Homeless: The Cinema of Monte Hellman
By Brad Stevens
What does it mean to be culturally marginal? This is the query we should make when confronted with the superficially ‘obvious’ (one could hardly ask for more in the way of precise visual clarity) yet fundamentally mysterious oeuvre of Monte Hellman. Starting out in the world of ‘B’ movies – many of them produced or financed by the emperor of this particular realm, Roger Corman – ostensibly aimed at undiscriminating audiences seeking exploitation product, Hellman’s films seem to have leaped over whatever commercial expectations they might theoretically have generated, and landed, without detour, in a form of distribution better suited to Robert Bresson or Jacques Rivette. The screening of four Hellman masterpieces at Spain’s Play-Doc festival is an initiative to be welcomed, but one that raises questions of appropriate context. For these are films that both do and do not feel at home in a European festival devoted to independent cinema, just as they did and did not feel at home in those grindhouse cinemas that played host to them during what we might, with some exaggeration, describe as their original theatrical ‘release’. These are, in every sense, films without a place where they might, even hypothetically, come to rest. Condemned to an existence as cinematic nomads, The Shooting (1966), Ride in the Whirlwind (1966), Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) and Cockfighter (1974) are objects that bother us, maudit works refusing to settle into even this most unsettled of categories.
Now that physical media copies of Hellman’s films are (with a few exceptions) relatively easy to find, it should be remembered just how challenging it once was to track down these elusive texts. As a young cinephile, I knew who Monte Hellman was long before I had the opportunity to actually see anything he had directed, a series of searches through obscure video shops finally turning up a VHS tape of The Shooting which proved to be taken from one of the worst prints of anything I have ever encountered – the first minute of the opening credits had simply vanished, being replaced by a video-generated title card, and most scenes ended with an abrupt splice. The difficulty of following the narrative, the inkling that material important for comprehension of the plot was missing, appeared to be due to footage having accidentally been removed, the apocalyptic quality of the source materials conveying the impression that I was ‘reading’ an ancient text surviving in only fragmentary form. Yet those meticulously restored editions of The Shooting that are now available on Blu-ray (and will doubtless form the basis of the Play-Doc screening) prove no less elliptical, the sense of key elements being left out proving to be part of the original concept. This is a film which might have been intentionally designed to resemble a print that has undergone rough handling.
It is, then, appropriate, that these films have their status as objects of obsession – hard-to-find artifacts that must be sought out in marginal spaces – baked in. And, of course, entirely logical that they should focus so relentlessly on characters engaged in quests every bit as obsessive as those the films once demanded from potentially interested viewers. The nameless woman played by Millie Perkins in The Shooting, trekking across the desert in pursuit of a man who may be responsible for the death of her child, but may just as easily be something else entirely. The equally nameless protagonists of Two-Lane Blacktop, their every waking moment devoted to car races which bring them little in the way of satisfaction. The eponymous Cockfighter, incarnated by Hellman-regular Warren Oates, similarly devoted to achieving victory in that most marginal of sports.
Appropriate also that these films without homes should so often focus on characters in a similar dilemma, consigned to rootless existences by fate, their obsessive natures, or something deeply buried in the American experience, with its ambivalent attitude towards the settled community, simultaneously seen as both an ideal state of living and a feminised space offering men little except the experience of emasculation. The secret at the heart of the Western genre is that the only respectable option for the consummate American male is to turn away from that community in whose name he ostensibly acts, casting out forever into a wilderness he is attempting to conquer in the name of values that will render him redundant. Which is to say that the experience of America is, at its heart, one of insanity. It is Hellman’s genius to confront this unblinkingly, exposing those neuroses that link the building of a nation to the absurd activities of the road racer and the cockfighter. The key moment here is the finale of Two-Lane Blacktop, in which the road, that symbol of freedom from the oppressions of domesticity, becomes the Road to Nowhere (2010) which provides the title of Hellman’s final feature, stretching on eternally, offering neither liberation nor triumph, but rather a nightmare that will never end. The closing image of a reel catching and burning in the projector is the most eloquent way imaginable of expressing the impossibility of the American dream, with its irreconcilable contradictions. Ending by fire here indicates not the death of the protagonists, as at the conclusion of Easy Rider (1969), but rather the death of cinema, of narrative, of America itself – a pessimistic vision all the more pertinent as we enter a period that promises to confirm our worst assumptions about the country. Fraternal ideals constantly hover at the edges of these films, rarely coming into focus, yet generating a poignant sense of loss at the disappearance of communal values that might never have existed, appealing to an audience which may itself be a work of fiction. They are like the Rachel, that “devious-cruising” ship at the end of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick which “in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan”.