The Death Valley
Death ValleyMichelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970) is a realistic fiction film, a counter-culture story that tragically comes to life for lead actor, Mark Frechette.Initially closer to a road movie than a detective story, Zabriskie Point is nevertheless a film noir via its uncompromising look at late ‘60s North America. The investigation lies in its social reality. Shot at the very beginning of the following decade, without the hindsight necessary to analyze it all, it’s more of an interpretation, despite the film’s truthful account of that era. The deliberate casting of nonprofessional actors, unconventional sequence shots, a committed discourse and the obligatory original soundtrack (Pink Floyd, The Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia, The Youngbloods…) make it a work of unequivocal modernity.(In)questThe story of Zabriskie Point revolves around the absurd. Mark, the main character, witnesses the murder of a student by a policeman in the course of student demonstrations in Los Angeles in 1969. As he himself is armed, he flees aboard a stolen plane and flies over the desert. He becomes the ideal murder suspect. There’s nothing exciting about the chase that ensues; the investigation is dealt with quite randomly in the film. The interest lies rather in Mark’s flight, which finally turns out to be more of a quest than an escape. An encounter as lovely as it is improbable between the persecuted hero and Daria, a young woman longing for the sensory, ends by introducing the second location. An amorous parade between an old Buick and an airplane in Death Valley.Parallel Between Two WorldsOn one hand, we have Western society — Los Angeles, the student movements, race riots, repression and its boiling points, all shot in a quasi-documentary style with a hand-held camera and police sirens blaring in the background. On the other hand, a world populated with the ideas of lost, anti-establishment young people, across mind-blowing wide shots of the desert, where esthetics are praised and Pink Floyd’s music hypnotizes. A gap in the guise of a scene at the height of its protagonist’s despair.The Italian director’s vision of the United States remains very clichéd and reductive, not without a certain irony, almost a caricature. It denounces everything — from violence to the lack of culture, from arbitrary arrests to consumer society, all the way to the paranoia, and panic it engenders, of a generation that falls victim to its own innocence.HallucinosisAs if to reinforce that impression of two totally opposed universes, the reality of the facts is supplanted by phantasmagorical scenes that punctuate the character’s quest for the absolute. One orgiastic sequence in the desert propels us into the nitty-gritty of the sexual revolution. And the inevitable scene in which, dumbfounded, we witness consecutive explosions of all the symbols of a consumer society smashed to pieces. A fireworks display demolishing anything “superfluous” to smithereens. That unprecedented finale was to precede the film’s original last scene — an airplane trailing a banner emblazoned with the words, “Fuck you, America,” which was censored by Louis F. Polk, then president of MGM.Zabriskie Point’s poetry essentially resides in that mélange of pessimism in conjunction with an irrefutable estheticism.Tabloid Headlines, From Fiction to RealityMark Frechette, who was discovered by a talent scout and immediately cast by Antonioni, was very quickly caught up in a certain reality of the situation. From the streets to the location, from film to sect, from sect to tragedy, events mirroring the film itself are interconnected in a kind of novelistic vortex. Once shooting was completed, Frechette’s love affair with actress Daria Halprin led him into The Family sect, led my musician Mel Lyman — a cult with ideals similar to those of Charles Manson, but minus the violence.In August 1973, Mark Frechette and two other acolytes rob a bank not far from the sect’s refuge. The clan’s escape ends with the death of one of his accomplices. Despite the fact that his cartridge was empty, Frechette was arrested, convicted of murder, and was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. He was found dead in the Massachusetts Correctional Institution gym on September 27, 1975, asphyxiated by a barbell. His death was ruled accidental.
