On Route 66 to Nowhere

Happy Birthday goes out to singer-songwriter and guitarist James Taylor who turns 65 today. Taylor has been pleasing audiences with his soft, mellow compositions and gentle voice for over 40 years, but it's his detour from performing music that we're more interested in today.

Just after recording his second and most popular album Sweet Baby James in 1970, Taylor starred in Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop, a existential drama of a pre-highway America, characterized by minimal dialogue and exceptional landscape shooting of the expanse American west.

The story of Two-Lane Blacktop is fairly simple, just as sparse as the dialogue in the film, the plot follows two characters known as The Driver and The Mechanic (played by Taylor and Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson respectively), as they challenge an aging, head in the clouds wanderer referred to as GTO (Warren Oates) on a cross-country race for pink slips. Simple, right?                                                                                             

What Two-Lane Blacktop lacks in narrative it more than makes up for in style and emotion, focusing more on themes pertinent to the time the film was produced. The film represents an America that has vanished, left in the dust long ago by the souped-up vehicles the characters drive in the film. It's a time of the old Route 66, of cheap gas, when hitchhiking was what kids did to get where they were going, when money was called bread, and when a 454 was your car's engine long before restrictions placed a ban on them.

The American cinema of the 70's has been referred to as a cinema of loneliness, characterized by a generation lost within an vast American wasteland, facing the realities of the Vietnam War and the perils of finding a way to move on. Two-Lane Blacktop presents this theme leftover from the counterculture of the 1960's, already brought to the forefront with films such as The Graduate (1967) and Easy Rider (1969). The Driver and The Mechanic are gear heads, nothing matters more to them then cars and racing. Even when a young vagabond referred to as The Girl, played by Laurie Bird, shows up in the backseat of their car, the two men shrug it off, talk about fixing valves, filling up, and driving to the next race, the next competition, because there's always competition.

Muscle Cars Are Not for Playboys

And the boys get that competition when a bright orange 1970 GTO roars up behind them, a middle-aged playboy wearing a sweater vest and driving gloves explodes past their '55 Chevy, a scent of lounge music left lingering in the air.

GTO is the most interesting character in the film, and, in fact, is the only character the audience knows anything about, well, sort of. Where The Driver is an introvert and the only quality we know about him is his special knowledge of cars, GTO is an man aching to be something he's not. An extrovert of the highest order, GTO picks up hitchhikers along his travels, each ride the chance to tell a different story, a different life.

 When The Driver and The Mechanic meet GTO, a race from California to Washington D.C. is devised; the reward: their car's pink slip. Two-Lane Blacktop is the one of the great road movies, a sub-genre that is quintessentially American. In this film, while kids in the 60's were making their way out west, our characters are headed east, away from the ideals everyone else was trying to attain.

Taylor gives his famous empty stare as The Driver

By the time production on the film started in 1970, James Taylor was already a well known name. His single "Fire and Rain" quickly rose up the Billboard charts earlier in the year, and his role in Two-Lane Blacktop is just as mellow and arresting as the melodies in his music. Director Monte Hellman first saw Taylor's face on a billboard in Los Angeles and was struck by the look of the singer's face and immediately wanted to meet with him for the role. Taylor brings a special quality to the role of the driver - a  subdued, reserved quality that doesn't come off as if he's hiding something from the audience, but something more along the lines that the character is unaware how to express certain emotions. This could be from the fact that Taylor is not a trained actor (Two-Lane was his only acting role), but watching Taylor's audition footage, it's clear that the singer is of the reserved, shy type. It's interesting to note that Taylor is playing a role that is part of a generation that would listen to his music, and the shiftless, ennui of the counterculture youth is captured perfectly by Taylor, himself only twenty-two years old.

There is plenty of racing throughout the film. The characters collect winnings from various illegal street races to aid in their travels east, but at a certain point, the viewer becomes aware that there is no race to D.C. - in fact, there never was one. Throughout the film the three main characters mingle with one another, staying on each other's exhaust pipes, never letting one out of the other's sights. The Girl switches cars throughout the trip, forced to listen to each characters denied hopes and dreams. They even trade cars and The Mechanic trades tips on how to keep GTO's engine running more smoothly. When The Driver passes GTO, he backtracks five miles to meet up again.

The Girl ditches the men and hitches back west. The only character the audience thinks is lonely and is yearning for something in her life - The Girl - who wants to get back to San Francisco to rejoin a life she is unsure is still waiting for her, becomes fed up with the aimless future of the other characters and splits. The Driver invites GTO to join him in Columbus, Ohio to participate in a race, just another sideline to keep them from D.C., but GTO declines and continues east.

Their actions are further evidence of the characters inability to connect with what is going on around them, an almost deliberate move to ignore their problems and a way to stifle any progress; It's no coincidence the characters are only known by their simple descriptions. The characters are lonely, and their solitude, inside the steel coffins of their cars on the open road, is where they choose to fester.