Review of "The Duel"

We are only a few weeks into summer, and the heat and humidity are already overwhelming. We would like to think that these conditions will slowly build up to a culminating point, sometime around Labor Day weekend, after which there will be a release, and we will have some sort of relief. Logically, that is what we should be able to expect, is it not so, as we plan the change in our routines, and go on living our life in accordance with the unconscious rituals that tend to define our lives. Things will calming go cycling on, over and over, season after season, in a familiar fashion, if we are lucky not to be jolted by unexpected changes, by seasons that, lately, have been defined by more episodes of more extreme weather, by wild veering from one end to the other, by tornadoes where we haven’t seen them before, by droughts that last for decades and that break temperature records, especially out here in southern California where I live, and by breaks in the routines that seem to be more alarming the more we age.

The reason I began this way is because I recently Steven Spielberg’s action thriller from 1971, The Duel. It is advertised as the director’s debut feature, or at least, the one that brought him to the notice of studio executives. It is based on a story by Richard Matheson, the prolific writer who recently passed away, and is set in the open expanses of the Southwest, in a landscape that is utterly familiar to me, having been raised as I was in the inland valleys and deserts of California. This movie is structured as an almost allegorical confrontation between a middle-aged man and an unknown assailant driving a giant, rusty, decrepit truck. To me, it seems fairly compelling that it has to do with the depiction of a mid-life crisis, but perhaps, maybe that is due to the fact that I am projecting my own experiences on the movie.  I am aging, and it roils me inside to recognize how much my life has changed, and how there is a level or urgency that I had never perceived before in my life.

The film begins with footage of the road. We have a progression of roadscapes that detail the trip from an urban metropolis, with all the confusing jumble of mega highways, past the mountains that ring Los Angeles to the north, and then, to the open landscape that traverses hills and dry expanses of open terrain. It isn’t quite open desert, but it feels just as lonely, just as forlorn. The desert is a beautiful but also pitiless landscape, a please where we can’t hide our illusions, but it is, also, a hypnotic landscape. It was and certainly still is for me, and I treasure the memory of my drives through those open spaces.

As the protagonist, a character named David Mann, played by Dennis Weaver, traverses this landscape, he seems to relish the opportunity to surrender to the road. The blank spaces complement his mood, because the fact is, he has familial and professional obligations that are weighing on his mind. These conflicts are simmering under the surface in an ocean of disquiet, but perhaps it is because they aren’t immediately evident (or because he has bottled them up inside) we feel that the film has a certain psychological edge because the truck, of course, has to symbolize something. It is the unconscious, perhaps, the exteriorization of those conflicts, the fears and anxieties that need to take concrete form?

 

 

What ensues is a duel that seems as much improbable as thrilling. We never see the face of the driver, because it makes much more sense to leave that antagonist as an anonymous character defined by a perverse and mysterious need to torment and run down our protagonist. It is, of course, no accident that the truck is announced to be hauling a cargo that is “flammable”; it is also no accident that it is a weathered truck, still hardy, but definitely not new. In a very real sense, it is the representation of anxieties and torments that beset the protagonist and, by extension, all of us, especially as we age. The truck is the vestigial and primitive inner self, the one that operates on a deep and primal level, that screams out to us that we won’t make it, and shows us why by sabotaging us.

There are all manner of obstacles, but it becomes all the more evident that the truck represents an abstract concept. All else fails, including the radiator belt for the protagonist’s orange car, as well as his judgment and his inability to convince others of the danger he faces. But the truck lumbers on, overtaking him constantly, tormenting him in nightmarish confrontations that occur in plain day, on winding and lonely roads that resemble at times erotic brown landscapes, sinuous curves, with chasms that will ultimately be filled by one of the protagonists in this duel. It is a contest to see if a man of middling prospects can somehow hope to extract from vitality from his life, and confront those inner demons, those fears that take different concrete form.

There is a curious episode in this duel. In one scene, he will drop by a small gasoline shop, where he will be attended by a frumpy old lady who has a collection of snakes and spiders that she keeps outside. It isn’t enough that he is being pursued by a maniacal truck driver, he also is being challenged, so to speak, in his masculinity (let’s say, virility and vitality) by an old lady who not only pumps gas in his car, but also opens his car hood to evaluate the state of his radiator hose. Could the psychic dimensions of this threat as he is emasculated by an “Eve” with her rattlesnakes who attends to him not in the Garden of Eden by next to a dusty gasoline stop be any more obvious?

That this truck can muster the speed that it does as it barrels in on the protagonist is a source of wonder. We can feel the threat, the sense of a destiny that is hardly to be averted, the punishing weight of a massive truck that represents an irresistible force. It stops from time to time when our protagonist tries to leave the road, or signal for help, and it charges in on him, without our ever obtaining a clear view of the driver who, I should assert once again, can’t represent anyone other than himself, that deep inner self that is scared and that asserts itself by embodying this primitive and destructive force that he seems to need to visualize, but can’t.

David Mann is a sympathetic figure, and as he becomes progressively more desperate, speaking to himself and imploring his car to go faster and faster as he is being pursued, despite the leak in the cooling system that overheats his car, we see a man who also stops trying to intellectually understand the scope of this problem, and instead, meets it head on, as an emotional force, something irrational, something that can’t be understood on any other terms. It reminds me very much of the final conflict we had seen in Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel, A Wizard of Earth Sea, where the character stops running from the shadow and instead decides to confront it, realizing as he does that his antagonist represents a part of himself that he hasn’t been able to reconcile.

In Spielberg movies we are used to seeing a denouement that emphasizes a reconciliation of a sort, after navigating through all manner of perils. He does have a penchant, perhaps, for the Hollywood “Happy Ending”, but in this case, the ending is much more somber, even if the protagonist survives. He is left to ponder the meaning of the combat he has just participated in, and to reflect on how his outlook has changed. The final scene of the film has him silhouetted against the backdrop of a setting sun, ironically confronting his survival but doing so within the framework of a day that has ended.

This film is a thriller that, in a very real way, is structured as a race against time and over obstacles that pop up and threaten continually to derail him. We have the long and coiling snakes that he is somehow miraculously able to avoid, but also, the long and coiling trains that pass by, and against which he narrowly avoids being crushed. The radiator hose (another long and coiling shape) ruptures in a pivotal scene, and of course, the roads twist this way and that as they coil along the low hills of this desert landscape. It seems to me to be, once again, a film about an everyman’s mid-life crisis (the name, once again, is David Mann), one that won’t necessarily leave him at peace, but will at least disabuse him of certain illusions of rationality and comprehensibility.

The movie doesn’t answer why but, like the long slog through the summer, and the shimmering heat that lies like ghostly presence on the landscape, it gleams with the aura of inevitability, of glasses that, like those of the driver, focus inward, not outward.

 

 

Eternal Observer -- ORomero (c) 2013
Copyrights ORomero 2013