| Patrick Clifford |
Image sourced from IMDB
Duel plays at the Heights Theater on Thursday, February 27th, as part of our collaboration on the 16th Noir Festival. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
The first frames of Steven Spielberg’s first film, Duel, are black. Total darkness. Before we see anything, we hear footsteps, a car door opening, and a car starting.
I love this movie. It’s a great ride. Released in 1971, it has everything that made the 70s, Hollywood’s greatest decade. And Spielberg was one of the young auteurs making the case. These mavericks were Hollywood’s first real students of world cinema. They had watched the European masters, Soviets, and Japanese. They were learning the language of film and the art of creating a story by manipulating pictures, sound, and time. Knowing how to master these elements translated to total audience mesmerization.
A few years before Spielberg would use sound to prevent every Gen X child from entering any body of water without fear of certain death by shark, he did a pretty masterful job of using sound to terrorize us in Duel.
We find out shortly after hearing the car start that we are leaving a garage. Going for a drive. Heading out to confront whatever the day brings. We are in the car, and for better and worse, we will never really leave it. At first, we hear the ambient sounds of city streets in morning rush hour, with a traffic report on our car radio promising congestion and misery on the road ahead. We can all relate. Eventually, we wind our way to the two-laned blacktop of the country. The radio has become more personable and switched to a call-in advice-seeking program. We hear the caller, a man, tell us he is not the head of his household. That he feels emasculated and submissive to his dominant wife. He is not an alpha, and he is ashamed. Around this time, we notice our car is coming up on a large, smoke-bellowing, dust-coated, rusty steel monster on wheels with a FLAMMABLE warning in bold red for all approachers to see. At this point, we see our driver, David Mann, played perfectly by Dennis Weaver, as he utters his first sound. A cough. Then another. He is dressed conservatively and neatly in a shirt and tie. His moustache is magazine cigarette ad ready. His yellow-tinted sunglasses are way cooler than he will prove to be—just like his car, a Plymouth Valiant, betrays his true personality with delightful irony. The duel has begun. It’s truck versus Mann, and we immediately know they are not at all alike.
After mumbling to himself about the truck’s interference, Mann decides to pass. When he does, we hear the weight of the truck’s rumbling machinery, followed by the loud rudeness of its deep, baritone horn blast. Both the rumbling and the horn will be the only sounds that come from the truck throughout the entire movie. They are all it needs. It is a force that announces its presence with authority and drowns out any pleas for mercy or reconciliation. Mann is already reluctant. He does not like confrontation, and he realizes he has confronted the truck.
We witness our first road rage cat-and-mouse session between the two before Mann decides to pull off for gas and a short-lived hope for quick resolution. At the gas station we hear the film’s first dialogue. The attendant tells Mann he might be soon in need of a radiator hose. When Mann says no thanks, the attendant replies, “You’re the boss.” Mann responds, “Not in my house I’m not.” To make that clear, he uses the gas station’s phone to call his wife and apologize. As she states in their call, she was “practically raped” last night by another man at a party and he did nothing about it. When Mann weakly promises to confront the man, the truck’s horn shouts from the pumps. It’s saying this is not a confrontation he can wiggle his way out of. It’s time to get back on the road.
Our next road battle ramps up the muscle of the truck’s determination while sending Mann deeper into his pit of self-doubt and timidity. This time he is forcibly shoved off the road at a café. He and his Valiant car are clearly shaken. In the café’s bathroom, we hear Mann’s inner dialogue with himself. It’s a conversation between the David Mann who wants to stand up for himself, and the one who prefers to take the easy way out. We first hear his dominant side imagine trying to confront the truck driver. To stand up to him and tell him that he’s crazy. But as he notices that the truck has also stopped at the café, his weaker, fearful side takes over the conversation. He covertly scans the cowboy boots lined up at the counter and dreams of escape. The loud bang of silverware getting tossed down in front of him rattles him back to reality. David Mann needs to keep running.
Short of its music, which was not composed by Jaws maestro John Williams, Duel’s soundtrack continues to turn up the volume on the film’s intensity throughout. The radio, by the second act, has turned to static, heightening Mann’s isolation and inability to communicate clearly. His spoken dialogue reveals more frustration. And the characters he speaks to, from school kids and old couples to snake wranglers and short-order cooks, all laugh at him and deride him for his deficiencies. The truck responds to these brief interactions by immediately cutting them off. Always with the blare of the horn, sometimes by literally smashing the conversation to pieces. Mann’s inner dialogue voiceovers only become more desperate and less convincing that he will ever choose to face his fears. He even imagines himself telling his wife after he gets home that evening that his trip was fine. That nothing happened. Oh Mann.
By the third act, the radio is off and there’s no more time for talk of any kind. It’s just tires and horns. Screeches and crashes. The sounds of a confrontation that will go as far as the road takes it. If you haven’t seen Duel yet, go to the Heights and check it out. If you have seen it, go to the Heights and remember how good it sounds to sit shotgun alongside a director who knows how to take you on a hell of a ride.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon
Great review. Good look at the “sounds” of Spielberg… that often go unnoticed. After seeing the “Fableman” flick, I can’t help but feel that Mr. Mann was modeled after young Stephen’s dad.