Plague Times Viewing (3) - Phillip Adams has a film which resonates - DUEL (Steven Spielberg, USA, 1972)

Frail human beings trying to deal with, duel with, a monstrous, implacable enemy. Remind of Spielberg’s movie Duel?  Just watched it for the umpteenth time to confirm my view that it’s close to the perfect film, more silent than ‘a silent’, 99% dependant on pure images. Images of a frail human being trying to deal with a monstrous, implacable enemy: a thumping great black oil road tanker, intent on his death.

Steven made his debut feature in 1971. He was just 25. He made it for just half a mill. And in a sense he’s made the same film over and over again. Pitting the frail against the pitiless.

Jaws? Replace the truck with a shark. Jurassic Park?  Tyrannosaurus Rex. In Schindler’s List the monstrous force is Nazism. In Saving Private Ryan, in War of the Worlds, the enemy is implacable, the odds overwhelmingly stacked against the hero. 

Even the lightweight Sugarland Express echoes Duel. Made two years later its strongest image is of another little car (occupied by Goldie Hawn) under the threat of far greater horsepower. Not one pursuing tanker but hundreds of pursuing squad cars. As the great philosopher Mortein once said ‘if you’re on good thing stick to it”.

What else helped Spielberg become the most commercially successful director in history? A sort of democratisation of the heroics, a dramatic demographic shift.  

Spielberg’s other central idea is the ‘burbs’.

Where Hollywood usually set movies in cities like NYC or Los Angeles Spielberg took his plots to where his audience lived – where they watched his movies in the multiplexes. Into the suburbs. The bloke in Duel lived in one. Ditto the family in ET. And talking of extra-terrestrials so did Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters. The UFO’s might have cast in their usual role as threatening, like Duel’s tanker, but Spielberg made them benign. Yet there’s still something of the frail human confronting implacable might in the plot. As another suburban bloke tries to make it to the landing site – actively discouraged by the power of the US military. And that notion is echoed in ET, as the children try to save their little friend from the combined threats of kids’ implacable enemies, human grown-ups. Both in and out of uniform.

(The Simpsons is another story told in a suburban setting. No LA for Matt Groening, no Law and Order or Sex in NYC for Homer, family, friends and the neighbours. Springfield might think of itself as a mighty metropolis but we know better. It’s just a big burb)  

Though hardly frail with his countless box office successes Spielberg often loses to a powerful enemy, a nemesis of his own creation. His OTT sentimentality. For all the austerity of Duel, for all the horrors of Schindler’s List, again and again he lapses into mawkishness you’re spared in the films of his contemporaries. I haven’t seen enough of Lucas to judge George – being allergic to Star Wars – but his Californian contemporary Francis Ford Coppola is hardly sentimental in the Godfathers– or Apocalypse Now. 

There’s an old expression in TV drama – “jumping the shark’. It marks the moment when exhausted scriptwriters go far too far in a plot from which their series will never recover. Similarly Spielberg jumps the emotional shark – and we’re not talking Jaws- with a moment in many of his movies when the entire audience squirms in its seats. If he can beat that like the little bloke in Duel beat the tanker nothing will stop him.