Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson, 1970)

This is a tough one. Structurally, it's hypnotic. It drifts from scene to scene with no imperative to create strong connective tissues in between. Especially in the first half, episodes occur at unspecified temporal junctures. And even as the narrative generates more forward motion in the second half, the increased linearity does not push the story towards a resolution of an enigma or the result of a high-stakes contest. All of which is fitting for a tale about a drifter with no direction in life.

Too bad the film had to have a star at the helm because Five Easy Pieces is one of the most obnoxious displays of toxic American individualism ever pinned to celluloid. Jack Nicholson plays one Robert "Bobby" Eroica Dupea, a disaffected musician who has given up a promising career (and the upper-middle-class values that go along with it) to work with the salt of the earth at an oil rig - ya know, where real, honest labor happens. Think of Five Easy Pieces as a sequel of sorts to Office Space (Mike Judge, 1999) in which Judge, not knowing what do with his antihero at the end of the film, gets him a job in construction, presumably free of the mind fuckery of his former employment as a white-collar drone. Bobby cannot even handle the oil rig job and soon he's off drifting. The de facto road movie that ensues indulges in at least three instances of the venal gotta-move-on-babe-don't-hold-me-back macho frontier spirit with respect to his girlfriend, the admittedly irritating Rayette Dipesto (Karen Black). The last instance is, of course, the final shot when Bobby strands Rayette at a gas station, a shot of extreme profundity for some, the height of assholism for others. 

There's also the famous "chicken salad sandwich" scene in which Bobby abuses a waitress for menu policies she had no hand in creating. The scene is played for laughs but it's funny only to those who fail to conceive of waitressing as labor. And it rings false besides since the waitress (crucially, she's unnamed but played by Lorna Thayer) would have just given Bobby whatever he wanted to end his harassment of her. All this before he reaches home in Puget Sound where he signals his superiority to his family and their friends at every turn.

Rafelson could have made the self-absorption go down with less stomach upset had he engaged in any kind of distanciation techniques. But we are clearly meant to be in awe of Bobby's rugged individuality. Take the early scene in which Bobby and his co-worker Elton (Billy "Green" Bush) are driving to the oil rig at a crawl on a crowded highway. Enraged at the standstill, Bobby jumps out of the car and makes a spectacle of himself, jumping on a car, barking at a dog, and unaware that his fellow travelers may be equally put out. He hops on the back of a pick up and plays an out-of-tune piano while Elton cheers his rebelliousness. Just look at that crazy kid and his shenanigans. 

Rafelson keeps cutting back to Elton to posit him as our surrogate as we're sutured into the scene. In a moment of epic dorkiness, he mimics Bobby's piano playing (I thought the New Hollywood was supposed to deliver us from the corniness of classical Hollywood cinema).

 

 Then he applauds Bobby before coaxing him back into the car.

All the while, the drivers are honking because Bobby is holding up traffic. Oh if only these zombies could recognize Bobby's esprit.  

 

But lo, Bobby ignores Elton and hitches a ride with the pick up truck, blowing off work with no apparent consequences, a luxury unavailable, one has to assume, to the drivers who can't hold their horses.

There's a hilarious sequence with Helena Kallianiotes and Toni Basil as lesbian hitchhikers, the former fabulously (and hyperbolically) cranky. Nicholson's eleventh-hour breakdown in front of his ailing father is a justifiably fantastic piece of acting. And some will claim that we are not supposed to be in awe of Bobby, that we can identify with the drivers instead of Elton. I'll leave you to debate that while I take in 1970 films of much greater substance such as Hollis Frampton's Zorns Lemma or Andy Milligan's Torture Dungeon. 

Grade: B+