No Easy Road

Within the history of Hollywood, it’s fair to say, exists a not-so-secret history of novelists being chewed up and spat out. Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Huxley, West: none achieved the same success at the movies, and rarely did they have nice things to say as the door swiftly hit them on the way out. In the shadows, less notable writers got tangled in the bureaucratic rigmarole, never to be heard from again. Presumably, they’re stuck in that never-ending development meeting from hell. Others have heeded the warning and stayed far away from its seductive pull.

 

All this makes the film career of novelist Rudolph Wurlitzer much more remarkable—and unbelievable. His small but notable work in film (a smattering of film scripts, a few detours into directing) slipped through the cracks at a time when such a thing was still possible, when a studio would still finance a film that was built to break every constructed convention. Slow as opposed to fast. Less instead of more. Destruction before construction. After a long break from work, Wurlitzer’s career is once again being discussed and his influence acknowledged. Drag City will be issuing an audio version of his novel Slow Fade this summer (read by Will Oldham), marking the first time in a long time that all his writing will be available. Most of his film work can now be seen on DVD, when five years ago almost none of it could.

For a writer working within an industry that has made a habit of undervaluing the role, there is an unusually clear persistence of vision throughout Drop Edges of Yonder, the new series at Anthology Film Archives. The most notable is Two-Lane Blacktop, an existentialist road movie with no clear destination. Two characters, the Driver (James Taylor) and the Mechanic (Dennis Wilson), embark on the open highway in a 1955 Chevy, where they occasionally cross paths with another traveler, G.T.O. (Warren Oates), in the guise of a cross-country race. The stakes are naught in this anti-romantic vision of the myth of freedom, which ends with an anti-climatic destruction from within.

Wurlitzer’s characters are constantly on the move, as if compelled by some outside force or preternatural view of the future. In Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, the two main characters (James Coburn and Kris Kristofferson), former friends, one now a lawman while the other a crook, embark on a dangerous path toward death. The tone often shifts from elegiac to nihilistic; a romantic vision of the West contrasted by a breakdown of character identity: who the hero or the villain is becomes pointless. In Glen and Randa, the most troubling film of the series, the titular characters roam a barren post-apocalyptic landscape in search of “the city,” which may or may not exist.  The tone and spirit closely resembles Wurlitzer’s novel Flats, in which a host of characters traverse a similar landscape in order to keep moving, where they came from and where they are going constantly changing, the distance from each expanding and collapsing.

The must-see Candy Mountain (May 3 and 5), co-directed by Wurlitzer and the photographer Robert Frank, is the apex of a fruitful collaboration that also produced two shorter works, “Keep Busy” and “Energy and How to Get It.” If two artists were destined to work together, it was these two: both share a fascination with the ineffable modes of travel and transformation, of aimless wandering, of a road open at both ends. Candy Mountain revolves around the opaque search for a legendary guitar craftsmen named Elmore Silk, who was once revered but is now largely forgotten. The wandering Julius (Kevin J. O’Connor), after spreading the lie that he knows Silk, promises to bring some of the expensive prized instruments back with him to New York in exchange for some capital to start his career. Frank’s formal photographic eye offers a counterpoint to Wurlitzer’s mannered, bone-dry dialogue, giving the film an offbeat, disjointed musical rhythm. It makes sense that the film is peppered with musicians: Arto Lindsay, Tom Waits, Dr. John, Joe Strummer and David Johnansen all make brief appearances along the way.

The road in Walker is one toward invasion and expansion. The madcap film, at once Wurlitzer’s most political and comical, tells the story of William Walker, who marched his way into Central America in the 1850s and, by force, became president of Nicaragua. The film is no historical epic or burdensome lecture. Filmed in Nicaragua during the United States-supported armed struggle in the 1980s, Walker uses techniques such as humor, stylized violence and blatant anachronisms to highlight its connections to the (then) present. Audiences were initially put off by the intentional breaks in the fantasy on screen. Now, the distancing techniques seem pertinent, even essential.

What you won’t find in the series is conventionality. In Wurlitzer’s work, the road is not a place for characters to come of age, to attain a long-sought goal or reach a cathartic point they never thought they would reach. Characters are blank slates in which identities can shift and transform; identification with them is not desired. Wurlitzer’s work defies easy meaning and has no intention of gently leading you in that direction. The process of viewing the films in Drop Edges of Yonder closely mirrors the states of being on screen. The trick: just go with the flow.

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April 29–May 5, Anthology Film Archives, 
32 2nd Ave., 
anthologyfilmarchives.org.

Wurlitzer appears April 29, along with Will Oldham, for a reading and conversation to mark the release of Oldham’s recent audio book version of Wurlitzer’s Slow Fade.