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.
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