cut to Zeigler. He says he knows what happened the night before, and he knows what’s been going on since then, and he thinks Bill has the wrong idea about one or two things.
Bill stares in horror, drops his head, smiles, then asks what he’s talking about.
“Please, Bill, no games. I was there, at the house. I saw everything that went on.” Zeigler asks Bill what the hell he thought he was doing. He couldn’t begin to imagine how he heard about it, much less got himself through the door. Then he remembered seeing him with the “prick piano player, whatever his name was, at my party” and it didn’t take much to figure out the rest.
Bill says it wasn’t Nick’s fault, it was his.
“Of course it was Nick’s fault. If he hadn’t mentioned it to you in the first place none of this would have happened.” He says he recommended the cocksucker to those people and he’s made him look like a complete asshole.
“What can I say?” Bill asks. “I had absolutely no idea you were involved in any way.”
“I know you didn’t, but I also know you went to Nick’s hotel this morning and talked to the desk clerk.”
Bill asks how he knows and Victor admits he had Bill followed. He says he is sorry, he owes him an apology but it was for his own good. He says he knows what the desk clerk told him but what he didn’t tell him was that all they did was put Nick on a plane to Seattle and by now he’s back with his family banging Mrs. Nick.
Bill mentions Nick was bruised.
“Ok, he had a bruise on his face. That was a hell of a lot less than he deserved.” Victor goes on saying he doesn’t think Bill realizes the trouble he was in. “Who do you think those people were? Those were not just ordinary people. If I told you their names…I don’t think you’d sleep so well.”
Bill asks if it was the second password that gave him away.
Yes, finally, but not because he didn’t know it. Because there was no second password. It didn’t help that most arrive in limos and he showed up in a taxi. Or that when they took his coat they found the receipt for the rental house in his pocket made out to you-know-who.
“There was a woman there who tried to warn me.”
Victor says he knows.
“Do you know who she was?”
Victor says he does. A hooker. “Sorry. That’s what she was.”
A hooker.
Victor says suppose he told him that everything that happened to him there, the threats, the girls’ warnings, the last minute interventions, what if he said that all of that was staged, a kind of charade, that it was fake.
“Fake.”
Yes, fake.
Bill, having seated himself on the sofa, bent over, beats his clasped fists against his forehead, asking why they would do that.
In plain words? To scare the living shit out of you. To keep you quiet about where you’d been, about what you’d seen.
Bill slaps his hands. He brings out of his pocket the newspaper article about the girl’s death and asks if Victor has seen it.
Victor advances, takes it. Folds it up and hands it back, saying he has.
Bill says he saw her body in the morgue. “Was she? Was she the woman…”
Yes.
“Well, Victor, maybe I’m missing something here. You called it fake, a charade, do you mind telling me what kind of fucking charade ends with somebody turning up dead?”
“Okay Bill, let’s cut the bullshit. You’ve been way out of your depth for the past 24 hours. You wanna know what kind of charade? I’ll tell you exactly what kind. That whole playacted, take me, phony sacrifice that you’ve been jerking yourself off with had absolutely nothing to do with her real death. Nothing happened to her after that party that hadn’t happened to her before. She got her brains fucked out, period. When they took her home she was just fine. And the rest of it is right there in the paper. She was a junky. She OD’d. There was nothing suspicious. Her door was locked from the inside. The police are happy. End of story. Come on. It was always going to be just a matter of time with her. Remember, you told her so yourself. You remember, the one with the great tits who OD’d in my bathroom. Listen, Bill, no one killed anybody. Somebody died. It happens all the time. Life goes on. It always does. Until it doesn’t. But you know that, don’t you.”
In the screenplay, Victor instead describes Amanda thusly:
Bill, are you so sure she was the kind of woman for whom the things you imagined were actually a sacrifice? If she attended these affairs and knew the rules so well, do you suppose it would have made any difference to her whether she belonged to one of the men, or to all of them? Bill, she was just a thousand-a-night hooker, no more, no less.
Victor’s costume at the play, the tricorner hat and the mask, is exactly as that observed in a statue in the theater district of Milton Keynes, paired with another female figure in a Napoleonic hat. The 1995 sculpture, “Dangerous Lliaisons” is by Philip Jackson and based on the Maschera Nobile.
The Tricorner Hat
Before I move along, I’d like to note that the notion that Amanda’s death by OD, rather than a murder, is given as proven by her door having been locked from the inside. “The Shining” had the scene in which Jack was locked in the storage room (pronounced story room at one point) and then is released by what may be a supernatural force. Much has been conjectured about whether he was released by such a force or of there is a rational answer. We’ve here another such mystery, the how of Amanda’s death given as confirmed entirely by that door being locked on the inside, Victor insisting that this proves her death was accidental. The viewer is left to judge whether or not Victor can be trusted.
Bill Returns Home
Cut to Bill’s mask on his pillow, Alice asleep beside it.
The light suggests Alice’s face is masked
Bill enters the apartment, the fleur de lis decoration on the blue hall wall outside. He removes his coat, enters the living room with its lit tree, presents all around. He cuts off the lit tree. Goes into the kitchen. Takes a beer from the refrigerator and sits at the table. Dissolve to his opening his bedroom door, looking slightly inebriated. He sees the mask. Stares. He lowers himself to the bed and begins to sob. His crying wakes Alice, whose expression is at first bizarrely inscrutable, mask like, distant, devoid of any emotion, even surprise. He leans down and rests his head on her. “I’ll tell you everything,” he says, she stroking his hair. “I’ll tell you everything. I’ll tell you everything.”
Only after the extinguishing of the multi-colored Christmas tree lights do we have this break down with Bill offering to tell Alice everything.
Cut to Alice, smoking, dressed in a blue sweater, eyes red as if with tears, sitting on the sofa. Bill sits across from her on the other sofa. Dawn. Alice says Helen will be up soon and she’s expecting them to take her Christmas shopping.
Next a toy store or toy section of a store. “Stairs to all floors” sign. The decorations are white stars on fields of blue and red. They pass by a sales display of games called “The Magic Circle”, a man scattering bubbles above attracting interest to the display via the many bubbles. Helena runs ahead and looks at a doll baby carriage saying how pretty it is, she could put Sabrina in there. “It’s old fashioned,” Alice says, dressed in a camel color coat the same style as had been worn by the bald individual who had been following Bill, her hands tucked into its pockets as had been that individual’s. A tiger doll or puppet sits on a box behind the carriage taking us back to Domino’s apartment, outside of which had been the baby stroller, inside of which had been the toy tiger.
The decorations are white stars on fields of red and blue.
Helena runs ahead and picks up a large teddy bear, saying she hopes Santa gets her one. Tigers hang nearby. Alice looks at the price tag and says he’ll have to wait and see. They pass through multiples of stuffed animals, teddy bears.
And, really, thinking in terms of a deluge and rainbow and the idea of multiplying afterwards, the toy store with its numbers of stuffed animals etc. Interestingly, the multi-colored Christmas lights and tree are absent here, as noted above, the store just being those stars on fields of red and blue.
“Alice, what do you think we should do?” Bill asks her.
“What do you think we should do?”
“Look, mommy!” Helena holds up a boxed Barbie doll in a ballerina costume. Numerous such dolls in boxes below.
“What do I think? I don’t know. I mean, maybe.” They stop before a wall of tigers. “Maybe, I think, we should be grateful. Grateful that we’ve managed to survive through all of our adventures whether they were real or only a dream.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“Am I sure? Only as sure as I am that the reality of one night, let alone that of a whole life time, can ever be the whole truth.”
“And no dream is ever just a dream.”
“The important thing is we’re awake now, and hopefully for a long time to come.”
“Forever.”
“Forever.”
“Forever.”
A trinity of forevers, just as the twin girls in “The Shining” had invited Doc to play with them forever and ever and ever, and Jack had told his son that he wanted to live at the Overlook forever and ever and ever. OD or OVD is a word that means continuance, eternity, life everlasting. It comes from a word meaning to repeat. My reasoning is that we have not only the word here, emphasized in the repeating aspect, inflating to the sense of eternity, but it perhaps also is referred to in the scenes with Sandor who references Ovid (Alice responding didn’t he die crying his eyes out in a place with a bad climate, referring to the flood) but also the overdose of Amanda which is in the film referred to as an event the recurrence of which was inevitable.
“It’s no use, that word,” Alice says. “It frightens me. But, I do love you. And, you know, there is something very important that we need to do as soon as possible.”
“What is that?”
“Fuck.”
It should be realized we have no idea what Bill told Alice. “Everything,” he said, but what was his vision of what he’d observed as opposed to what Kubrick has presented us or what we observe? I’ve no doubt that in the end we’re left to know no more than the once knowledgeable Bill, or Alice.
This Will have to do for my wrap up
The flooding that Bill experiences in the film seems to have to do with a stripping away of, let’s say, some attribute of the world of Malkuth or Assiah (the material worlds in cabbalistic lore), or an elevation into one of the higher worlds, so that he is suddenly immersed in a landscape of denuded formula, of signs repeating and expanding upon themselves. But I’m not a Cabbalist so what do I know. This is just how it seems to me from the little of which I’m aware.
There is perhaps a reference in 2001 that neatly ties in and strengthens my position. Dave Bowman has been drawing pictures of the crew in hibernation. HAL asks to see them and while Dave shows them to him HAL begins to question him on how he feels about things, asking if he has second thoughts. HAL says his reason for inquiry is difficult to define, that perhaps he is simply projecting his own concerns (just as any one of us can project wildly upon Kubrick’s films) but he is unable to free himself of the suspicion that there are some “odd things” about the mission and he’s sure Dave will agree with the truth about this. “Certainly no one could have been unaware of the very strange stories floating around before we left,” HAL says, and as he says it, on one of the computer screens is MEM, which I think refers to the Hebrew letter M and the waters. The strange stories floating around in connections with the waters is very akin to what has happened here.
It is at this point in the inquiry that HAL breaks off and predicts a fault in the AE35 unit that will go 100 percent failure in 72 hours, but says that there will be no indication of this until the time that it fully fails. The computer, which has full knowledge of the mission, whereas Dave Bowman doesn’t yet, is acting as a sort of oracle on the failure of the communications device. But is HAL in error, as the folks back on earth say he is, or are conditions different out here in space so that the result he gives is different from his twin computer. Or is HAL simply already plotting the death of Frank Poole and Dave Bowman. Whatever, this is the turning point that will ultimately result in Bowman’s confrontation with the monolith at Jupiter leading to the long sequence of brightly colored lights that seem to convey intelligence, the close-ups of Dave’s iris wrapping round his pupil while this is ongoing, and the popping out the other side in the French Baroque bedroom and bath where he will progress through his final leg of the journey toward rebirth.
The fault in Bill’s life which seems to launch him into the flood is perhaps his forgetting of the name of Roz or, conversely, having been made aware of it, which is going to be in respect to his failure to really see his wife, to look at her, which has to do with the world at large and his own complex nature. RZ is “to attenuate” to hide, a mystery, secret. Roz is his babysitter’s name, the one for whom he’s left the numbers. Rosa is the name of the Nathanson maid. His experiences on the street beginning at the time of his seeing the couple kissing under the closed rosebud, one could think in terms of matters sub rosa. By the time we reach Domino’s apartment, the flood of signs well under way, we have “maid’s day off”, the place a mess of dishes and old food. At the costume shop we can see across the way the sign Eros and though there are historical warpings, present day myth has, according to Wikipedia, Aphrodite giving the rose to her son, Eros, who gives it then to Harpocrates, who has eventually become associated with the god of silence, “to ensure that his mother’s indiscretions (or those of the gods in general…) were kept under wraps”, which fits in with this movie as well as long as we don’t think in terms of personality. At the time of the winter solstice Bill is well on his way to Somerton, his wife also effected by the flood and providing her own view of the universe and its repetitions which seem to reach for novelty in evolutionary ways, which occur via multiplication. By the end of the film Bill and Alice stand in the toy store, amongst a suggestion of innumerable stars and all the games of magic circles, the creatures of the ark multiplying all about them, counting themselves as now awake and lucky to have survived their adventures, ruminating on mysterious natures of reality of which they were previously unaware.
The end story remains what is the nature of love and fidelity in this big universe and where does it fit in.
The Zeigler’s Party
Naval Officer, Marion
Domino, Sonata Jazz, Rainbow
Somerton, Alice’s Dream
Nick’s Hotel, Rainbow, Somerton
Marion, Domino, Sharky’s, the Hospital
Zeigler, Home, the Toy Store
Revisiting Marion Nathanson
Exterior shot of Harford’s apartment building at night, much the same as when we first saw the building. Inside, Bill is returning home, he goes toward the living room, his daughter calling her greetings. He goes into the dining room where his wife and daughter are at the table and asks if there were any calls for him. She says that Dr. Sanders and Shapiro called.
His daughter is doing school work, books spread out over the table, including a book titled “Carlos”. One book is open and she says she got “all of them right”. Alice yawns and asks if he’s hungry. He says he is, sort of. Alice asks if he wants to eat at 7 and he says to make it earlier as he has some appointments, that he has to go out again. His daughter asks if she’s going to get a puppy for Christmas and he says they’ll see about it.
“But he could be a watchdog,” his daughter says.
A watchdog? Interesting, considering the admonishment given Bill that his family could be endangered by his inquiries. But Bill is also, in a sense, a watcher throughout. This idea returns at the end in a scene with Victor. On one level it could have to do with Bill’s being told he’s knowledgeable but missing out on much, as if experience. On another level there’s the idea of the double dialogue going on around him, the signs playing out physically.
“We’ll see.”
He passes by a candelabra holding 7 red candles, entering the kitchen. As he goes to the refrigerator (recall that he’d originally left the phone and pager numbers on it for Roz) he hears his wife doing a math problem with Helena.
“Joe has two dollars fifty and Mike has one dollar and seventy five cents. Joe has how much more money than Mike?”
Bill stops with his drink in hand, turns and looks at the two.
Alice asks if it will be subtraction or addition and Helena decides subtraction.
We hear him replaying his wife’s confession of her dream in his head, that there were hundreds of people around them and everyone was fucking and then she was fucking other men.
She sees him staring at her and she smiles back. He smiles, strained, in turn.
“So many, I don’t know how many I was with.”
Remember that Carl was a math professor, a scholar of numbers.
The meaning of IVSPh (Joseph) is “let him add” or adding.
MNH or MNA is to count, number.
Cut to Bill’s office, the camera looking toward a hall beyond the counter on its left, a security camera above and a warning sign that states there are security cameras on the premises, reminding of the camera at Somerton and Helena’s asking for a puppy watchdog. A sign about payment can be seen on the wall beside the counter. The camera pans right, over the counter, to the waiting area and the lit Christmas tree.
Cut to Bill in his office, seated behind his desk, hand to chin, envisioning again the naval officer and his wife. He picks up the phone and makes a call.
The phone in the Nathanson apartment rings, Carl answering. He says hello several times. Bill hangs up.
But he’s made a connection.
The Return to Domino’s Apartment
Cut to a cab pulling up before the prostitute’s building.
Bill gets out, wishing the cab driving a Merry Christmas. Another woman passes with a GAP bag. A box in hand he enters the building, passing a woman who carries a large box that looks much like one that had been carried past Rainbow earlier. Bill’s box appears to be a box of pastries.
Inside he rings the doorbell. A woman answers through the door. “Domino?” he asks. The woman replies, no, it’s not her, and when queried if she’s expecting her back soon she says no. Looking somewhat defeated, perplexed about what to do, Bill says he has something for her and can he leave it? The woman, saying sure, opens the door, and smiles upon seeing Bill in his nice clothes, unchaining the door. She wears a blue work shirt, her hair up, a blue skirt with flowers. She asks if she can say who the gift is from. Just tell her it’s from Bill. “You’re Bill?” she says. “The Bill? The doctor who was here last night?” He says he supposes he is and she replies that Domino said how nice he was.
“Did she?”
She nods and invites him.
One wonders what in the world has happened to the Christmas tree which looks pretty beaten up compared to the previous evening.
He advances to the kitchen in front of her and as he removes his jacket before the yellow kitchen table (now cleared) she squeezes her body past him invitingly, saying her name is Sally.
The rainbow on the lens
“Helloooo, Sally.” Bill says, they flirting with each other. He asks when Domino can be expected back, a blue half circle shape appearing on the camera lens in the lower left hand corner. “No idea?” No. “She may not even be coming back,” Sally says. “She may not even be coming back,” Bill repeats, unbuttoning Sally’s shirt. Sally leans her forehead against him, hesitating, this rainbow in the lower left corner, and says there’s something she should tell him, acting as if she’s struggling against arousal. She pushes Bill away and has him take a seat. “I don’t quite know how to say this,” she says. “Don’t quite know how,” Bill says.
Note that Bill is only repeating everything that is said to him. We’d had the signs being doubled physically. Now Bill, returning to Domino’s apartment, only repeats everything that is said to him. At least up to this point in the conversation where a surprise turn is taken and he is astonished, compelled now to react emotionally.
Sally continues on to say that considering that he was with Domino last night, it’s only fair to tell him that Domino got the results from the blood test that morning and they were HIV positive.
Bill sits back. “HIV positive.”
“Yeah.”
He stares. Blinks. “Well,” he says, he’s very very sorry to hear that.
“It’s absolutely devastating,” Sally says and asks if she can offer him a cup of coffee.
Bill says no thank you, that he better be going.
Perhaps he remembers that earlier that morning, at Gillespies, he had used his doctor credentials as a password to try to get to Nick, and failing, had said that he had a message to give him about some medical tests.
Bill, in a sense, returning to the events of the previous evening, is attempting to converse with them. He is making inquiries. But a scared Nick has been sent away, bruised, and a devastated Domino will not be returning.
Sharky’s
A nearly empty street, Bill walking down it.
He passes a garbage can marked 80 then two lit phone kiosks. He looks down, back, and across the street sees before a building, the Nicon House, a man in a beige coat who he seems to think may possibly be following him. There is a one way sign pointing the direction in which they both walk.
The Musica Ricercata plays.
On his side of the street he passes 343. Passes a sign on a door reading FINDINGS. The number 30. Past an awning reading (212) 555-7686. It is a diamond jewelry place. Passes 37. 38. Passes a postal box that bears the same graffiti as had the one before Nick Nightingale’s hotel and the Rainbow shop. Passes Val Dor Ltd, a pearl importer. He looks across the street and now the man is walking before building 23, the Donnelly House, another man passing him going the opposite direction.
We see Bill turn a corner, a delicatessen with bright green awning across the street. He passes by a restaurant lit inside with strands of white lights, outside a sign that reads “For sale, vital, 212-353-3005″. He passes by another postal box, a C&P Cleaners shop with same day cleaning, wash and fold service, 14. He looks back and sees the bald man in the beige coat rounding the corner behind him.
He speeds up, frightened, and before address 237, a restaurant decorated with multicolored lights, he waves for a cab, fearful.
We then see him from another view, waving for a cab, on Wren street. He is at an intersection where a cross street dead ends into Wren, perpendicular him, and at the end of that street is the neon green awning of a delicatessen.
He sees a cab round the corner from the left, onto the side street, crosses toward it. Runs. A passenger gets out but the cab driver yells “Off Duty” at him and takes off and leaves him. Across the street is “A Hint of Lace” next to a “Nails” shop. We see the restaurant he was standing before when hailing the cab was the Verona Restaurant.
A stop sign behind him seems to be marked with the graffiti CMB. He continues down the cross street away from Verona, a Nails shop on the opposite side now and the man in the beige coat appears at the corner, standing next to A Hint of Lace. The man in the beige coat stops and stands still as Bill stops before a manned news kiosk. Cut to a side view of Bill watching the man. Cut to the man on the corner and we see he’s at the intersection of Wren and (perhaps) Miller streets (but it may not be Miller). Cut back to Bill who picks up a newspaper and purchases it. Cut back to the bald man crossing the street to Bill’s side. Again, he stops and stares at Bill. Then he walks on.
Verona is Veronica, meaning “true image”. The story of St. Veronica has her wiping the face of Christ with a cloth and thus recording a true image, an icon of him. She’d offered the cloth to him as he stumbled on the way to his crucifixion.
The Verona’s address is 237, which had been the room number of the maze-like hotel in “The Shining” which served as setting for some horrifying events, the true nature of which could never be divined.
Newspaper in hand, Bill turns and continues down Wren, towards the green delicatessen, and is indeed going the opposite direction from which he initially came. At the middle of the block he turns toward a coffee shop with a bright green awning over its stairs, multicolored Christmas lights decorating, and goes inside. Inside we see it reads Sharky’s. He passes under a Christmas decoration shaped like a bow with two candles upon it.
If we’ve been paying careful attention we are aware that the building with the green awning that holds Sharky’s is the same as that which had held the Rainbow costume shop, which was observed as an unlit building down the street from where Bill met Domino, and was a building with a green and white striped awning next to where Bill was slammed into a car by the frat boys.
The bow that is also at Victor’s
He enters the coffee shop, in which Mozart’s Requiem Mass is playing, approaches the bar and orders a cappuccino.
Just as the globes of light on the tables at the opposing Sonata had given the impression of stretching on into infinity, so do the globes of ceiling light here, reflected in the windows, give the same impression, as if stretching into the street and connecting Sharkeys with the Sonata.
He takes a seat under a large portrait of a woman. We see on the back of the newspaper “Cool as Ice” and “Lucky to Be Alive” reads the cover under “Holiday Special”.
The paper open, we see a headline reading “Party” on the right, but what catches Bill’s attention is an article on the lower left page, “Ex-beauty queen in hotel drugs overdose”.
Above it is a picture with a caption that reads “Derailed” showing cops taking an accused bank robber, Anthony Norman, away after his surrender, ending a hostage drama. Also the last sentence of the above story reads, “We have to have no-tolerance for violence.. . even this mental violence.”
A former Miss New York was (reported/admitted?) in New York Hospital in critical condition after a drug overdose, police …. said.
Amanda Curran, (can’t tell age), was found unconscious in her room at the Florence Hotel by security personnel after her agent asked them to check on her be- Hotel by security personnel after her agent asked them to check on her because he’d been unable to reach her by phone.
Workers at the Florence told police she had not been seen since 4 a.m., when she returned to the hotel accompanied by two men. The staff said the men seemed to be holding a giggling Curran upright as they brought her into the posh hotel.
Police have been unable to locate the two men, but a police spokesman said they did not suspect foul play in Curran’s overdose.
“We don’t believe there has been any crime against Miss Curran, but we would like to talk to these two men to see what they can tell us about her final hours” before she was discovered, the spokesman said.
Officials decline to say what drug or drugs Curran OD’d on. It was unclear if there was anyone in the room with her at the time she ingested the drugs. her at the time she ingested the drugs.
Her sister, Jane Curran, told The Post, “Her overdose must have been an accident. Mandy and I were as close as sisters can get. We didn’t have any secrets. If there had been anything wrong, she would have told me.”
Jane, a (something year old) perfume (something) said that her sister was emotionally troubled as a teenager but had managed to put it behind her.
“She’d undergone treatment for depression in her teens, but that was a long time ago.”
She said that her sister was not totally satisfied with her career, but was still hoping to turn her beauty pageant success into an acting gig.
“Things hadn’t gone as well as she’d expected after winning the Miss New York title, but she was considering several television offers.
“She has many important friends in the fashion and entertainment worlds. “She has many important friends in the fashion and entertainment worlds and she believed she’d break through in the end. It was just a matter of time.”
After being hired for a series of magazine ads for London fashions designer Leon Vitali, rumors began circulating of an affair between the two.
Soon after her hiring, Vitali (illegible) insiders were reporting that their boss adored Curran — not for how she wore his stunning clothes in public, but for how she wowed him by taking them off in private, seductive solo performances.
Leon Vitali played the part of the Hierophant in the film.
Several lines are doubled in the article.
The Hospital
Cut to the hospital’s exterior. Then from the inside, through the large revolving doors, Bill’s cab arriving. Entering he goes to the information desk, shows his card, says one of his patients had been admitted and asks for her room number. He’s told she died that afternoon, at 3:45.
Next, Bill is being ushered to the morgue. Inside, all the tables are empty. Amanda’s body is taken out of locker 10 for him to view. He hears in his head, “Because it could cost me my life.” He draws close, gazing on her, examining her face. After a little too long he withdraws.
Then he is walking towards the camera down a hospital hall, brightly colored paintings lining the white wall to the right, the wall to the left yellow, the wall beyond red. His phone rings. Passing Admissions he says yes it’s Dr. Harford. “Tonight? Oh, no, no, no, that’s okay. Please tell him I’ll be there in around 20 minutes.”
We are led to believe that the woman in the morgue is Amanda, that’s the set up in the film, but the woman looks slightly different from the Mandy who was in Victor’s bathroom. Her features look slightly different. In the screenplay Bill asks Ziegler later if it was Amanda, saying he went to the morgue and couldn’t tell.
Next: Zeigler, Home, the Toy Store
The Zeigler’s Party
Naval Officer, Marion
Domino, Sonata Jazz, Rainbow
Somerton, Alice’s Dream
Nick’s Hotel, Rainbow, Somerton
Marion, Domino, Sharky’s, the Hospital
Zeigler, Home, the Toy Store
Nick Nightingale’s Hotel
Fade in on the street. Bill emerging from a taxi (7P94), returning to the Sonata Cafe which is closed and gated. The ad on top of the cab reads DKNY EYES. We see behind the earlier sewing thread sign and that above it the building reads Thread Mills. People walking along carrying wrapped packages and a person has a GAP bag. As he approaches the Sonata Cafe again, with the guitar sign above it, just as when he last visited it, a man with a guitar passes to the right, wearing red and black plaid shirt. Bill finds the Sonata Cafe gated and locked.
He enters Gillespie’s Diner next door and learning from the waitress that Nick Nightingale comes in there, and that she knows his address, tries to get her to tell him where he lives. He even shows her his doctor card but she says no. So finally he tells her it’s a matter of medical tests and that Nick will want to know about them as soon as possible.
The waitress wears a pink shirt and a necktie. A necktie is perfectly normal on a woman but I think here is indicative of gender reversals.
Bill now is encountering gates closed to him after entering Somerton under false pretenses. And yet Bill was certainly enticed to Somerton.
We see him pass by Artini’s and enter Hotel Jaso…. (can’t see its full name) at building number 143. More people with packages and a person with a GAP bag. The exterior light globes on which we see the number 143 remind of the globes on the tables in the Sonata Cafe, and further of stone globes that had been on the gate at Somerton.
The clerk at the reception desk, obviously gay, eyes him up and down appreciatively and asks how he can help him, but when Bill asks for Nick Nightingale’s room, he’s told he already checked out around 5 in the morning, leaving no forwarding address. Bill asks if he noticed anything unusual about him. The clerk asks, “Hey you’re not five 0, are you?” Bill says no, that he’s an old friend, a doctor. “Really?” the clerk replies, interested. And Bill shows him his medical card. “It’s funny you should ask that question, Bill” the clerk says, allowing there was something strange about the way he left. He came in at 4:45 with two big guys, well dressed and well spoken, but not the kind of people you like to fool around with. And, he had a bruise on his cheek and looked a little scared. One of the men settled his bill while the other took him up to his room. When he was leaving, Nick tried to pass him an envelope but the men wouldn’t allow it, saying that any mail or messages for him would be collected by someone properly authorized to do so then took him off in a car and he hasn’t a clue where they went.
Bill says he appreciates it and leaves and the clerk says “any time”.
The gay man recalls Bill having been targeted as a “faggot” the previous evening, after his visit with Marion. A switch hitter. And here we have the gay man obviously attracted to Bill.
Big guys. This comes up a number of times, the big guys who appear to act as bullies or constrainers. Giants are also associated with the NPhL, fallen, overthrown ones, or tyrants. May fit with the film in the context of the mythic story of the rainbow/flood.
Speaking of the mail, if one pays attention to the mail receptacle boxes, we will see them now bearing identical graffiti, appearing to be the same box from place to place.
The second visit to the Rainbow costume shop
Now Bill goes to the Rainbow store to return his costume, a shop selling Murato paints just beyond, which is the store before which he encountered the prostitute, and we are able to see on it in large letters MANNING and below that BOWMAN. A woman passes with a large box. He goes up the side steps and enters into the store.
We see that one of the mannequins in the window is no longer wearing red, as it had been the previous evening.
We see that the stance of the mannequin beside the security gate is different from the previous evening.
Where there were shirts beside the mannequin beside the security gate, there are now shoes, and a second counter is located there, whereas the previous evening there had only been one counter located before the wall cases holding the suits.
The owner greets him, “Oh, the doctor” and asks him if his outfit was a success. He says it was. The owner informs Bill he’s forgotten the mask. “Maybe you left it at the party,” he suggests. Bill thinks a moment then says he doesn’t think so, that he must have lost it, and asks it to be put on the bill.
It was 150 for the rental, then the 200 and 25 for the mask. 375. As Bill prepares to pay, cut to the side and through the door that leads to the back room, the owner’s daughter exits, still in her lingerie and the little wrap that she’d used to cover herself with the night before, when caught with the two men. “Yes, yes, dear, come, come,” says the owner. “Would you like to say hello to Dr. Harford?” She advances to hold hands with her father and shakes hands with Dr. Harford, saying, “Hello.”
The tags on the suits in the case behind are different, much smaller than the previous evening.
The two men from the previous night exit, dressed (well-dressed), thank Mr. Millich and promise to call him soon. As they leave, the owner wishes them a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
Bill stares on in disbelief, the owner giving him his receipt and thanking him for his business.
Bill says that last night he was going to call the police. The owner scratches his beard and says things change, “we have come to another arrangement” and if the good doctor should ever want anything again, anything at all (he wraps his arm around his daughter) it needn’t be a costume.
The girl’s face is very doll-like. One could take it that as the shop owner wraps his arm around his daughter with the mention of the costume, he is not so much selling her as referring to the idea of costuming, as if she is herself costumed.
The shopkeeper’s daughter
Her appearance reminds us of the shop owner indicating the mannequins the previous night and pointing out that they only looked real. The manner in which she said “hello” upon the shop owner’s direction seemed like that of a puppet, and the film Kubrick had been preparing for after Eyes Wide Shut was AI, a Pinocchio type adventure which recalled the problem of the HAL-9000 in 2001 which eventually appeared to possess emotions. She could be connected with Amanda, as this girl is the only teen in the film, I think, and the only other time a teen will be mentioned is later in a news article which brings up Amanda having had emotional problems as a teen, but that it was a long time ago and she’d “put it behind her”.
Another interesting thing is Bill doesn’t call the police in response to the seeming pimping of the girl. He seems helpless to do so after having attended the party the previous night. At Nick’s hotel he had to identify himself as not being police, and he won’t call the police about Nick. He also won’t call the police about this girl, or later about Mandy, and Kubrick leaves us to struggle with whether it is less a moral failure than his recognizing that things are not as they seem and his questioning of the reality of the situation on, at least, the every day, mundane level.
The Second Visit to Somerton
Next shot, a business area of the city.
Cut to Bill seated in his office, troubled, facing the window, hand to his mouth. But he’s not thinking about the girl, he’s envisioning the naval officer having intercourse with his wife. There’s a knock on the door and an employee enters with black coffee in a bag. He asks how his afternoon is looking and she says there’s just Mrs. Akley at 2:30 and Mrs. Kaminski at 4. He tells her something has come up and to see if Miller can see them and if not to apologize and make new appointments. And please call the garage and have them get his car out in half an hour.
Next shot, Bill in his Range Rover crossing the bridge. He passes under the sign for Exit 39 which leads to Glen Cove Rd. Entering a forested area, he passes a sign that reads that 495 East is ahead, in the opposite direction from which he is driving, and 495 West is to the right. He is approaching Somerton from the opposite direction he arrived in via the taxi. He drives up to the gate and the viewpoint of the camera is from the other side of the gate, watching him as he paces.
The Musica Ricercata plays.
He looks up and sees on one of the gate posts a security camera following him. He watches a car approach on the other side of the gate, license plate BQR 213. An older man gets out, advances toward the gate, and slips an envelope through to Bill, then returns to the car, gets in the passenger’s side, and leaves without a word.
The envelope is addressed Dr. William Harford. The note inside reads, “Give up your inquiries which are completely useless, and consider these words a second warning. We hope, for your own good, that this will be sufficient.”
BQR means “to inquire, make search”.
Once again, the gate is closed to Bill. He’s denied admittance. The envelope seemingly having already been prepared for Bill, his return visit had been anticipated.
Next: Marion, Domino, Sharky’s, the Hospital
The Zeigler’s Party
Naval Officer, Marion
Domino, Sonata Jazz, Rainbow
Somerton, Alice’s Dream
Nick’s Hotel, Rainbow, Somerton
Marion, Domino, Sharky’s, the Hospital
Zeigler, Home, the Toy Store
