In Search of 'Zabriskie Point'

MICHAELANGELO Antonioni's Zabrickie Point, crucified by the nation. I press as the naive product of questionable motives, is not as simple as its detractors would have us believe. Consider seriously the question of why Antonioni made the film in the first place. Consensus: Antonioni is a smart 57-year-old who knows that whatever's happening isn't happening in Italy and has ventured in search of an important audience. This much is true: when Antonioni waves an American flag outside the window of a soul-less real estate tycoon, he is not out to educate his audience as much as confirm their existent prejudices. A Jesus Saves sign looms briefly out poor Rod Taylor's window. Here I air a prejudice of my own. I would rather have my symbols built openly into a-film's structure (like Hitchcock's Tonight Golden Carls sign in The Lodger, or Hawks's The World is Yours-Cook's Tours sign in Scarface ), than hold or pan-away from lurid urban graphics as Antonioni too often does.

Antonioni is a sincete man, and when he says the hope of the world lies with young American revolutionaries, he probably means it. His complex response to the nascent revolutionary movement is cheapened by a desire to convince YOUTH he's on their side. The true merit of Zabriskie Point lies in the way Antonioni uses his commitment to Youth and The Movement to explore a set of typical characteristics of the country, both urban and natural. It's important that we respect the man enough to know that, in the city scenes, he offers more than the simple-minded judgments of Medium Cool and the irritating awe of Demy's The Model Shop. And on the road, we're not dealing with Easy Rider's paranoid tourist mentality.

A recurrent dramatic problem in Zabriskie Point prevents it from working harmoniously for long stretches: good ideas are played to excess and then taken to the point of self-parody. The opening off-campus meeting between Kathleen Cleaver and Black militants with potential white revolutionaries starts out well with acceptable archetypal ideology tossed around. The dialogue is more theoretical than these discussions usually get (radical meetings tend to bog down in debates on procedure, elections, factional conflicts), but Antonioni cannot be blamed for telescoping exposition to raise some basic questions; it's the sort of things movies do best. But the need to provide an atmosphere distasteful to Mark (Mark Frechette), the film's protagonist, prompts Antonioni to make the meeting noisy and confused. Soon after, Mark makes a conspicuous exit, and the students react with excessive irritation. "If he didn't come to join us, he shouldn't have come at all," one boy exclaims; by this time the credibility of the scene has been sacrificed to narrative clarity, and there is honest question whether Antonioni is in control of his material. The lack of total realistic grasp reoccurs in the handling of police and in the diminished effectiveness of the desert love scene after the Open Theatre is introduced.

During the debate, Antonioni introduces Mark with stunning emphasis. Close shot of Mark smoking; camera whips to the right, presumably panning away; but it can't escape him: a trick cut ends the pan with a second tight shot of Mark; camera then jumps into wider angle, showing Mark restless and bored. The physical character establishment is unequivocal. Antonioni convinces us that we're watching someone literally magnetic.

As realistic credibility breaks down, the film begins to operate on a different level of observation. For example, the meeting poses the question of what can turn white radicals into militant revolutionaries. Mark's development should provide an answer, but the progression is implausible. In a truck, driving with his roommate, he talks about a need to Act Now, and soon afterwards he's shaken up in a police station by some appropriately vicious Pigs. This prompts him without further thought to buy a gun. Frechette's acting stresses listless pragmatism, and his quick transition to Militancy is not convincing. But Antonioni's mind is elsewhere: While Mark and friend drive, he is more concerned with urban abstraction than the soundtrack's exposition. Anyone who has lived in Los Angeles knows how perception is changed by spending half of one's life in a moving car. Tangible responses and strong emotions are triggered instantly by faces, signs, buildings that pass by in seconds. The montage is violently edited, aggressively recreating this warped perception. Unlike Bogdanovich's Targets, where endless L. A. street footage is accompanied by characters lamenting its over-all ugliness, Antonioni's L. A. is active in his characters' lives. The scene is lightweight taken as a judgment on urban decay. Seen as Antonioni's interpretation of landscape, it provides a clue for an audience seeking a way to watch the film.

To what extent does Antonioni reveal his perception of the city through Mark's eyes? The theft of the airplane is foreshadowed by several earlier point-of-view shots. Mark sees a police helicopter before he's busted, and several planes and airline posters before he finds the airport. If we take this establishment as Mark's point-of-view, it partially justifies the theft in terms of the character. The attraction of his eye to airplanes could indicate a basic recurring dream, or even knowledge based on earlier experience (i. e. he knows how to fly-an implausible plot point in the film). But the airplane footage also qualifies as pure directorial observation, so the shot function is schizoid and cannot be clearly applied to the story.

That Antonioni's interests are often opposed to the relevant drama is evidenced in the documentary riot footage cut into the University confrontation. The shots are good but impersonal, so Antonioni isolates specific incidents of police brutality and throws the rest away, uninterested in building a structured sequence from purely expository material. The staged part of the confrontation differs radically, with focus shifts and architectural space creating distances (parallel layers. schematically) between conflicting groups of people: Mark-watches-militants-watching-police-watching-building. With emphasis on buildings-their function as barrier and blind as well as their pure form-the slaying of the student becomes a certainty-before-the-fact, given the specific illustration of each faction's partial blindness. Degree of sight proportionately indicates degrees of danger in Antonioni's films. Once the tear gas bomb fills the frame with dense smoke, the illogical outcome of the clash becomes an inevitability.

The audience, able to this point to watch the imprecise vision of the players, is suddenly confronted with a questioning of its own perceptual powers: the deliberate half-illusion of Mark shooting a policeman. In fact, the gun isn't out of his boot when the shot is fired. Antonioni wanted to confirm that Mark would have killed the cop had someone not beat him to it: he is moral and we must not doubt the truth of Mark's denial of murder later in the picture. The timing of the shot is elusive enough to convince part of each audience (perhaps the part that blinked during the crucial six frames) that Mark may have pulled the trigger. Antonioni will not do all our watching for us, and the audience is not totally secure in Zabriskie Point. Remember Blow-Up where the indefinite enlargements are never entirely wrenched from the realm of dangerous illusion.

Stunningly introduced, running breathlessly toward the camera in a frame worthy of romantically-inclined Hitchcock, Daria (Daria Halprin) represents for Antonioni semi-dormant awareness of the imperfect world she inhabits. A hippie girl who condescends to establishment employment when she "needs bread," this Antonioni heroine is a creature of fashion: she smokes grass (in contrast with Mark's ascetic "reality trip"), plays music on her radio rather than strike bulletins, and tends to pacify her frustrations and desires by retreating into claborate fantasies. An occasional line suggests that these fantasies are standard-operating-procedure. Mark speaks of the group he used to go with, and how they had "rules about smoking." Daria casually recalls hearing of them: "Oh yeah, they can't imagine things..." Although she suggests playing a "death game" in the desert, she is Antonioni's hope for life, partly because of her pure responses (feeling "at home" in the desert) but also simply because she survives the course of the film. Mark may be the first white militant in Commercial Narrative Film, but he is marked by impotence and fatal lack of vision; his response to the desert is that it is dead, i. e. safe, and his irrational behavior chains him to the past-the illogical first third of the film. When Daria drives out of frame at the end of Zabriskie Point, the camera pans to a lurid and apocalyptic sunset which nonetheless represents a kind of natural order; it is identical to the sunset painted on a Bank of America billboard Mark walks vainly toward (in distance-flattening telephoto close shot) early in the film. The difference in their destinies is stated in the parallel.

If the first part of the story deals ostensibly with the process that stirs Mark into some kind of militant action, the second half leads to a martyrdom which jolts Daria into a more responsible state of consciousness. Presumably she exits the film with enough commitment to end her complicity with a destructive society, an involvement symbolized by her attachment to the, businessman, Rod Taylor. Again, her basic reflexes are sound. Antonioni suggesting that she is capable of reaching a decision to resist forces' Antonioni condemns. In a brief meeting with some beautiful deranged children, corrupt as the angelic demons that end Fellini's Toby Dammit and La Dolce Vita, Daria is threatened by infantile gang rape and escapes fast, horrified at 'these mutants removed from society by a friend of hers. They inhabit America's barren unclear-testing-ground country, children of a social and cultural Hiroshima, like those of Losey's film These Are The Damned. The sequence ends with Daria driving out of frame; the camera lingers, tracking into the Bar window and setiling elegautly on a stunning image of fossilized American Past, Daria has passed-by two extremes of living death, and approaches the partial regeneration of the desert scenes.

It is reported that Antonioni didn't care what his amateur players said to each other during these scenes. Any security generated by that decision probably grew from a conviction that character development was dependent entirely on scripted behavior and action, a constant regardless of dialogue. If Frechette and Halprin drew on their own lives for some of the dialogue, as Antonioni apparently encouraged them to do, then they are in part responsible for character inconsistencies that cloud the basic narrative thrust of the film. A twenty-one-year-old carpenter from Mel Lyman's Fort Hill commune, allowed to fuse his beliefs with his part, is not going to esndorse a set of volatile character traits compatible with buying guns and menacing policemen ( Avatar, remember, endorsed Robert Kennedy's candidacy as the hope of the Nation). Less important but equally troubling, it is to be hoped that a San Francisco dancer as lovely as Miss Halprin does not make love stoned and simultaneously imagine Joe Chakin's Open Theatre doing it along with her.

The latter sequence, initially a strong and primeval love scene, goes wrong with the addition of Open Theatre couples miming sex, a curious semiclothed series of tongue exercises and reptilian advances, sort of mutually-indulged masterbation. Tone is destroyed more than central focus and Antonioni is forced to cut quickly-Mark and Daria after fucking turned chalk-white like the desert away from his logical climactic image earth-to a more conventional wide-angle pull-back of dozens of lovers dotting the landscape. Antonioni cuts to three panoramic long shots of desert terrain. The third shows: Mark and Daria in the distance. Before MGM removed it from the prints, Mark said full-voiced on the soundtrack. "I always knew it would be like this." With the Open Theatre love scene directly before, the line was a howler. Antonioni claims it referred specifically to the desert, and the nature of the establishing shots confirms that. Abstracting the line from the absurdity of its context, the three-shot sequence extends the motif of unestablished point-of-view serving to unify the perception of director and characters. Mark and Daria see the desert through Antonioni's camera-eye and experience, however simplistically, a transcendental and maturing emotional response.

Zabriskie Point structurally (and wisely) resembles Eclipse more than Blow-Up. Probably fearful of juggling both American Youth and radical advances in construction and style, Antonioni returns to a familiar formula: the people are cipher-like, of less consequence to the film than Hemmings in Blow-Up or Monica Vitti in Red Desert. and are often unsecing guidse through elusive situations in abstract environments. Also, we can parallel the student strike footage with the stock market scene in Eclipse: like the earlier film, Zabriskie Point balances personal travelogue with formally spectacular set pieces. The scenes of Daria driving through the desert, and the one of Mark buzzing her car with his an plane, are not travel montages in that great Easy Rider tradition but careful and exhaustive explorations of a specific image common to the American romance movie. Set-ups shift continually without returning to a master shot, the camera defining angles that combine car, desert road, and sky in varying dynamic relationships. Antonioni refuses to construct conventional cutting patterns between driver-wind-shield-car-road, and each shot represents 'a separate approach. A fair amount of space between camera and car is maintained, rendering the scenes formally dadactic. By keeping frame elements in fixed proportions, he creates a symbiotic force between camera and car, physically drawing the car forward or in some cases impellingthe camera, depending on the shot. Given over to exercises, as in these scenes, Antonioni's tracking camera lacks moral force as one finds in Lang's films and Godard's, but refreshingly the control maintained robs the typical American highway sequence of its customary thrust and sense of car-tantamount-to-wild-per-sonal-liberation.

The Panavision camerawork, gratifyingly messy after Blow-Up's superficial neatness, often frames with disturbing ugliness objects in unfamiliar proportion to one another. A low-angle shot of Rod Taylor in his office-the underside of his desk filling two-thirds of the frame-is troubling by virtue of its compositional imbalance, not its overtly ironic content. Particularly in interior scenes, Antonioni recognizes that destruction of form within a Panavision screen can be used thematically, for example to warn against America's depersonalized computer jungles. In this he becomes the thinking man's Frank Tashlin ( Bachelor Flat, The Girl Can't Help It ), who also revels in the natural excess of the wide screen and applies it to similar subjects: mechanical courtship, distortion of props, vistas of commercialized cityscapes. Antonioni's photographic approach to American life-styles goes a long way toward explaining why the French like Jerry Lewis.

In the last two reels, Zabriskie Point hits its stride. The best scenes in the film up to then have prepared for the increasing abstraction and breaking-up that dominate the ending. Superficially connected by dramatic relationships, the shots are actually as distinct from each other as the five-minute montage of locations that ends Eclipse. In the airport footage, each group (police, newsmen, airport workers) is given its own turf and its own shot-the camerawork never connects them, and the soundtrack stresses their diverse functions and attitudes. Cross-cutting between Daria's final drive to Phoenix and Mark's return to L. A. stresses spatial differences and dissimilarity of direction and movement, widening the gap between their futures. Except for two brief inserts when police are pursuing him on the runway Mark is never shown again-just the plane. He loses all force and identity, becoming a distorted symbol for the ignorant people awaiting him on the ground.

In Taylor's house near Phoenix, people are seen hazily through glass or as dim reflections superimposed on living-room walls and furniture. Dialogue is non-existent or meaningless; Daria walks by chattering wives at the pool without being seen, retreating into a natural rock cavern leading to the house. Inside the house, two groups of businessmen stand on opposite ends of a transparent real-estate development map trying to bluff each other, their desperate quiet energy passing unhindered through the colored plastic. Emotions are unhesitatingly suppressed, language conceals obscure truths. Daria outside, unable to cry over Mark's death, plunges her face into a stream of water, drawing vacarious tears from the man-made waterfall. Antonioni, grooving, is a swell iconographer. The dramatic conception is finally on a level with the visual sophistication, and the last reels stand as an abstract montage of breakdown and non-communication.

When Daria in total disgust imagines the house repeatedly exploding, the scene is justified and perhaps inevitable. Having broken down the connections between people and objects sharing a common environment, Antonioni literally breaks down the organic structure of the objects themselves, and of the frames that contain them. The house, shown in increasingly close angle, erupts furiously. Then, in a coda, rooms and objects within the house are destroyed in slow motion-refrigerators, bookshelves, clothesracks. The abstraction becomes Expressionistic, simplemindedly recalling Jackson Pollock. Zabriskie Point offers a final reduction in images revealing the vulnerability of props and symbols that obscure humanity and emotion. The vision is conservative: he idealizes love-making in its simplest natural element, then projects World Revolution in the constructive annihilation of material objects representing social corruption. The explosion montage reaches its audience. It's good to see him bust it all up.

Daria's fantasy is childish and petulant if we take it, purely as a mind-projection resulting from unsupressable hostility toward the System. Applying it to her character, the montage confirms Daria's tendency to retreat into self-gratifying illusion when faced with actual degeneration, thereby failing to deal with society on its own terms, as a revolutionary. Like Blow-Up, there is some doubt whether Zabriskie Point projects hope or total pessimism. Given the frequent shifts in point-of-view and Antonioni's tendency to fuse himself with his characters to carry them to new experience, the ending operates better as a fantasy specifically given to Daria. As a vision implanted in the girl by the director-God, its constructive nature remains unqualified. Daria is wiser for it-not further detached from external action-and the final cut-back to her exit (weak on the level of simple dramatics) becomes the obligatory preface to a different and more promising existence.