1:00-5:15 — Chrissie Watkins is at a beach party. A boy, Tom, makes eyes at her. She teases Tom out of the circle with an offer of skinny dipping. Tom is eager but too drunk to follow through. Chrissie goes out swimming and gets attacked by a shark.

There is a temptation to give an unnecessarily sexual reading to this opening scene. Chrissie takes off her clothes as she lures her date along the beach, she is obviously after more than some swimming. The boy may be unable to attack, but the shark seems to be up to the task. This is the “Friday the 13th” reading, that the sexually promiscuous woman is “asking for it.” I think this is the wrong reading — the point of the opening scene is not that Chrissie is sexually active but that she, and the other teens at the beach party, are “free.” They are free to smoke, drink, do drugs, play music and go swimming naked. They are, in all but name, hippies. Like the US on September 10, 2001, they are living in an open, permissive society that takes its freedoms for granted.

Chrissie’s nakedness also happens to make for better drama, as she, like Marion Crane in Psycho, is presented in the most vulnerable light possible at the moment of the attack on her person. There’s no reason Spielberg could not have put her in a swimsuit, but having her naked raises the dramatic stakes that much more.

The scene establishes genre, announces This Is A Horror Thriller, and presents the primary antagonist, a brutally inhuman monster, unthinking, unreasoning, implacable.

5:15 — We meet Brody, as we meet many a protagonist, getting up in the morning. He awakens and looks out to the sea. Several times in the movie Brody will look out to sea, this is the first. The sea, we could even say, is Brody’s nemesis.

Brody’s state of being as we meet him is that he is disoriented — he asks his wife why the sun is shining in the window. Next he reports to her where their children are, and there is some dialogue that indicates that he’s new in town and not doing a good job of fitting in. (He’s a cop from New York, essentially the same character Roy Scheider played in The French Connection and The Seven-Ups. Here, he’s a — pardon — fish out of water.)

His older boy comes in from the yard. He’s cut his hand; this is the level of domestic turmoil Brody expects to find in Amity. He’s so new to the town that he picks up the wrong phone when it rings. Beautiful scene where his wife tends to his boy’s cut and he talks to his deputy on the phone in the foreground.

(A third reason for the opening scene is to create suspense. Generally, the writer wants to put the audience in the same position as the protagonist, unless for the purposes of suspense. If the audience knows there’s a bomb under the table but the protagonist doesn’t, the writer can wring out minutes and minutes of suspense as the audience gets more and more upset about the bomb. Here, we know what the phone call is about, even though Brody doesn’t, and his family in the background, still “free,” knows even less.)

7:30 — Brody takes off in his car to investigate the disappearance of Chrissie Watkins. There’s a nice shot of his car zipping along a country road. And I’m thinking “Hmm, an ordinary shot of a car traveling on a road, why is this in there?” Then the car passes the AMITY ISLAND billboard, which tells us four things: 1, the name of the town, 2, the fact that the town is on an island, 3, the fact that the town promotes itself as a swimmer’s paradise, and 4, that there is a “SUMMER REGATTA” coming up July 4th — which of course, turns out to be a ticking clock driving the narrative. So this one simple shot tells us a ton of exposition, without any dialogue, and raises the stakes without making a big deal out of it.

8:00 — Brody talks with Tom about Chrissie’s disappearance as they pick up her clothes from the beach. The concept of “Islanders” is introduced: the natives of Amity consider themselves a clan unto themselves and everyone else, it seems, is a second-class citizen. Tom “belongs” in Amity, Brody is the outsider.

Brody’s deputy Hendrickson, himself an Islander, sees Chrissie’s remains first — another good use of a suspense beat. Brody stands over the remains, clutching Chrissie’s purse, literally “left holding the bag.” Brody’s Gap opens here: his job has just gone from cleaning up after a drunken party to investigating a death.

9:00 — Polly, an elderly secretary to Brody, reports for work, unaware of Chrissie’s death. As Brody types up Chrissie’s death report, she tells Brody about the local kids “karate-ing” fenceposts. Again we see the juxtaposition of “business as usual” with the urgency of Brody’s predicament. (Spielberg even places Brody in the same place in the frame for both scenes.) The Medical Inspector calls and tells Brody that Chrissie died from a shark attack, and the news strikes Brody like a thunderbolt. As Police Chief, it his duty to protect the citizens of Amity from a threat and, seeking to Prove His Worth, he leaps into action.

10:00 — The newly-charged-up Brody heads into town to get supplies to paint “BEACH CLOSED” signs. As he’s in the hardware store, we hear a customercomplaining to the store owner about an order — he is going to be unprepared for the big 4th-of-July Regatta. This is to remind us of that ticking clock that will form the climax of Act II in another 50 minutes or so. There is a marching band rehearsing in the streets and, again, the “free” populace goes about their business, complaining to Brody about trivial things, and his anxiety set against the town’s blissful ignorance raises the dramatic stakes.

11:41 — Brody learns of some boy scouts out swimming and goes to warn them out of the water. As he takes the ferry across the bay, he is accosted by the Mayor.

It is impossible for me to watch the scenes with the Mayor without thinking of George W. Bush. Everything he does is straight from the Bush playbook. The town is under attack and the only thing the Mayor can think to do is ignore the problem, hope it goes away, cover it up and tell people to keep on shopping. There’s a great beat where the Mayor tells Brody that Chrissie may have been killed by a boat propeller, then turns to the Medical Inspector for backup. The Medical Inspector, the same man who told Brody that Chrissie was killed by a shark, stops to try to think of something to add to the Mayor’s comments, then realizes he can’t and instead simply parrots the Mayor, and Alberto Gonzales suddenly leaps to mind. The Mayor is concerned that, without summer dollars, the town is going to be on welfare come winter. He is, literally, willing to feed his citizens into the mouth of a shark for the sake of making money. The scene ends with the Mayor turning to the ferry operator and saying “Okay, take us back.” Indeed.

Brody, who only wanted to close the beach because the Medical Inspector told him that Chrissie was killed by a shark, is now powerless to act. One Man, it seems, cannot Make A Difference after all. But he wants To Get Along, so he Does As He’s Told.

(Of course, statistically speaking, the Mayor is correct — shark attacks are absurdly rare and the likelihood of another attack is a statistical impossibility. But that wouldn’t make a very good movie.)

13:40 — The beach. Later that day, I’m guessing. We meet Alex Kintner and his mom. Alex is destined to soon die, but we don’t know that yet. We also meet the guy with his Labrador Retriever. Brody, alone, watches the beach, a Man With A Secret. All around him, banality reigns. His neighbors discuss the “Islander” thing again, and one of them comes to pester him about some parking hassles. The frisson between the triviality of Amity life and the life-and-death struggle Brody is silently engaged in is unbearable. There’s the “Bad Hat Harry” scene, a false-scare that serves as a small misdirect. Brody thinks it might be a shark, but we, the audience know better, because we haven’t heard the shark’s musical theme. There is some more suspense as the guy calls for his dog, as Brody’s youngest son plays in the sand and sings “Do You Know the Muffin Man?” Again, we know more than the protagonist and the suspense builds. The music kicks in, we know what’s coming, and then little Alex Kintner gets it, in a spectacularly violent scene.

18:15 — The city council meeting. What is Brody going to do? He’s seen the monster for himself (in that dramatic rack/zoom), and he knows that the same shark killed Chrissie Watkins. He can’t pretend the problem doesn’t exist. And yet at the city council meeting, faced with the concerns of the local merchants, he caves. He is overwhelmed by commerce — the merchants of Amity don’t want the beaches closed for even 24 hours. In his pursuit of Doing What He’s Told, he is bulldozed by the very people he’s supposed to be protecting.

20:40 — Quint appears, in an all-time classic entrance. Quint tells the city council that he’ll catch the shark, but it will cost more than the $3000 dollars Mrs. Kintner is offering — he demands $10,000 and walks out of the meeting. He is dismissed by the city council, and again I can’t help but think of Bush, who not only doesn’t give a damn about the people he’s supposed to be leading, he doesn’t want to spend the money it takes to do a job properly. What does the Mayor do? He pushes the task of protecting the populace onto the “private sector,” secure that market forces will settle the problem and not cost him any money. And Brody is helpless — it seems that One Man is completely incapable of Making A Difference.

22:30 — Brody retires to his home and reads about sharks. Know Thy Enemy. There is a teeny bit of exposition as Brody commiserates with his wife about his burden and she offers to lighten his load. So again we see a juxtaposition between Brody’s problems and his family’s. His wife has come around to his side, a little anyway, but his boys are still “free” and innocent (even though they were on the beach that afternoon too). Brody orders his son off his sailboat, even though it’s tied to the dock, then worries that he’s pushing his authority too far — his job (as both father and police chief) is to protect his family so they can live freely, not to order them around and curtail their freedoms. As it happens, his wife, at just that moment, sees an illustration in one of Brody’s shark books of a shark attacking a fishing boat and screams for the boy to get out of the water.

So this scene, it seems, argues for a slightly more conservative viewpoint — the enemy is out there, and it’s better to instill a little fear into your charges than allow for the possibility of their getting injured or killed.

This scene, and specifically the illustration that provokes Brody’s wife’s hysteria, becomes an important cue in the movie’s visual schemata: the WATER, Spielberg tells us, is where the evil is. As long as you are NOT IN THE WATER, you are safe. If you are IN THE WATER, there is no hope for you. Again and again for the rest of the narrative, it is suggested that if you have even a finger or toe IN THE WATER, you are in danger.

24:30 — Like in this very next scene, where the two local clowns try to catch the shark with a holiday roast for bait (the “holiday”, of course, being the 4th of July, that ticking clock again). The shark takes the bait and heads out to sea, taking the end of the dock, and one of the clowns, with it. The second the clown goes into the water, we fear for his life, and we do not relax until his feet get out of the water. Spielberg even lets the camera linger on his feet scrambling over the collapsed dock, knowing that we are crawling out of our skin waiting for the shark to leap up and snatch the man away.

Of course, it does not, and the scene works as both a good scream and as good comedy. And let me add the beauty of the dock being towed out to sea, then turning around to come back for the clown as his friend screams on what’s left of the pier.

(There is a connection, of course, between the shark and the Mayor, and the visual design of the clown scene shows it. Jaws is about the largely-invisible forces that pull us around — we don’t see the shark in the clown scene, but we see the dock-end pulled around. Similarly, we don’t see the market forces that pull the Mayor around, but we see his discomfort at being in their grip. And, like the shark, the market forces in Jaws are brutal, unthinking, uncaring, inhuman, implacable and unanswerable. But more on that later.)

28:00 — The Yahoo Armada. Amateur fishermen from all over descend upon Amity. Market forces are allowed to run free, and the result is chaos. Brody is more overwhelmed than ever. (We could say that Brody is the US Forces in Iraq and the Yahoo Armada is Blackwater.) Out of this Yahoo Armada, Hooper appears. Hooper is, like Brody, a fish out of water, which is why his introduction in the midst of the Yahoo Armada works well. He is an Expert, and more to the point, he is a Reasonable Man, educated at some Eastern University. That is, he is the opposite of a Yahoo, and a “sissy” to boot, a bespectacled Academic, and he is here to Discover The Truth of the death of Chrissie Watkins. (I note that Spielberg takes the beard and glasses from Hooper, his Effete Academic in Jaws, and puts them on the face of Henry Jones, the Effete Academic in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.)

31:15 — Hooper examines Chrissie’s remains and loses his cool. And I’m thinking “Why does this scene work? We already know Chrissie was killed by a shark, why do we need Hooper to declare it so?” The reason is, the act isn’t about “A Shark Comes to Amity,” the act is about Brody trying to Prove His Worth by Doing What He’s Told. And now here is an independent authority coming along and telling him, like a slap in the face, that he’s an irresponsible jerk who’s no better than the Mayor or the Gonzales-like Medical Inspector. Brody, who thought he was doing such a good job of Doing What He’s Told, has just been informed that his goals, as the protector of the people, should be higher than that.

33:00 — Back on the dock, a tiger shark is caught. We know it’s not the shark who killed Chrissie and Alex, but Brody breathes a sigh of relief: maybe he’s off the hook, maybe the system works, maybe Doing What He’s Told will turn out to be the wise move after all.

The Mayor comes along and, again, is concerned only with image and publicity. When Hooper expresses doubt as to the validity of the shark (like a good liberal, he feels a simple examination of facts will produce a sane response from authority), the Mayor dismisses him with talk about the “appropriateness” of cutting open the shark “in front of everybody.” His hope, of course, is that no one will ever cut open the shark, the problem will go away and everyone can make a lot of money.

36:00 — Mrs. Kintner comes down to the dock and has her brilliant scene where she confronts Brody, and Brody is brought face to face with Responsibility, and the true meaning of his job. He is on the island to protect the citizens of Amity from harm and instead he Did What He Was Told.   One Man could have Made a Difference in the life of Mrs. Kintner, but that One Man hewed to the beaten path instead.  And as Act II begins, we will see Brody go from being a man who Does What He’s Told to a man who Takes Charge.

The protagonist of Amblin’ is a young man with a bedroll and a guitar case hitch-hiking his way through the desert to the coast. He meets up with a girl, another hitch-hiker, and they form a halting, tentative friendship. She teases him, they have an olive-pit-spitting contest, they get run off the road by an aggressive motorist and seek shelter in a storm drain.  (It’s hard to watch these scenes and not imagine the truck from Duel barreling around the corner to cream these two waifs.)  The girl offers the boy some pot and steals a kiss, and they chase each other around in the desert. They hitch a ride with some Hippies-with-a-capital-H (in a psychedelic VW van, no less), and they try to get him to take out his guitar. He refuses and the two of them get left by the side of the road (lousy hippies). They try to hitch a ride, and while plenty of motorists are happy to pick up the winsome, befreckled redhead girl, they take off like rabbits when they see there’s a guy with her.

Night falls and they make a fire. And now I feel I owe Spielberg an apology: I noted a few days ago that it wasn’t until 1993 that he was able to put a credible love scene on screen, without jokes,slapstick or juvenile attitude, but here he is, in his very first movie, doing just that. The fire is lit (so to speak), the girl takes off her shirt, the boy looks scared but desirous, he hesitantly takes off his own shirt, they kiss tenderly and zip their sleeping bags together. Even though the scene is about two adolescents having sex, the scene isn’t adolescent in its approach. Compare the above to the “love scenes” in Raiders, Temple of Doom or Always — or better yet, simply note how Spielberg tends to avoid love scenes altogether, making movies for an audience of 14-year-old boys, without anything “mushy” in them, movies for adolescents made from an eternally adolescent point of view.

(Urbaniak was shocked the other night to learn that the novel Jaws had an extensive, graphic, explicit subplot about Hooper having an affair with Brody’s wife. It’s hard to imagine the movie with it, but it bothered a number of people when it first was released. So much so, I remember at least one critic inserting the subplot into the movie in his own mind, even though there isn’t a scintilla of evidence of it in the film. Try, try to imagine Jaws with Richard Dreyfuss boinking Lorraine Gary half-way through Act II. Yeesh.)

(Oh wait, it just occurred to me that there’s a love scene — a lesbian love scene, no less — in The Color Purple. And now that I think of it, it bears a strong resemblance to its counterpart in Amblin’.)

(One more parenthetical.  The campfire-leading-to-lovemaking beat returns, of course, in Jaws, and the two scenes even share a couple of the same shots.)

Anyway, morning comes and the boy and the girl get passed by many more cars, and then finally get a ride to the coast. They reach the beach and their journey is over. It’s the old road-movie dilemma: two souls are joined together by their common pursuit, and when the goal is achieved they face a dilemma — do they now stay together or go their separate ways?

That’s the girl’s question anyway. The boy seems too intoxicated with having reached his goal. He runs into the surf as the girl waits on the beach, wondering what to do next. After some hesitation, she opens his battered guitar case, only to find, surprise, no guitar. Instead, the boy has brought with him to the coast a nice shirt, a tie, a copy of an Arthur C. Clarke novel, a bottle of mouthwash and a roll of toilet paper. In other words, this boy is no hippie at all — he’s a geek, and a square. As the boy romps in the waves, the girl sighs and walks away.

Of course, it’s hard not to identify the protagonist as a Spielberg stand-in. Here it is, 1968, the height of the hippie era, and Spielberg, famously, was sneaking onto the Universal lot, in a suit and tie, in order to pose as a young executive. With an Arthur C. Clarke paperback in his pocket too, I’d bet. The boy, frightened of love, apprehensive about sex, but joyous in the face of sheer sensation, romps in the beach on his way to becoming Steven Spielberg, while the girl moves on to wherever her road takes her.

There is no dialogue in Amblin’, instead there is a kind of over-produced 60s folk-rock soundtrack. No matter — Spielberg would meet John Williams soon enough and wouldn’t need another composer again.

It is, of course, primarily a director’s reel — Spielberg showing potential employers his understanding of film language — jump cuts, dissolves, freeze frames, tracking shots, dollies, zooms, simple optical effects. Images are layered with attention to dramatic flow, so forth. There’s Truffaut all over the place — it feels very much like an extended “date” sequence from Jules et Jim. The best scenes are the ones observing simple behavior — when Spielberg tries to make a “point” he sometimes falls back on a kind of glib jokiness that would never really leave him.

It feels very 70s — and since it was made in 1968, I guess that means it was actually ahead of its time.

The DVD I had access to is a painfully degraded dupe of a dupe of an I-don’t-know-what. The transfer is so bad I can’t even tell you if the movie is in color or not.

Personally, I don’t know why Spielberg doesn’t restore this and his other pre-Sugarland movies and put them all out in a DVD box. Certainly there’s an audience for the material. What is he thinking, that if people see these youthful expressions they won’t hire him to make movies any more?

The Sugarland Express is reminiscent of a number of other movies, most of which would not come out until years or even decades afterward. It has the baby-obsessed heroine of Raising Arizona, the populist-heist dramedy of Dog Day Afternoon, the over-the-top car chases of The Blues Brothers and the sunny hick humor of any number of70s modern outlaw pictures. It takes place against the backdrop of the same Texas as No Country For Old Men (there’s a crusty old police captain who has the exact same relationship Sheriff Bell has to Moss, and the climactic car-chase even ends smack in the middle of the Rio Grande, and one half-expects Josh Brolin to come running along, chased by a dog) and has the doomed-lovers-on-the-run aspect of Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands.

Ed in Raising Arizona wants a baby from her class superiors, but Lou Jean’s beef is with the state — they have taken her child away from her for being an unfit mother. So the drama of The Sugarland Express is one of the individuals against the state and how the state responds when order is upset by an individual. Especially when the individual inspires thousands of other individuals — in other words, “the people,” the same people the state is supposed to be serving.

The structure goes something like this:

ACT I: Lou Jean busts her husband Clovis out of jail, they hitch a ride out of town, lead a state patrol car on a wild chase, kidnap a Patrolman named Slide and head to Sugarland, where Lou Jean hopes to be reunited with her baby. All this happens in a brisk 22 minutes.

ACT II: The principal antagonist, Captain Tanner, emerges and marshals the forces of the state against Lou Jean. He leads a number of patrol cars across the state on a slow-speed chase behind Lou Jean that lasts into the night. He considers assassinating Lou Jean and Clovis but then thinks better of it. A roadblock trap backfires and creates a traffic snarl that allows Lou Jean to escape into the night. This takes us to 57:00.

ACT III: Lou Jean and Clovis have a respite where they hide out in a used car lot, where they camp in a mobile home, play house and watch a Roadrunner cartoon at a nearby drive-in. In the morning, a couple of unlicensed yahoos show up with shotguns and proceed to blow the hell out of the car lot. Captain Tanner arrives with his men and allows Lou Jean to go free again, while he arrests the yahoos. This takes us to 1:17:00.

ACT IV: Lou Jean leads what is now hundreds of police cars, media vans and onlookers across the state. They are swamped by well-wishers as they pass through a small town and eventually arrive in Sugarland, where, unbeknownst to them, a trap has been set by Captain Tanner. Clovis is shot and he, Slide and Lou Jean desperately try to make it for the border. They make it halfway through the river before Clovis dies and Lou Jean is arrested.

(The end title tells us that Lou Jean finally got her baby back after serving a 15-month prison sentence — that would make her and her son just the right age to become Melinda Dillon and Carey Guffey in Close Encounters.)

NOTES:

A few minutes into the movie, Lou Jean, while visiting Clovis in a low-security prison, pulls him into a bathroom and begins to initiate sex. Clovis is flustered and upset, especially when it turns out Lou Jean doesn’t want sex at all — it’s all part of her escape plan. This is the first time a sex scene is played for laughs in a Spielberg movie, but it would not be the last. It would take, by my estimation, another 20 years before Spielberg would present a mature, straightforward scene of two people having sex.

And as long as we’re here, let’s look at the romance between Lou Jean and Clovis.  Lou Jean busts Clovis out of jail against his will, then forces him to kidnap Patrolman Slide, and essentially keeps kicking his ass forward until he’s dead.  It’s played well, but that’s essentially the dynamic of their relationship.  That, to me, is something other than a mature view of love.  It almost seems like Lou Jean would be better off getting her baby all by herself, since she has to boss Clovis into every transgression (much like Ed in Raising Arizona, except here Lou Jean is the protagonist).  It’s telling that Clovis’s idea of a romantic evening is curling up on the bed and watching Roadrunner cartoons — he’s still just a kid himself.

Spielberg’s use of lenses and camera movement is as fluid and skilled as it is in Duel; what impresses here is his work with actors. There is a warm naturalism to all the acting, especially among the large supporting cast, which is essentially the yokels and goofballs from the “armada” scene in Jaws stretched out over an entire movie. Spielberg presents these yahoos with great affection and humanity. There is plenty of typical Spielbergian wit and punch as scenes move with an effortless grace created through sheer visual kinetics — Character A moves from point 1 to point 2, carrying prop B which is important to plot point 3, etc. etc. The character scenes all land nicely with only occasional broadness, but Spielberg really lets loose with the car chases and shootouts. You can tell that’s where his real interest lies — or rather, you can tell that action is what he’s more comfortable shooting (this dichotomy of action-over-character is most pronounced in 1989’s Always).

Captain Tanner is an interesting antagonist, as he is essentially sympathetic with the protagonist. As a man, he wants Lou Jean to be reunited with her child, as a peace officer (or tool of the state, if you prefer) he is required to act with lethal force to maintain order. The fact that no one’s life is ever really in danger and the only real property damage caused by Lou Jean is a wreck Buick does not concern the state — she has rebelled against the state and the state must quash her rebellion. One could say that Tanner is caught between the natural law of human families and the man’s law of the state.

Lou Jean and Clovis hit the road with their kidnapped patrolman in an attempt to mend their family, and so become a kind of ad hoc family on the way. Max Slide becomes their punished child, their palling brother and their scolding father at different times in the movie, and even briefly becomes a potential point in a romantic triangle.

There’s a wonderful scene as Lou Jean and Clovis watch the Roadrunner cartoon at the drive-in. They can’t hear the sound, so Clovis begins to supply the sound effects. As he watches the cartoon, he, and we, begin to realize that Lou Jean and Clovis, like the Coyote, are caught in an endless pursuit across the desert, a pursuit that will not, and cannot, end well for the Coyote.

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.