Spielberg: Duel

Duel shows that with enough skill and planning, a decent movie can be wrung out of the simplest of premises. There is little dialogue in Duel, and the dialogue that’s there feels like too much (and an extended monologue Mann has at the close of Act I feels like way too much). The idea that a movie this austere and peculiar would be someone’s debut is audacious enough, but the idea that it would be a TV movie-of-the-week, shot in 12 days and broadcast a few days later, is pretty freakin’ astonishing. An apologetic Hitchcock homage (the music explicitly quotes a number of Bernard Herrman themes), Duel announces the arrival of a skilled technician already in firm control of the tools of relentless suspense.

The structure is basically this:

ACT I: Mann sets out for his trip. He has a couple of encounters with the truck and begins to suspect that the truck, for whatever reason, has it in for him. After an apparent attempt on his life, he stops to rest at Chuck’s Diner, where he worries that the driver of the rig is watching him, judging him. He lashes out at a man he’s convinced is the driver, but is proven wrong and made to look like a fool. He continues on his journey.

ACT II: The truck harasses Mann some more, and its attempts to kill him become pronounced and distinct. This is no coincidence, the truck is honestly trying to kill him. After a number of these attempts, Mann fools the truck into bypassing him and takes another rest.

ACT III: Mann’s attempt to elude the truck fail, and the third act is pretty much one long chase scene as Mann desperately tries to turn the tables on the truck.

SOME SUBTEXT: While sweating it out in Chuck’s diner, Mann whines to himself about how one simple thing can tear away the veneer of civilization and put a man “right back in the jungle,” but the laws of Duel seem to have a more medieval origin. “Honor” plays a significant role: the protagonist is a man stuck in an early-seventies world where honor, specifically masculine honor, is under constant attack. His wife criticizes him for not defending her honor at a party, he whinges at the prospect of his mother coming to visit (a prospect that reduces him to a child), he gripes to a gas-station attendant that he’s not the boss of his house, a caller on a radio show he listens to complains about how not having a job has removed his title of “head of family.” (Family is a burden in Duel, a rarity in Spielberg’s work, although not surprising in a movie made by a 21-year-old. 21!) When Mann(the extra “n” is for extra iNadequacy!)’s life is in danger, “real men” in cowboy boots glare pitilessly at him, old men laugh at him, he is made to sit my himself in the “pink section” of the diner, where he can barely muster the manliness to order the ultra-un-macho meal of a cheese sandwich and a glass of water. It doesn’t help his case that Mann, as played by Dennis Weaver, with his tidy mustache, at times resembles a weak-jawed Burt Reynolds.

Balancing “honor” in a civilized world, of course, is “duty.” Mann has a duty to his family, to his job, to the middle-class suburban society he represents. He’s a Civilized Man, and his sense of duty is so great that, even after he suspects that his life is in danger, he still proceeds to his job appointment — even after the truck has tried to shove his car into the path of an oncoming train and he’s hours late for his appointment, Mann does not turn around and head home — he grimly pushes ahead. Perhaps he feels his duty to his family is that great, or perhaps he decides he would rather be fighting for his life with a homicidal maniacthan back home with his shrewish wife and burdensome kids.

(To beat the truck, he runs at it head on, shoves his briefcase marked “David Mann” [his briefcase is his life] against the gas pedal and dives out of the car, abandoning his life, and his suburban morality, seemingly once and for all.)

In Act II, Mann is required to stop to help a stalled school bus get started again — his attachment to suburban responsibilities extend even into his life-or-death struggle in the desert. As he valiantly attempts to assist the bus (the car he drives is even called a Valiant, I am not making this up), the suburban kids make faces and jeer at him for his lameness. (I’m surprised his Valiant is red — the character is about as beige as they come.) The movie not called Truck Fight or Meaningless Attack, it’s called Duel, and one recalls that a duel begins when one’s honor has been offended.

The truck, of course, knows no honor at all. Its filth and smoke stand as a symbol of pollution, its size and aggression stand as symbols of everything that pushes Mann around and makes him feel small and helpless. To string all the symbols along, one could say that the tanker truck symbolizes the heartless, homicidal oil economy (cf There Will Be Blood) that created the middle class that Mann belongs to, and also created the automobile culture that allowed for the suburbs in which he lives so safely.

(Spielberg insists, by the way, that he was thinking of none of this while shooting Duel, and I believe him, but that doesn’t mean that the meaning is not there.  My guess is that the highly skilled direction belongs to the young director and the cultural symbolism comes from the writer Richard Matheson.)

(Or maybe the truck is meant to symbolize a more pure evil. After all, it has “FLAMMABLE” written in huge letters on its sides [although it pointedly does not explode when it falls off a cliff] and it is involved in a set piece staged at a gas station called “Snakarama.”)

SOME CONTEXT: Mann and his bespectacled, civilized-man-in-the-moral-jungle predicament recall the protagonist of Straw Dogs (Mann’s wife even complains of being “almost raped” by another man), the physical predicament allude to Wages of Fear (and predict Sorcerer, its remake), the motiveless-evil of the truck recalls The Birds and anticipates Halloween and Death Proof. I don’t know if Hitchcock saw Duel, but its out-of-control downhill car chase is echoed in Family Plot.