Ice Road Truckers: World’s Most Dangerous Roads

I made the mistake of watching IRT: World’s Most Dangerous Roads and got briefly addicted. I watched three episodes, all set in Peru, and liked the show before a sudden flash of insight wrecked the whole thing for me once and for all. IRT is a spin-off of Ice Road Truckers. The show plays as a sort of hillbilly parody of Clouzot’s Wages of Fear or Friedkin’s Sorcerer – truckdrivers paid to transport dangerous freight over impossibly deadly terrain. In the shows that I watched, three trucks – one laden with dynamite, one with fish in coolers full of ice, one carrying big paper-mache sculptures of dinosaurs – drive over the Andes cordillera somewhere in southern Peru. The road snakes through an incredibly desolate and narrow canyon, Dead Nun canyon, dropping down from a pass at 16,000 feet to sea-level. The road is no wider than a goat-path in places with incredibly vertiginous abysses a few inches from the huge spinning dual tires. There are claustrophobic tunnels, landslides, washouts, and fragile bridges over swollen torrents. The whole thing is very amusing – the hillbilly truckdrivers are stoic and resourceful; they have sidekicks to whom they can make quips as they plow through the avalanche detritus on the narrow roadway and, sometimes, they have to drive for 18 hours at a stretch to navigate the deadly vertical landscape. The episodes are shot dynamically with lots of inserted closeups of whirling wheels, rocks plummeting from above – in one show, a car hit head-on by the truck is shown from no less than three approach angles with the accident lensed from two rather showy perspectives (one of them is directly overhead). Crossing a bridge, we see the truck struggling over planks that groan and skitter away from the wheels on a narrow, ramshackle bridge – the whole thing is flamboyantly shot, very much like a similar scene in Sorcerer in which a nitroglycerine-laden truck inches over a rotting bridge in a typhoon. But, suddenly, you realize that if the bridge is moaning and groaning under the weight, it’s primarily because the flimsy structure is loaded with five or six camera-crews trailing the truck, or dangling from its side to film the close-up inserts. The moment you realilze that the mise-en-scene requires that the whole thing be staged – and, not just, semi-staged but, in fact, blocked and story-boarded like a Hitchcock film, all the suspense evaporates and the show becomes utterly risible.