Zabriskie Point

Zabriskie Point – Parts of Zabriskie Point are so startlingly awful that they suggest a scathing re-evaluation of Michelangelo Antonioni’s entire career. And yet… After Red Desert, Antonioni became internationally famous and was thought to be a director sufficiently bankable for Hollywood. He signed a contract to make three color pictures for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The MGM pictures are Zabriskie Point, Blow-up, and The Passenger. Most critics regard Zabriskie Point as the least of these films although it contains one of the most spectacular, purely visual sequences in all cinema – the explosive destruction of a desert house comprising the final five minutes of the film. Zabriskie Point begins with callow students in Los Angeles debating whether it is acceptable to use Molotov cocktails and assassination of cops to advance their revolutionary objectives. This sequence is shot in out-of-focus cinema verite style and is intentionally inept and crudely produced. The hero announces that he is bored by all the pseudo-revolutionary debate and walks out of the meeting. There is a demonstration and the hero gets himself arrested proclaiming that his name is Karl Marx – the cops predictably botch the spelling. After the arrest, presumably radicalized, our hero buys a gun and seems to shoot a cop during an impressively staged campus riot. (The film is a cop-out to use the jargon of the time – it turns out that our hero hasn’t killed the cop although the editing is intentionally vague on this point.) Surprisingly, the kid is an accomplished pilot – maybe, Antonioni thought all Americans knew how to fly planes. He steals a plane in a highly implausible scene, flies east, where he buzzes the car of an attractive, free-spirited girl that he sees motoring along a desert highway. The kid lands the plane near Death Valley, has sex with the girl in the badlands below Zabriskie Point, a scenic overlook in Death Valley National Monument, and, then, after decorating the plane with Day-Glow psychedelic colors returns to the airport from which he hijacked the plane. The cops are not amused and gun him down. Intercut with this nonsense are episodes of tycoons in skyscrapers plotting to build a desert resort involving high-end houses. One of the tycoons has sent the free-spirited girl to Phoenix. She pauses to dally with the plane hijacker in Death Valley and, then, proceeds to Phoenix – it’s not clear to me whether her boss is her father or her lover. She meets the tycoon at a luxury home built atop a rocky pinnacle somewhere near Phoenix. The house is an extraordinary structure, integrated into the rocks with a little waterfall inexplicably decorating one of the stony spires on which the structure is mounted – the building is fantastically cantilevered and suggests a hallucinated Prairie House in the manner of Frank Lloyd Wright, albeit on acid (it’s a combination of Taliesin West and the House on the Rock.) After some inconsequential discussion in the house, the girl departs and has a vision of the structure being destroyed in a huge and cataclysmic explosion – the blast is filmed from 15 angles and shown repeatedly from various perspectives. Then, we are treated to eerie super slow-motion imagery of a refrigerator being blown apart – a chicken carcass swims through the air – a wardrobe full of expensive clothes, as well as a Tv and chest-of-drawers being blasted apart. (These scenes were filmed underwater so that the debris fragments would slowly spin and rotate through what appears to be the air – but is, in fact, the water of a deep pool). This sequence is alone worth the price of admission as pure spectacle – clearly, this visionary climax is intended as some sort of prophetic judgment on the materialist society that has spawned the campus riots. But the imagery is so purely excessive that it seems to be a drug-induced fantasy. Much of the film is exceedingly handsome – the aerial sequences in the desert are exciting and there is an intriguing soundtrack of country-western and vintage rock-and-roll psychedelia. The most ludicrous episode is a love scene in the eroded arroyos below Zabriskie Point that somehow metamorphoses into an orgy featuring dozens of naked, dust covered lovers writhing uncomfortably in pebbles and gypsum. This sequence is utterly idiotic. I’ve been to Zabriskie Point and the behavior of the characters, at least between May and October, would be lethal – the sun would kill you if you decided to enjoy sexual congress on a bed of borax and gypsum crystals. The scenes of the lovers wandering around the gulches are alarming – the place is a maze and if you followed the example of the boy and girl in this movie and ambled around in these badlands you would be lost and dead within hours. An image where the boy darts down a huge slope of eroded, naked earth, descending into the valley five-hundred feet below caused me real anxiety – I said to my TV screen: “it’s easy to get down there. Coming back up is going be a bitch.’ Antonioni also has only the vaguest notion of American geography. It’s extraordinarily difficult to get to Death Valley because it is a hole in the earth’s crust that is not on the way to anywhere else. Even today, you can run out of gas if you’re not careful trying to get out to that place. Antonioni seems to think that Death Valley is on the way to Phoenix – a minor flaw, but one that is indicative of much larger problems with credibility vexing this film. The picture is an uneasy combination of late sixties whimsy (I’m thinking of things like The Strawberry Statement and Brewster McCloud), an attempt to rip-off Easy Rider (the hero, who can’t act, looks like Peter Fonda), and whoozy political commentary. But get this DVD, fast forward to the orgy – which you’ll probably enjoy for its aggressive, over-the-top stupidity – and, then, fast forward again to the Pink Floyd-accompanied explosive climax. The film isn’t about the delirious stupidity of the sixties – it was made in 1970 -- it embodies that stupidity.