The Best Film That I Took Twelve Years to See (Vanishing Point)

Essays 70s, existentialism, film, folktale, myth

I had heard about it. I’d seen old promotional materials and posters from it. Filmmakers have talked highly about it, as have film buffs. Quentin Tarantino and even made a big fuss about it by referencing it several times in his ode to exploitation cinema, 2008’s Death Proof.

What I gathered about Vanishing Point was that it was a 70’s era B movie that had a healthy cult following, it was a car-centric movie, and the story featured a lightning white Dodge Challenger. I knew too of the film’s prevalent imagery of the Challenger cutting through desert landscapes.

Fast forward to the present, around 12 years later. Maybe something like this has happened to you, and the consequence was finding a new favorite movie. On a long weary night with things cluttering my head, I decided to watch a movie, and I recalled Vanishing Point, I am not sure what sparked it. Maybe it was my exhaustion or the fact I was thinking of road trips or of home.

Whatever it was, I found the little film online; twenty minutes in I knew I was seeing something significant.

What I watched was not a standard 70’s-era car movie. Vanishing Point is one of those rare movies that simultaneously exists as many things, an existential drama, a road movie, and an American folktale.

The story follows a man name Kowalski (Barry Newman), an automobile transporter. Kowalski is a man internally driven. On a spontaneous bet, he aims to deliver a new high-powered Challenger from Denver to San Francisco in less than a day. Soon enough, he has police on his tail, determined to stop his journey. Guiding him like an angel, and also narrating his tale to the public along the way is a blind DJ with an illegal police scanner named Super Soul. Although escape seems narrow, Kowalski is captivating the hearts of the people as the last true free man in America.

With Kowalski, we have an anti-hero of sorts; noble hearted but reckless in action. But as the movie unfolded, I could see that he was also a person out of joint. He neither fit well into the established norms nor the counterculture of the late 60’s early 70’s. Marginalized, a soul looking for its own sense of purpose, Kowalski faces the crisis that comes from the anxiety of choice. The choice to stop or to keep going; to become one with the “molecule of speed” (Sarafian), or to stop and be punished. Will he define his own existence or will he acknowledge that the world has natural laws and boundaries, and that he, like all that exist, are painfully chained to that reality? It is an existential tale in a post-modern world.

The cinematography and editing lent the story an ethereal feel, which I admired, and paints the film with more texture than a simple road movie. Largely shot on the road, the movie delivers gorgeous vistas of the mid-western and western states. The 70’s era film stock give the landscapes an incredibly picturesque quality. Many shots harken to the film’s title, as you could see the far-off horizon line and the road disappearing into space. The story is often intercut with an almost docu-style look at small towns and their people. Seeing those worn places and the interesting faces and gave a realistic and human quality to what I interpreted to the story’s overarching lofty themes. It’s a time capsule movie; a piece of Americana, and it could easily fit into the mold of a Western.

And like a Western, Vanishing Point offered itself as an American Folktale. I was watching the tale of Kowalski: a man outside the law, a man wandering the asphalt wilderness, a man pushing against normalcy. All these things displayed in him we can find in our celebrated American heroes. The film’s narrative can even be seen as the creation of a folktale and a folk hero. As Super Soul reports on Kowalski’s condition, he is helping create a hero for the common people, hanging all their hopes and dreams on him as he tears through the desert. And I, the viewer was one such person rooting for him. It is a story of a man going on a spiritual journey of sorts, and I saw some religious allusions. This was definitely a mythical tale, supercharged and bound in classic Mopar steel.

Vanishing Point was written by Guillermo Cabrera Infante and directed by Ricard C. Sarafian and features a rockin’ 70’s soundtrack (including the band Delaney and Bonnie).