Who blew up the house?
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Khayyam1048 — 13 years ago(April 08, 2012 04:57 PM)
Exactly right. Mainstream America doesn't come out of the film terribly well, to put it mildly (consisting essentially - in Antonioni's sharply-observed vision - of corporate despoilers, thuggish police, mean-spirited small-businessmen and philistine, lumpen-conformist, consumerist Mr and Mrs America (and Junior)), but this doesn't mean that our sympathies are supposed to rest firmly, automatically and unconditionally with the student rebels or with Mark Frechette and Daria (although she is almost certainly the most sympathetic of the available options).
What is it with you young people (I'm 52)? Are you so narcissistic or lacking in empathy that you must always have heroes and heroines that you can identify with, or simply-stated causes (spelt out in letters six feet high just in case anyone misses the point) that you can subscribe to? Have you altogether lost the capacity to cope with ambiguity or uncertainty?
This film was never likely to be a commercial success, even at the time of its release, and - given the collapse in the rigour of public education that has gathered pace in the intervening 40 years or so - it is even less likely to be understood or appreciated now. There is plenty of simple-mindedly distracting fodder currently available at your local multiplex if you don't want to make the fairly modest mental effort a film like this demands.
To me Zabriskie Point is a model of narrative clarity, and Antonioni's contempt for the existing establishment and his reservations about the moral and intellectual coherence of the would-be rebels are conveyed subtly but forcefully. (Rather like the improvisatory instrumentals of the Pink Floyd and the Grateful Dead that constitute most of the soundtrack, the freewheeling core of the film is bookended (and contextualised) by tighter thematic statements.) -
CaliCurmudgeon — 13 years ago(April 08, 2012 06:23 PM)
This film was never likely to be a commercial success,
That would be news to Metro Goldwyn Mayer, who definitely wanted to cash in on the youthful moviegoer demographic (of the day), had seen the success of "Blow Up", and thought Antonioni would deliver. Word is that some heads rolled among the studio execs for financing this "Golden Turkey".
Sorry, but here you clearly DON'T understand Hollywood. Leftist pretensions of so many of them aside, this was a box office disaster, and it stung them badly. -
aktowfik — 21 years ago(March 16, 2005 03:57 PM)
One point that should be put in mind is this: The guy doesn't understand America. The events take place in America and the actors are american, but everything seems dubbed from italian. The old illusions that americans have; that's everything that comes from Europe is deep, highly cultured and should be taken seriously well.. this trick never fails. Personally, I think the guy didn't have a clue of what he was talking about. He wanted to create a nude love orgy in the desert for the hell of it. He wanted to see a house exploding and let these people abroad stay up late wondering who blew it (I think it happened in her mind). These ideas were extremely successful in that era, but we can never understand this atmosphere now. Hippies are already in their early fifties now, and the world is getting gloomily wise for these european games.
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SolidChris — 20 years ago(July 18, 2005 06:39 AM)
I think, as a European who has spent time in America myself, Antonioni understood America extremely well. It isn't too difficult to understand that at one time young people thought that they could make a real difference, they thought that the world could be better but they were confused and frustrated at the same time.
Antonioni seems to be predicting the unstoppable advancement of America - it's relentless obliteration of other cultural ideals in the face of overwhelming capitalism. I'm not saying this is wrong or right just that it has happened and continues to unabated.
I like America i think it is a wonderful place and it has an admirable set of ideals as its core but there is a lot of things wrong in the culture and i believe that Antonioni tried to bring this to the surface unfortunately his cinema language is very difficult to understand and it passed plenty of people by. I love this film i think it is truly unique. -
Comic_Book_Guy — 20 years ago(July 27, 2005 08:12 AM)
I just saw the 35mm print at a local arthouse, and found the movie boring for the most part. Being a Deadhead/Floydhead, I wanted to see the movie because of the soundtrack more than anything, but was also interested in whether or not the movie succeeded in saying anything about the 60's generation.
While I think Antonioni captures some of the major points about the hippie generation (rebelling against traditional values, the anger and frustration caused by their failure to effect change through accepted channels), the movie seems to say that America's Baby Boomers were just adrift in a dead land, wasting their time (and ours) making love and running from the law. As an eyewitness and student of the era, I can say he never gets to the core of what drove the Baby Boomers. It oversimplifies a generation who so changed the world for the better that it's taken 30 years for the CEO's and corrupt politicians to change it back.
The sad part is that the most brilliant portion of the film, the explosion of the house and its contents to one of Pink Floy'd best songs, failed to ring true. The girl looks back on the opulent house where the business of explointing the Earth is being conducted. It is the symbol of all the things wrong with America and Western Civilization in general. In her mind she explodes the house, supposedly destroying the idea of it in her mind. And yet, as history has shown, most of the Baby Boomer generation sold out in the 80's, trading in their VW microbuses for BMW's, their youthful idealism for traditional values and their socialism for captialism. The prediction of the exploding house was never truly fulfilled. In the early 21st, it's business as usual again.
It's still a movie with a great soundtrack, and there are scenes that capture the energy of the era, but if you want to gain further insight into America's war with itself, watch a movie like "Little Big Man." -
mrs_danvers — 20 years ago(October 01, 2005 01:51 AM)
I just saw Zabriskie Point in a program with many of Antonioni's other films. Although I think Antonioni is one of the masters of cinema, I think this is one of his minor works. I mean, some of his Italian films are truly magnificentwhat am I saying, ALL of his post neorealist and modernist films are a revelation. Concerning the question of whether his representation of America as an European sucks or not in ZP, I would say it is pretty good. It reminds me of that coffee table book by BaudrillardAmerican signs and vast wasteland landscapes are fodder for Europeans who think they're Marxists. The way that America looks on the surface is so easy to attack from this perspective because frankly, American strip malls and billboard advertising is really a really depressing reminder of the ends of capitalism. Another great European perspective on Amerircan vapidness and emptiness (figurative and litera) is Paris, Texas by Wim Wenders. Anyway, Antonioni's critique of Americahis amazingly striking photography of the pop nonsense of the commercial landscape is far out, man. No, sarcasm aside, some of these images are great, I just don't think this film gels well. It's just a bit too groovy for me. And the dialogue as usual, sux. I prefer La Notte.
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UHUstic — 20 years ago(January 18, 2006 02:51 PM)
Zabriskie Point is an analysis of the idea of late '60s American counterculture and capitalism; Antonioni's USA is not intended to be real. Note that his fixation on corporate signage, though vapid in a Warhol-ish kind of way, is very, very beautiful and then contrast that beauty with Mark and Daria's elemental sexiness (they're quite like Adam and Eve, and should be understood as archetypes rather than "actual" people). The orgy scene pairs their desperate sensuality, their (wasted) youth, with the sterility and death of the landscape the same landscape that Rod Taylor's character is trying to exploit (he's a developer). Essentially, America in ZP is a kind of rotten canvas onto which both the counterculture and big business try to spill themselves. And throughout the whole film we have Daria wondering if the complete and total annihilation/reappropriation of America via revolution, catastrophe, corruption, whatever could be feasible, or even desirable. Her epiphany (the exploding house sequence) is not a direct answer, but a remarkable suggestion: i.e., that destroying beautiful things, even the possibility of destroying them, is at that moment at least, which is, after all, her and her generation's fleeting, luxurious, shining moment - more beautiful than the things themselves could ever be.
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Clemencedane — 13 years ago(May 20, 2012 11:54 PM)
it's taken 30 years for the CEO's and corrupt politicians to change it back.
I hate to tell you this, but "the CEOs and corrupt politicians" who changed things back from the Nirvana that the Baby Boomers allegedly created are themselves Baby Boomers. It's the Boomers who changed. Little gremlins didn't come and undo the Flower Children's work. Flower Children became CEOs and politicians and undid it themselves. -
blade04runner — 20 years ago(March 11, 2006 05:03 PM)
well my american friend..We (europeans) can easily understand whats going on in your country..It has been, and it is today (even worst) very much like Antonioni shows itAnd most of all, (wait and see), the last seen, sooner or later is going to be the final act of the American dream
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CaliCurmudgeon — 19 years ago(August 04, 2006 03:00 PM)
Oh really? You Europeans stagnate, decay, and allow muslim savages to reduce you to dhimmitude in your own countries, and you claim to understand the one major nation that tries to fight the savagery to which you feebly succomb?
Mr. Antonioni's ending did resonate with a message; however, it probably wasn't the one that he intended. The message? That the "counterculture" ended with nothing but fantasies of nihilistic destruction, nothing constructive came of it.
Fortunately, not too much destructive came of it either, other than the whole wretched 1970's decade. We are still recovering from that damage! -
Khayyam1048 — 13 years ago(April 08, 2012 05:13 PM)
As a European myself (I'm English in spite of my monicker) I understand what you're saying, but you have to understand that our "dhimmitude" (which I entirely deplore) is not entirely self-inflicted. Have a good look at an atlas of the world and see what countries partly encircle us in a rather apt Islamic crescent. (Note, in particular, our relative closeness to Israel and the Middle East.)
The United States, on the other hand, is the filling in the club sandwich between sparsely-populated Canada (whose political-correctness imitates the silliest excesses of Western Europe and especially Britain) and a pullulating, lawless but at least Roman Catholic Mexico. In other words, the relative conditions of Europe and America vis-a-vis Islamisation are to no little extent accidents of geography as much as products of policy. -
CaliCurmudgeon — 13 years ago(April 08, 2012 06:32 PM)
And yet, somehow, some way, the Israelis stand firm. And these are Jewish people, so many of whom throughout history have been prone to intellectual navel-gazing and wishfully ignoring deadly threats until it is too late for a good many of them.
It is sad to see what Canada, the UK and much of the Anglosphere have been reduced to. Churchill's ghost weeps, and I can only hope Maggie in her senescence does not know what her beloved land has come to. -
chacowalla — 19 years ago(August 19, 2006 07:23 PM)
I think you're on to something with yor comments both about Antonioni's motivation doing something because it was cool to see and the way we Americans grovel before and enrich anything that comes from an European perspective. To me , the characcters were detached in much the same way that Mersault in The Stranger was detached. They also kind of remind me of the Beat generation with their alienation and coolness. I saw the movie back in my youth when it first was released I was with a bunch of UCLA anthro students who were so detached and so cool that Charles Manson could have walked through the door and someone would have handed him a beer and asked him
"hey, what's happenin' Dude?" -
thomas_nielsen72 — 19 years ago(October 08, 2006 07:08 PM)
It is so disturbing to read how ignorant and arrogant people can be. And to read their response to a movie which does not apply to the quality of their intelligence is even worse. How come some Americans are so blind to the views of other cultures and nationalities? Is it because these Americans, so absorbed in their own trivial lifes, think that the American way is the only way? ZP truly shows how wrong it is - and stupid!!! Like when the cops shot the leading actor in the plane. America as a whole is degrading, only protecting property of the rich, exploiting everything since the arrival of the pioneers, and protecting their own interests in any way possible. Remember that the nukes which took out Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not necessary for the Japan campaign. It was to show their might to the entire world. One which has turned "The American Dream" into a "Global Nightmare". Blowing up the house was in comparison to the contemporary propaganda footages of nuclear tests in Nevada, with multiple angles and high-speed cameras. I think he tried to get back at the American Way with the same strong visuals, reminding the audience of how fragile materialism is - and maybe urging them to find a more stabile future.
P.S: I am Danish! I'm sure some Americans will be enraged now, but I tell you what. My country is not to celebrate either. Espeially not now, where Danish culture and values are being interupted by neo-Capitalist, neo-Conservative, neo-Liberal and even neo-Fascist views of the American Dream. For me the movie is still as contemporary as it was back then - and Global. The world has truly stepped back a couple of steps, and it is time to learn the lesson and use inspiration such as this movie for a better future. BLOW UP THE HOUSE!!!
Muhahahaha