http://www.slate.com/id/2221940/
Was Zabriskie Point Antonioni's biggest flop just misunderstood?
By Dennis Lim
July 14, 2009
Hailed as a master youth-culture anthropologist after 1967's Blow-Up,
his supremely chic ode to Swinging London, Michelangelo Antonioni
went looking for the soul of a dramatically divided America. The
resulting movie, Zabriskie Point, was the first and biggest flop of
his career, and the only film he ever made in the States. Reviewers
characterized the Italian director, pushing 60 at the time, as a
clueless tourist who had failed to bridge the inevitable cultural and
generational gaps. "Antonioni has no feeling for young people," Roger
Ebert complained. Mark Frechette, the movie's young star, plucked
from obscurity by Antonioni, distanced himself from his director: "I
told him he wasn't making a film about any America I knew." Guitarist
John Fahey, one of the musicians summoned to Rome to work on the
soundtrack, came to blows with Antonioni when the maestro launched
into an anti-American rant; Fahey would go on to describe Zabriskie
Point as "a really terrible and long skin flick." Later generations
of film buffs have known it chiefly for its inclusion in the Medved
brothers' The Fifty Worst Films of All Time.
All this rancor is a little hard to fathom today. Recently issued on
DVD for the first time by Warner Home Video, Zabriskie Point is of a
piece with Antonioni's best work: a luxuriant portrait of spiritual
alienation with a sense of place far more expressive than its blankly
beautiful characters. Released in February 1970 after a drawn-out
production that ballooned the budget to a then-exorbitant $7 million,
it grossed less than $1 million and soured the Hollywood flirtation
with counterculture chic that had started with Bonnie and Clyde
(1967) and peaked with Easy Rider (1969). But was Zabriskie Point out
of fashion precisely because it nailed the zeitgeist?
The film was conceived in the afterglow of Bonnie and Clyde, but its
doomed couple, Mark and Daria (played by Frechette and Daria Halprin,
nonactors in every sense), are too numb and inert to fulfill the myth
of the glamorous outlaw. It opens, pseudo-documentary-style, at a
meeting of student radicals in which a group of Black Panthers, led
by Kathleen Cleaver, are mocking and questioning the commitment of
their white colleagues. The back-and-forth continues until Mark
breaks the vérité spell by sullenly declaring himself ready to die
for the revolution "but not of boredom." Events proceed in a
desultory trance. Mark tries to bail out a friend and briefly lands
in jail himself. He buys a gun and brings it to a campus
demonstration. One policeman opens fire on a black student; Mark in
turn kills the cop (or at least appears tothe framing and editing
leave it somewhat ambiguous). He then very casually steals a plane
and flies it into the desert.
Daria, meanwhile, is driving through Death Valley to meet her boss
and sometime lover (Rod Taylor), a real estate developer, in Phoenix.
Spying her Buick from the air, Mark enacts a bizarre mating ritual
seemingly inspired by North by Northwest's crop-duster sequence,
swooping down and just about kissing the roof of her car with the
belly of his single-engine jet. After he lands, near Zabriskie Point,
the scenic overlook that gives the film its title, they exchange
flirtatious banter (even though Mark refuses Daria's jointhe's on a
"reality trip") and make love in the dunes, an occasion so groovily
momentous it fills the screen with a stoned daydream of other
writhing bodies (scores of naked extras imported from the Open
Theater, an avant-garde stage collective from New York).
It was this cosmic love-in that nearly got Antonioni charged under
the Mann Act, which prohibits the transport of people across state
lines for prostitution and "immoral purposes." In fact, the entire
production, as the critic J. Hoberman recounted in The Dream Life,
his epic cultural history of the '60s, was the target of much federal
snooping, with rumors swirling that Antonioni was planning a
flag-burning scene and intended to shoot on the site of Robert
Kennedy's assassination. (Neither proved true, though a rippling
American flag atop the Mobil Oil building in downtown Los Angeles
does feature prominently in one startling shot.)
The charges of inauthenticity must have irked Antonioni, who
apparently did his best to soak up the volatile mood of late-'60s
America. (He went to Chicago for the 1968 Democratic Convention, and
was, he later told the New York Times, "tear-gassed in Lincoln
Park.") He also decided to work not with stars but with actual
specimens of alienated American youth. Antonioni spotted Halprin, a
Haight-Ashbury earth child and the daughter of avant-garde
choreographer Ann Halprin, in a documentary about the San Francisco
hippie revolution. The male lead, envisioned as an avatar of inchoate
rage, was a bigger challenge. An audition in New York's East Village
drew more than 1,000 hopefuls. Eventually Frechette, a carpenter who
had spent time in psychiatric hospitals and belonged to the cultlike
commune of the folk musician Mel Lyman, was found by casting scouts
who saw him screaming obscenities at a bus stop in Boston. ("He's 20
and he hates," they reportedly said.)
Despite being credited to five screenwritersincluding Sam Shepard,
then an up-and-coming off-off-Broadway playwrightthe story is a mere
trifle, expanded by Antonioni from a news item about a young man who
was killed when trying to return a stolen airplane. Language is
seldom a priority in an Antonioni film (even more so here, given the
leaden line readings) and the power of Zabriskie Point,
unsurprisingly, lies in its charged imagery and its inspired
soundtrack (psychedelic rock and ambient noodling from Pink Floyd,
Jerry Garcia, and others).
Antonioni, who brings a painterly eye to the massive billboards and
endless freeways of smoggy Los Angeles and to the harsh majesty of
the California desert, was a master at connecting his landscapes to
the inner world of his characters. Notwithstanding the stiffness of
the actors, the movie provides a vivid and plausible account of how
young people might have experienced the contradictions of that
historical juncture, passion and urgency colliding with a growing
sense of impotence. Antonioni's Zabriskie Point, like so many of his
locations, is both a physical and a metaphysical place, a parched
terrain somewhere between the apocalyptic wasteland of Joan Didion's
California and the empty nowhere of Jean Baudrillard's America.
The finale, a jaw-droppingly literal vision of the end of consumer
culture, makes a virtue of bluntness. After Mark dies, a bereft Daria
arrives at her destination, a Modernist house perched on a desert
hillside, and imagines its wholesale destruction. We see it blowing
up, repeatedly, in slow motion. (Seventeen cameras were used.) For
good measure, Antonioni also detonates sundry household objects,
which sail through the frame as a Pink Floyd number plays: a clothes
rack, a television, books, the contents of a refrigerator, including
a loaf of Wonder Bread and a whole turkey. (The video for the recent
Jay-Z single "D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune)" is a pointed homage,
blowing up gold chains and bottles of Cristal as the rapper rails
against pitch-correction software.)
This middle finger of an ending got critics fuming that Antonioni was
advocating violence as a strategy for social change, but it's crucial
to note that the sequence is couched as a wistful fantasy of
Daria'sand, as such, is actually in keeping with the Antonioni mode
of passivity and inaction. It's equally significant that Mark, in the
end, simply turns the plane around and flies it back.
Antonioni rebounded from the critical drubbing with 1975's The
Passenger, starring Jack Nicholson. Halprin and Frechette became a
couple and lived together on Lyman's commune, as they revealed in an
amusingly zombified appearance on The Dick Cavett Show (alongside
critic Rex Reed, who in his review of Zabriskie Point had credited
the duo with "two of the worst performances of the decade").
The pair soon broke up. Halprin formed a new counterculture couple
with Dennis Hopper, to whom she was married for a few years, and
abandoned acting to be an arts therapist. In 1973, Frechette mounted
his own crackpot real-life version of Zabriskie Point when he held up
a bank in Boston, later claiming it was a political act. ("Robbing
that bank was a way of robbing Richard Nixon.") Two years later,
while serving out his sentence, he died in an apparent freak accident
while weightlifting, choked to death by a bar that fell on his throat.
Frechette was a casualty of the era, but Zabriskie Point looks more
and more like an invaluable time capsule. Feeding off the unease and
confusion that had permeated the youth and political movements of the
day, it's a film that marked the end of a revolutionary moment. More
to the point, it's also a film about why that moment couldn't last.
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