In the changing film landscape of post-1968 America, the youth road movie was still deeply intertwined with the exploitation market. Low-budget B-movies like The Wild Angels (1961) and Motorpsycho (1965) employed sensationalist imagery of drugs, violence, and nudity to capture the zeitgeist. In spite of the mainstream commercial success of Dennis Hopper’s more peaceful Easy Rider in 1969, many films (including the aforementioned) were accused of shallow ‘of the moment’ posturing. As such, plenty of critics responded with what amounted to a shrug at the seemingly superficial premise of 1971 cult classic Vanishing Point.
The plot revolves around hopped-up speed freak and ex-cop Kowalski, who wagers a bet that he can ‘deliver’ the white Dodge Challenger he’s driving from Denver to San Francisco in a little over 36 hours. Vanishing Point, a 106-minute chase movie with little to no motivation for any aspect of the chase, remains the poster child for fashionable alienation. All Kowalski is guilty of is driving too fast — with no pressing reason to reach San Francisco bar a meaningless bet, he has no motivation to send the cops on a three-state wild goose chase in pursuit of him. Yet he keeps driving, feverishly, suicidally, around hairpin turns in the West’s vast deserts, maneuvering around police roadblocks and helicopters while red dust flies, and encountering an eccentric mix of hitchhikers, druggies, Native Americans and evangelicals on his journey.
Through Sarafian’s unusual use of cross-cutting and flashback sequences, Vanishing Point often dislocates temporal and spatial orientation through the very act of driving. This disorientation underscores Kowalski’s sleepless amphetamine-fuelled mindset, heightening the sense of isolation already present. The driver’s very field of vision is cinematic, defined by the items that move into his limited focus. In true road movie tradition, Sarafian plays homage to the iconography of rural America — the tarmac road and the enormous blue skies that surround it, its ‘hick’ towns and gas stations Yet, the apparent symbolism of the open road is stymied by the intolerant forces of law and order that Kowalski defies.
Through the film’s interruption of narrative expectation (it reveals its conclusion in the opening sequence), Kowalski does not become a traditional outlaw in the mould of Bonnie & Clyde (1967) or The Wild One (1953). Instead, his unexplained impulse to escape is almost manic; he is a man on an existential quest, eaten up by a mysterious past and speeding eternally. As scholar Thomas Elsaesser points out, movies like Vanishing Point‘reflect the moral and emotional gestures of a defeated generation’, with their frequent portrayals of youthful martyrdom at the hands of ‘good old boys’ or figures of authority. The film ironically reveals the dead-end ambitions of the 60s youth movement, while nevertheless championing the ‘blaze of glory’ defiance of its antihero.