Zabriskie Point (Michelangelo Antonioni)

“So anyway... ought to be a word.” - Daria

Jean-Luc Godard asked: “What is it about?” A question of this stature is the equivalent to the jazz aficionado attempting to discover the hidden meaning behind Eric Dolphy’s relative metaphysical masterpiece- “Out to Lunch”. I could play it safe and say, Antonioni was playing script-jazz, or it’s a foreign film parodying an American film made by a foreign filmmaker who’s never seen an American film. Those all work. It’s about everything, and absolutely nothing at the same time. That works too, but what’s it really about?

Zabriskie Point is a protest against insignificance. Mark, the lead, is a twenty year old college student who drops out of unified emotional society, a generation of rebellion, and rejects normal human existence, by hijacking a plane, falling in love, and getting shot dead, all within a week’s passing. Throughout the movie, we’re bombarded by advertising billboards, seeing what Mark sees along his uninspired quest to escape from the political, manipulative day to day desensitizing of the media masterminds behind what makes Antonioni’s kaleidoscopic vision of America. Stream-of-consciousness scenes cut with sociological statistics to big business mind controlling adverts are the build up to Mark’s increasing destitute sense of being, which leads him to the middle of the desert, Zabriskie Point. The female lead, Daria, is the secretary to a real estate millionaire. She, reason unknown to us, decides to drive her car to Phoenix, along the way, stopping at Zabriskie Point for a smoke of grass. The two fall in love, fittingly to the movie’s desert-like tone, instantly.

This film is about a prophet, who inspires nothing. He is ready to die, but not for boredom in a movie that virtually explores the different expressions of boredom! We’re given no character development enough to care about these two characters, and all the spontaneous whimsical stupidity of a Tom and Jerry cartoon. The film moves sideways without a heart or soul to catch on to. The only truism I find, is Mark’s fearlessness from everything, of which I guess is connected to some kind of media implosion of the senses, ending the film inside Daria’s dream sequence of television sets, wonder bread posters, acid flavored balloon explosions, etc. Antonioni raises questions (i.e. how easy it is to buy a gun in this country, and that it’s legal to kill someone in self-defense on one’s own property, or the black panther brigades of the sixties), but fails to return to them to answer. The camera works like unfinished sentences, the actors like stale wine over week old chinese food. Zabriskie Point’s only obvious redeeming value is its awesome soundtrack. (Thank God, Antonioni had good taste in rock bands!)

What is it about? I think Zabriskie Point is about taking everything insignificant, including love, and relating all to existential optimism. He is protesting that there is beauty and spirituality in nothingness. He is using the film, as a vehicle to show us the flip side to anonymity. That being, the space around the obvious: College drop out, falsely accused of shooting a cop, flying a plane to the desert to fuck his brains out in a hallucinogenic sand orgy, later to be killed accidentally. The underlying meaning is for the viewer to investigate. I feel there is hope in being insignificant. There is hope in knowing any one of us could die at any moment. There is that sheer confidence in believing the world will end within our lifetime. That’s how I feel after I watch this movie. The fact that it moves me in this way, from crudely taped together pieces of nothing, is what it’s about.

interesting read->

http://www.trussel.com/lyman/frech5.htm