Saturday Night At The Movies

Mar 1, 2025 | Dark Star Crashes, Dead Water

What kind of American are you?

I’ve just had breakfast, idly wondering what to do with the day, and two films sprang to mind: Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point and Garland’s Civil War. 

I wrote about Zabriskie Point five years ago: They Should Build A Drive-In. I stand by what I wrote there – it is a great film. I watched Civil War recently and mentioned it in a different context a couple of posts ago on February 9th.

I wrote of Zabriskie Point,

We have to start with the obvious statement that Zabriskie Point is not an American film. It isn’t American in conception, execution, tone, pacing or dynamics. It is a film by an Italian modernist that takes America as its subject and object. The notion that there is a lack of nuance in the film misses the point: it is an attempt at a naturalist portrayal of an un-nuanced society. It makes little or no attempt to hide Antonioni’s contempt for what he sees.

 

By the end, grieving for Mark, Daria sees through the moral emptiness of an exploitative, empty society in which wealthy Lee has a Native American as a housemaid. Leaving it behind, Daria imagines Lee’s house in the desert and all its contents exploding to the aural equivalent of Munch’s Scream, before she drives away. Is she radicalised or just dropping out? We don’t know, Antonioni doesn’t say.

Similarly, Garland declined to do more than allow Civil War to speak for itself. The films are very different in tone and conception, but what they have in common is that both were made about America by Europeans and both were/are routinely dismissed or diminished within America. Civil War is particularly on the nose at present but Zabriskie Point, made and released before Kent State and Watergate and while the Vietnam War was ongoing(1), maps out the social and moral landscape of the next half century. It was prescient in a way that I very much hope Garland’s film is not.

(1) One of the great achievements of George Lucas in Star Wars (1977) was to successfully gull a generation of Americans into supporting the Vietcong against the evil Empire.

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Zabriskie Point features a little of the Grateful Dead’s Dark Star, the full version of which, recorded in 1969, is on their groundbreaking Live/Dead album. Time to head off, you and I, through the transitive nightfall of diamonds.