And it wasn't the craziest idea back in 1970, either - Michelangelo Antonioni wasn't the first foreign filmmaker courted by Hollywood (Jacques Demy covered similar near-Hollywood geography just a year prior, after all). We'll hook him up with some solid American writers and he'll do for 60s counterculture USA what he did for Swingin' London, right?
Right?
The thing was a nearly-legendary failure. Mainstream critics were alienated by Antonioni's usual poetry, and the hippies MGM were hoping to flock to the thing stayed away. Some argued that the nuances of American politics at the time were outside Antonioni's grasp, an assertion supported by his weary, paper-thin lead characters and attention to landscape.
But it grabbed me the first time I saw it, and it's deepened for me ever since. My sense is that Antonioni was absolutely true to what he saw during his American sojourn, because it's the America I see: the political left arguing about minutiae, blockaded by the police while the forces of capitalism work quietly and insidiously in the background. (And there seem to be some strong moments of connection with co-writer Sam Shepard, an ideal match for the project - the lonely cowboy at the bar and the swirling of car lot banners are particularly Shepardian moments that Antonioni realizes beautifully.) The whole thing is enough to make an earnest revolutionary wanna snag a plane and just fuck off somewhere.
And when what we love is taken from us, when only a bland, dull life awaits us, with our land paved over, our rich history packaged sold and forgotten, when the walls of the box truly manifest and start suffocating us, the only reasonable and effective revolution is one of absolute and utter destruction.
I've argued before that I see Michelangelo Antonioni as a fantasist, that where others see metaphors for the pain of contemporary living I see a science fiction imagination running artfully riot. And so I see the grand finale of this movie not as a metaphor for Daria's emerging revolutionary consciousness but as her direct willing of the destruction of everything. (The Carrie Ending, I call it.) But within this fantasistic take I understand that it's Antonioni's realistic assessment of what he observed during his time here. As Kiyoshi Kurosawa would decades later, he internalized and fully understood what he was seeing here, and simply looked ahead and found an apocalypse as the inevitable, even necessary, conclusion.
And so I'm thinking of Zabriskie Point today. On this holiday from which I've been disconnected in recent years and especially so today, as the world around me erodes under the weight of an uncontained epidemic, with the loss of home and community very real threats for me and so many I know, the government's dithering incompetence now firmly hand-in-hand with deliberate malevolence. On this day in which BLACK LIVES MATTER is painted on countless streets but Breonna Taylor's murderers (Jonathan Mattingly, Brett Hankison, and Myles Cosgrove) remain free. I can't buy into the celebration of the spirit of America while I can see so clearly how that spirit has been corrupted and subverted and twisted to fuck over, dehumanize, and kill so many of its own citizens.
On this July Fourth, these are the only fireworks I really want to see.
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