Conference bookie::movies

1212.0. "Vanishing Point" by BUSY::SLAB (As you wish) Tue Jan 28 1997 16:01

    	There are spoilers in here, so read at your own risk.
    
    
"Tighten your seat belt. You never had a trip like this before."

-Vanishing Point movie poster 
                                         
                                         
For the most part, there are two kinds of movies. There are movie movies, and
there are movie snob movies. It's the rarest of films that's honestly both.
Vanishing Point (1971) is, I think, one of them. It isn't that everybody likes
it -- people tend to either fall instantly and forever in love with it or think
it's the most stupid f***ing thing they've ever seen. The range of people who
love this movie, though, is amazing. Cult movie geeks, muscle car enthusiasts,
fringe artist-types and blue collar workers all adore it. 
                                         
Like many subjects of fanatical adoration, this movie is almost impossibly
simple -- the plot is so "high concept" it sounds like a joke when you first
hear it. "A guy is driving through the desert, and the cops try to stop him,
and he won't stop, and eventually he has every cop in the world after him." And
that's it. I mean, obviously there's more, but that's basically it.

It was inevitable that somebody was going to remake it. I suppose it was also
somewhat predictable that it would be the Fox television network, Vanishing
Point being a Fox property. Most predictable of all was that the remake would
be a complete joke.

What wasn't inevitable or obvious was that Vanishing Point, that bridge between
eggheads and gearheads, would be turned in on itself and made ugly and
divisive.

The Old School

In the original, a former race-car driver and cop named Kowalski (Barry Newman)
drives into Denver late one night, delivering a car. He gets hold of another
vehicle, a 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T (this is one stud machine, for those of us
on the egghead side of life), scores some speed, and is off immediately,
heading back to the Bay Area. Some cops try to pull him over, he doesn't want
to be pulled over, and a four-state chase ensues. He becomes a media star along
his drug-fueled way, and is aided by an assortment of freaks. Freakiest of all
freaks is Super Soul (Cleavon Little), a blind DJ at station KOW, with whom
Kowalski develops a seemingly supernatural bond. Super Soul becomes Kowalski's
alter ego/guardian angel/greek chorus, helping, praising, and ultimately
suffering along with him when angry citizens rise up and destroy the station.
Eventually, of course, Kowalski can't run anymore, and rather than give up, he
gets up speed and runs the Challenger (it's not really a '70 Challenger used in
the crash, any good movie/car geek can tell you--it's a '69 Camaro) into a
police roadblock and dies.

The remake ran on Fox's "Tuesday Night Movie" on January 7th, and stars Viggo
Mortensen as Kowalski (the only way I can forgive Mortensen for this is by
imagining him going "Vanishing Point? F*** yeah!" before he'd actually seen the
script). If the only thing you liked about the first movie was the car, you'll
love this one -- same car, and it's pretty much the star of the movie. The new
script replaces Super Soul with a populist "shock jock" named "The Voice"
(90210's Jason Priestly). Any wee hopes I had for this thing were killed in the
first minute, when I realized what the setup was going to be.

Vanishing Point is about my favorite 70's antihero movie, and it still stands
as a nearly perfect example of that genre. There is no setup and little
backstory. Kowalski drives into town and drives back out immediately against a
friend's good advice. He doesn't have any particular reason not to pull over
for the cops -- he just doesn't want to. He wants to be left alone -- if what
he's doing is technically illegal, who gives a crap? He's out in the middle of
nowhere, and the only person he's going to potentially hurt driving 100+ mph is
himself. Kowalski is a man who has had much more than enough (that's obvious
from frame one -- the occasional flashes of his past life just confirm what we
already knew) and wants to be left alone, whether or not his cause is just or
sane or even a cause at all.

The New School

The remake turns this Camus-on-crank fable into a combination of The Incredible
Journey with muscle cars instead of cute animals and populist nonsense like
Convoy. Hey, we can all sympathize with this Kowalski--he's got an ailin' wife
and a baby comin' to get home to! (Mrs. Kowalski being another 90210 alumnus.)
And he's not an ex-cop who saw other cops rape runaways, anymore -- he's a
heroic Gulf War veteran who was disciplined for disobeying orders, just for
doing what was right. Added to this is an idiotic and repulsive attempt to tie
into anger over the events at Ruby Ridge and Waco.

This last bit shoots itself in the foot for a couple of reasons. For one thing,
Kowalski's predicament isn't anything like the situations at Ruby Ridge or
Waco. No matter what G. Gordon Liddy would have you believe, in neither of
those cases were people just "trying to live their lives" when the government
suddenly burst in to ruin the party. That government abuses and mismanagement
resulted in unnecessary harm is undeniable in both cases -- but these are both
situations involving groups of people who were not so much interested in
fleeing tyranny (to paraphrase Gore Vidal) as in creating their own, and in
both cases they got tripped up by an enthusiasm for arming themselves for war,
entrenched themselves, and received the consequences of taking on the ZOG or
the Antichrist or whatever.

Blind Color Casting

This revision also fails because the overreaction of law enforcement, surreal
and ominous in the original, is just plain stupid in the remake. In the 1971
version, the cross-country chase snowballs silently and surely. In the remake
we have to see a bunch of expository scenes in which the evil FBI honcho
(here's the film's black lead -- blacks being omnipresent in the upper echelons
of federal law enforcement, after all) explains that they can't have another
Waco, so the wisest thing to do is assume, based on Kowalski's Idaho residence,
that he's a militia member carrying explosives and/or drugs and hunt him
accordingly. And hunt him they do, using car after car, a helicopter, and
eventually NSA satellite tracking equipment.

At least the transformation of the black DJ character into a lily-white one
made some sense as soon as I saw this stuff coming -- "Remember Ruby Ridge"
would have sounded pretty silly coming out of Cleavon Little.

The result of these transparent attempts to turn Kowalski, Mark II into a "man
of the people" and a hero is that he succeeds as neither. The original
Kowalski, who acts for no particularly good reason, has become both over time.
I think I know why that is, and what the makers of the remake got completely
wrong.

Our motivations, as humans, are not as simple as pop psychologists, preachers
and makers of lame TV movies would like them to be. Most of what happens to
most of us, and much of what we do is, if we're honest about it, fairly random.
We are not rewarded for our good deeds, nor are we unduly punished for them,
usually. Most evil, as C.S. Lewis points out in his preface to The Screwtape
Letters, is not thrilling and conspiratorial -- it's banal and nearly
unconscious. Popular notions like conspiracy theories capture imaginations for
the same reason romance novels do -- they provide escape from mundane
existence. Kowalski's story, in the original Vanishing Point, does not provide
release -- for all its fantasy, it's true. You suspect that you'll end up dying
the way Kowalski does, in some fashion -- that one day the choices you've made
will suddenly join circumstances to back you into a corner and you won't get
out. That many of us would like to go out nobly the way he does in the remake
is a given -- but really, how many of us will? And how many of us will just
walk into the wrong convenience store, or drive too fast around the same corner
we always do, or find ourselves in a tub with a razor or looking at a mass in
an X-ray?

In the quest to make Kowalski accessible, the TV movie has been stripped of
every fantastic touch. Gone is the psychic connection between Kowalski and the
DJ -- "The Voice," in this movie, only exists to help turn Kowalski into Randy
Weaver. Gone with the character's blackness is the wonderfully bizarre
placement of a funky-ass spade DJ in an isolated little cowtown. Gone with that
(and because it's not in keeping with the Kowalski-as-white-folk-hero theme) is
the attack on the station by the white residents of the town.

To re-inject the wonder, a pointless "vision quest" and equally pointless
backstory about a trapped mountain lion (guess what -- the lion turns out to be
Kowalski's spirit guide -- yaaaawn) have been added, and in the most bizarre
move in the whole mess, the movie has been turned into a quest for Christian
faith. The setting of the story ("Friday" to "Sunday" in the original) has been
moved to the Passion Week, and a subplot involves Mrs. Kowalski's Catholic
faith and Kowalski's struggle to reconcile himself with her beliefs. When she
dies, Mrs. Kowalski gets to come back as a really annoying 90210 angel.

Revisionist History

Worse than all these horrors, though, is that the ending has been changed.
Kowalski turns out to be D.B. Cooper. Somehow, impossibly, he jumped out of the
car and got away. On a highway. At 185 mph. In front of crowds of cheering
onlookers and waiting cops. This is mentioned only as a possibility by "The
Voice," as no body was ever found, but we see a series of shots that show
Kowalski's best buddy finding his St. Christopher medal a ways off the road,
and a future Kowalski and his little girl hiding out somewhere in purple
mountains' majesty.

What was a really simple, strange, and even subtle (for what is, in essence,
the dumbest car chase movie ever) exploration of the heart of man, of
individuality, and of life in general has been co-opted and twisted into a
stupid, mean and (I would argue) ultimately racist piece of crap that doesn't
even have the attraction of being fun to watch. A universal cry of despair at
how little we take from life and what it exacts in return, that has bound
wildly disparate groups of people for nearly three decades, has been turned
into an altar call, into yet another rant by the "oppressed" whites of America,
into a sermon on the bad government that punishes people for doing what's right
-- in other words, into a tract for the status quo. I've been pissed off by
remakes before, but this one didn't just anger me, it sickened me.

It's still a cool car, though.

Vanishing Point (1971) is available on VHS video tape and on laserdisc from
CBS/FOX, and can be found for rent at most video stores. The remake will
probably be out for rent in a week or so, but who cares?