On The Amazon Wish List: "An Avatar Of Inchoate Rage"

Never seen it, but may have to enter the world of Netflix for this.

In fact, the entire production, as the critic J. Hoberman recounted in The Dream Life, his epic cultural history of the '60s, was the target of much federal snooping, with rumors swirling that Antonioni was planning a flag-burning scene and intended to shoot on the site of Robert Kennedy's assassination.

The production being Zabriskie Point. More from the review gets us more worked up.

Guitarist John Fahey, one of the musicians summoned to Rome to work on the soundtrack, came to blows with Antonioni when the maestro launched into an anti-American rant; Fahey would go on to describe Zabriskie Point as "a really terrible and long skin flick." [...] Mark breaks the vérité spell by sullenly declaring himself ready to die for the revolution "but not of boredom." Events proceed in a desultory trance. [...] The male lead, envisioned as an avatar of inchoate rage, was a bigger challenge. An audition in New York's East Village drew more than 1,000 hopefuls. Eventually Frechette, a carpenter who had spent time in psychiatric hospitals and belonged to the cultlike commune of the folk musician Mel Lyman, was found by casting scouts who saw him screaming obscenities at a bus stop in Boston. ("He's 20 and he hates," they reportedly said.)

20s, 50s, whatever ... Most of the 20 yr.-old's inchoate rage seems to have been lost, in translation or in that desultory stuff.

Mark and Daria (played by Frechette and Daria Halprin, nonactors in every sense), are too numb and inert to fulfill the myth of the glamorous outlaw.

Fine by us, really. We hate acting. The only form of life lower than a musician is an actor, as a matter of fact. (You could look it up.)

The finale, a jaw-droppingly literal vision of the end of consumer culture, makes a virtue of bluntness. After Mark dies, a bereft Daria arrives at her destination, a Modernist house perched on a desert hillside, and imagines its wholesale destruction. We see it blowing up, repeatedly, in slow motion. (Seventeen cameras were used.) For good measure, Antonioni also detonates sundry household objects, which sail through the frame as a Pink Floyd number plays: a clothes rack, a television, books, the contents of a refrigerator, including a loaf of Wonder Bread and a whole turkey. (The video for the recent Jay-Z single "D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune)" is a pointed homage, blowing up gold chains and bottles of Cristal as the rapper rails against pitch-correction software.)

Plus ça change, hein?Not that we were unaware of Zabriskie Point, mind you. We've just never seen it. The further details from the review indicate it's not dissimilar to one of our favorites of the era, More. (Also w/ a Pink Floyd soundtrack, when "the Floyd" was tolerable). So maybe we'll catch this through the magic of home delivery one of these eternities.