Takin a ride to nowhere, we'll take that ride

Every few months I stop by the Criterion Collection website to see which movies they are releasing and to look at the older ones. If you are unfamiliar with the series, the Collection releases high quality transfers of important movies, often with extensive extra material including documentaries. The definition of importance is fairly broad. It includes intrinsic value, but also the influences that a film had on the development of cinema and films of particular historic value. I've often used the collection as a short list of movies to find on Netflix, at the library or at Movie Madness.

Two Lane Blacktop is a movie I most likely never would have watched were it not for its recent release in a Criterion edition. It would appear to be a simple road movie involving a race between James Taylor and Dennis Wilson (the Beach Boy) and Warren Oates. It is actually one of the strongest movies about alienation in America I've yet seen.

These characters are almost completely without identity. Names are never used. Oates's character is known as GTO in the credits because that is what he drives. Taylor and Wilson are called the Driver and the Mechanic, while the girl who joins them is called the girl. Oates picks up a lot of hitchikers and tells a different life story to each. The road race he provokes with Taylor is just another story to escape whatever it is he is fleeing.

Taylor and Wilson, while spending nearly all their time together drifting from race to race, almost never speak and when they do it is about cars and racing for money. Taylor is nearly always blank, unless he has to rile up a potential competitor. The girl blows in and then out of their lives as lost as they are.

The story plays out against Route 66 and other back roads. Most of the terrain is beautiful, but empty. The towns they visit tend to also be empty or they provide no human interaction.

Thanks to the near lack of dialogue, the movies message is not pounded into by soliloquy or fiery debate between characters. Instead we just watch the loneliness and emptiness on screen.