certainly the first time the cheesecake factory has been mentioned in my work

Some days the writing just comes. And some days you write something like this, look at it, and go "WTF?":

His stance was that of a dad waiting angrily in the crowded lobby of Cheesecake Factory. He'd always wanted to watch Top Gun, it was next in his Redbox queue, and he was so excited he mentioned it to his buddy. His buddy promptly told him don't worry, the Soviets win. So what was the point of watching it now? There hadn't even been a sequel. His engine broke down before he could reach the danger zone. Now he was flat spinning in the flaccid zone. 

 (Ok, I admit the first sentence kind of cracks me up, but seriously, I have no idea what the hell this is supposed to be. It's been a long week. Also, Cheesecake Factory and Redbox sound far too naughty in this context.)

Open Road Claustrophobia: The Hitcher and Duel

One of strongest American myths is that of the open road. From “Go west, young man” to On the Road, American mythology is awash with stories and symbols of the road as a place of freedom. Speeding down the highway with the wind at your back, the possibilities in front of you are limitless. The wide open spaces surrounding the endless highway promises the opportunity for continual reinvention.

Two movies show the inverse of this mythology. The Hitcher (1986) and Duel (1971), by introducing the concept of outside evil to road mythology, perform a kind of reverse alchemy that sees the transformation of the protagonists into closed, caged beings. It is a reinvention, but one forced upon them as opposed to being sought out. It is not, at least initially, desired. By the end of each film, the “heroes” (who are most certainly not heroic in any sense) are transformed to a more primal state: innocence and security is lost and in the case of Duel, Dennis Weaver is literally hopping around and hollering like a monkey.

The Hitcher portrays the rite of passage into manhood; Duel explores middle-age ennui and the loss of security before giving over entirely to a pitched “good vs. evil” death match. In both the open, empty landscape turns claustrophobic. The viewer feels that the evil can appear at any moment on any corner of the screen and the myth of freedom on the open road is revealed to be a lie, instead we are faced with the open road as a cage in which two forces are locked in a classic gladiator death match. The protagonist of each film is initially in this cage against their will, but as the movies progress their characters change as a result of the events unfolding and we understand that they will stay until the antagonist is slain, even if offered their freedom, because there can be no freedom for them so long as the antagonist still lives. This is shown explicitly in The Hitcher in the last minutes of the film when Jim forces the officer out of the car and takes off in pursuit of Ryder. Crucially, he does not kill the officer; but we feel this is not because he is “good” but because his focus—his entire existence—is centered on confronting and killing Ryder. The cat and mouse buildup in Duel lacks a similarly obvious scene, but in the crazed eyes of David Mann (brilliantly played by Dennis Weaver) we see a man who will not be able to escape until the truck and its driver (who we never see) is destroyed—and he must do that destruction himself.

The Hitcher's initial good vs. evil setup is traditional: we are allowed to see the human face of evil in John Ryder, Ryder kills wantonly from the first minutes of the film (in contrast to Duel, where the evil is focused solely on David Mann) and there is a pivotal damsel in distress scene. In The Hitcher, however, the damsel in distress is not saved, and it is here we see the evil personified by Ryder at its most transformative, as a force larger than his sweating, human face: this is where Jim Halsey becomes the mirror image of Ryder. The forces of rationality and process, which have been heretofore represented by the alternately bumbling and threatening cops, prove conclusively during this scene that they are powerlessness to stop Ryder and have therefore erased any hope of a way out for Jim. In short, he must embrace his destiny, and when the cops arrest Ryder at the conclusion of this scene we understand that they will not be able to hold him, that there is no hope of his containment. There can be no "good" outcome. It must be a showdown between Halsey and Ryder. The Hitcher suggests that there is no such thing as karma: good deeds lead to death, evil goes unpunished. At the end Halsey is more like Ryder than not--the evil has been passed on. He kills no one until he kills Ryder, but at what cost? It’s not simply vengeance or even fear; his actions have put him permanently on the outside. If not explicitly evil, he has certainly fully embraced the darkness.

Evil is not given a human face in Duel; thanks to the carefully placed shots of boots and an arm we understand a human is driving the truck but we never see his face or, more crucially, understand his motives. It could be argued that the Peterbilt tanker truck itself is the face of evil in Duel, but I think the boot/arm shots discourage this reading. As frightening as the Peterbilt is--and it is plenty frightening, a relentless inhuman monster--it can only be, at best, a proxy for the face of evil. Evil drives the Peterbilt and evil remains hidden. I also think the boot/arm shots disavow any notion of the supernatural. And that makes the story stronger: the idea of a human driving that truck is far more unsettling than a supernatural force. (Richard Matheson, who wrote the original novella as well as the screenplay, is a craftsman and not a poet. The novella is relatively gripping read but dry and emotionless, as are all Matheson’s books. In contrast there is no distance in the movie--you are with David, a companion during his descent into primal fear as established in numerous close-ups of his sweating, crazed face. The visual element of cinema alone helps close the distance, but it’s Spielberg’s poetic filmmaking that drives it home and forges the connection for the viewer.) For the rational mind, the story becomes plausible.

The Hitcher, by contrast, never tries to be plausible. It is clearly an allegorical tale. Broadly-drawn supporting characters and scenes explicitly portraying elements of the myth pool, such as Ryder putting the two pennies on Jim's eyes, utilize classic tools of allegorical storytelling. Plausibility is not important here. In real life the cops would have caught both early on. The frequently empty gas stations and diners would certainly have been more populated. I would argue that their very emptiness is part of what makes The Hitcher an effective allegorical tale. We understand that the film is painting in broad strokes and we see Ryder and Halsey as archetypes rather than flesh and blood characters. We see them both as unstoppable forces that must clash with each other until a victor emerges. Everything else is window dressing. Their battle is pitched against a landscape of empty desert and this emptiness ensures our eyes are always on them; nothing else is happening in the background. It is inevitable that final confrontation is on an otherwise deserted stretch of highway, after the first few minutes of the film we never see a moving vehicle on the highway aside from those driven by Ryder, Jim or the police (with the exception of the bus that reintroduces Nash to Jim—but both characters are passengers on the bus.) We’ve been visually told the entire movie that this stretch of highway exists only for them.

There is a timeless quality to both of these tales, as is frequently true when diving deep into the myth pool. We aren’t seeing anything new. The vehicles, clothes and technology (rotary phones, etc.) are artifacts of the eras in which the films were made, but these things are simply props--the tools needed to tell the story, not the beating heart of the story. You don't finish either movie thinking about Dennis Weaver's 1970s ugly yellow sunglasses or Jennifer Jason Leigh's 1980s haircut. Yet you will remember Rutger Hauer’s sweaty face. You’ll remember the Peterbilt’s grill, looking inhuman and out of time. Both films portray an utterly relentless evil. I’d even go so far as to say they portray a banal evil (as I believe evil in “real life” to generally be)—there is nothing romantic about John Ryder or the Peterbilt; Baudelaire is nowhere to be found.

If the road myth is generally one of expansion, these films show it as a contraction, a folding in of space. The road is a cage floor, the landscape its bars. Even if Jim and Dave want to escape their predicaments, they cannot—there is nowhere to run and no one around for miles. “The road must eventually lead to the whole world,” Kerouac said, but these two films show the road as the whole world, and a hellish one at that. There is no reinvention of self, only a reduction. Jim and David save themselves physically but we are left to ponder at what cost. Have they traded their souls for survival or have their souls abdicated the light in order to embrace the darkness necessary for their survival? Clearly both have devolved. In this final reduced state they are surrounded by the road. The bars have not lifted with the vanquishing of their foe and they find the cage is their home. The emptiness surrounding them closes in. The transformation is complete.

the lines on the wall look like a peregrine falcon diving after its prey (IV)

On this weekend he did not eat. She read about Richard Nixon. He dumped the last of the coffee down the sink and she threw out the bananas that had gone bad. He was sick with bloom. She marveled at how many elections Nixon had won. Nixon was the son of a grocer.

Hunger made his fingers tingle. He held his hands beneath the warm water streaming from the faucet. It would be little reflected in the water bill, if at all. There were no dishes in the sink. The warm water did not stop the tingling. He waited for it to pass to his toes, but it did not. He wondered if heart attacks were signaled by fingers tingling. A co-worker had told him that once, or maybe it was if your arm went numb. He couldn’t remember. Last week in the produce section he stared at the carrot bunches for almost ten minutes. The produce clerk asked him if needed assistance. He felt like crying but did not tell that to the clerk. Now he felt like crying again, holding his hands beneath the streaming water as if praying to a forgotten deity.

She marveled that a man as flawed as Nixon could have accomplished so much. They didn’t believe he had phlebitis after Watergate. She wondered if anyone ever believed him about anything. She was yet to be born when Nixon was president. Perhaps people back then believed what politicians said. Perhaps there was less cynicism. She didn’t know and couldn’t know. Memories cannot be trusted. Memories are crooks. Nixon created the EPA. Nixon would have been impeached. Nixon believed in keeping his troubles to himself. Yet his troubles were the most transparent of any president. She didn’t like carrots but could never know if Nixon had liked carrots.

The water continued to run. Nixon’s body will take decades to decompose.