What she discovers is far from postcard-perfect as the "Green Place" has become a grey and gross tract of toxic swamp. I missed looking into the sulphurous smog layer shrouding the low mountains and thinking: "Me! I did my bit to put all that shit up there!" And when I get my Mustang back today, I'm going to burn up the I-5 freeway doing 90 and bless the rotting ghost of Henry Ford - and give thanks to Peter Yates for the auto-nobility he conferred on all us demented petrolheads.Mad Max: Fury Road When Furiosa flees her captors/keepers in Mad Max: Fury Road, she heads, like a bat out of hell, to the Green Place - the rumored last fertile area of the Wasteland.
Road to nowhere movie drivers#
I missed that last great forum of American democracy: yelling obscenities at other drivers on the freeway. Mainly, however, not having a car for a day felt worse than heroin withdrawal.
Road to nowhere movie full#
Of course, he soon replaces his lost car with a suitcase full of handguns and AK-47s - the road-rager's ultimate fantasy grab-bag - so he's not quite as impotent as he looks.
He simply abandons his car on the freeway and starts walking, and on foot he finds a weird kind of freedom to traverse unharmed the city's dizzying, tapestry of ethnically and economically diverse neighbourhoods. Finding myself suddenly carless for a day put me in mind of Michael Douglas's character D-FENS (a man known only by his licence plate) in Falling Down. Actually, walking in Los Angeles is the great lost art of this city. As Thom Andersen points out in Los Angeles Plays Itself, losing one's automobile is LA's nearest equivalent to actual castration, a miserable prelude to the ordeal of cadging rides and negotiating the LA public transportation system. Oh, how I silently cursed him.Īnd as I spent the rest of the day walking the streets after my humiliating rescue, I felt like Jack Nicholson in Chinatown after the farmers kill his car. I feared that I was the victim of some karmic revenge cycle in which I was paying for the sins of another Brit - director Peter Yates - the man who pioneered the modern car chase in Bullitt. I guess I'm still British enough to appreciate such an irony, but I'm also American enough now to fear and despise any kind of irony, especially when it literally gets all up in my grille.
Road to nowhere movie driver#
But I confess to hankering mildly after the consoling comfort of my own mother's arms when some passing driver yelled "Loser!" at me from his Humvee (to which I offer comedian Bill Maher's exquisite retort: "A Humvee? C'mon - nobody's dick is that small.").Īnd where was I headed when all this happened? Why, I was on my way to see Pixar's Cars, of course. I didn't feel as bad as the kid mentioned in Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays (the 1972 Frank Perry adaptation of which is another forgotten LA classic that was slimed on initial release), whose parents abandoned him in the middle of the freeway and who wouldn't let go of the guard rail when the cops showed up.
I had my trousers firmly belted and zipped up, but I didn't feel any less naked or alone. Hoffman punches Walsh 10 times in the face while he's doing 70 on the freeway, weaving the car back and forth across four lanes of traffic, then forces him on to the central divide, handcuffs him to a fence, pulls down his underpants and takes off in his car, leaving Walsh bare-assed and squealing for help from passing drivers who just laugh at him. I thought of M Emmett Walsh's parole officer in Ulu Grosbard's Straight Time, when his charge, Dustin Hoffman, finally flips out on him. It was the automotive equivalent of popping my cherry.Īs the traffic howled past me while I screamed into my cellphone for the Auto Club to send me a towtruck, I flashed back on all the movies that have cited a moment like this. D espite having lived in southern California for 15 years, I never felt like a true, dyed-in-the-wool Los Angeleno until yesterday, when I finally endured the quintessential LA nightmare of being stranded with a dead automobile on the central divide of a major freeway.
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