284. Pick-Up

284. Pick-Up (1975)
Director: Bernard Hirschenson
Writer: John R. Winter
From: Cult Cinema

Carol and Maureen climb onto Chuck’s RV only to get stranded in a swamp and have, respectively, a romantic and spiritual experience.

We open with an extreme close up of a thumb on a belt buckle that pulls back to reveal a fly being unbuttoned. Chuck starts pissing against the RV that he's supposed to be delivering for a company. Lovely start. The initial shot is aesthetically interesting: blurry close-up on the belt buckle and the slow focus-pull makes for an interesting and unique image. The cinematography in the film is pretty solid and inventive. That the film imagines that its cinematography communicates something deep and meaningful instead of an overly-long stream of piss is also a wholly appropriate reading.

Carol and Maureen are sitting in a field watching. Carol gets his attention and asks for a ride while Maureen keeps meditating. Maureen says they shouldn’t get on the RV because Chuck is an Aries and it’ll be a “bad trip.” I immediately started repeating, “Please, please, please be a comedy.”

Then nothing happens until the last minute of the film.

I’m being both inaccurate and unfair. Nothing interesting or worth watching happens, but everything that does happen returns at the end in a way that’s both pointless and galling.

They drive, Carol gets the attention of some guys riding in the back of a pick-up truck and dances for them in the front window of the RV. Bad weather comes, the RV is sent down several detours, and gets stuck in the swamp. Chuck doesn’t call his boss to relate the problem or try to find someone nearby for help. Instead, he and Carol go traipsing through the swamp and hook up. Maureen stays with the RV reading the Tarot.

Several scenes focus on Maureen and visions she may be having. They may also be actual incidents. The confusion is because it's that kind of movie--you know, inept.

First, she’s told she’s the servant of Apollo. She finds an altar in the swamp, lies on it naked, and comes. Later there’s a flashback to her as a child playing the organ in a church (played by the adult Maureen except with pigtails). The priest comes in and molests her. (As the scene went on, I was less and less bothered that they put this adult woman in pigtails and had her play a child instead of casting a child). Then a senator seeking reelection finds the RV and tries to convince Maureen to vote for him. He has small placards in front of him that say he’s both 1000% for and against each issue. I’m not sure if the scene’s trying to make some political statement or be a moment of broad comedy, but it fails at both. To be fair, the scene did make me devolve into giggles repeating, “What the fuck is this movie?” Finally, Maureen sees a clown in the swamp with a bunch of balloons. She laughs at it, receives a balloon, and then is horrified and runs away when it takes off its mask.

Between all these strange sequences are a variety of sex scenes between Carol and Chuck. We do get one flashback of Carol as a 16-year-old (again played by the adult in pigtails). It’s another hook-up scene. While this one’s consensual, it’s still creepy. You have an adult woman pretending to be a child hooking up with someone who looks like he may actually be 16. Pick the part you find most unnerving.

Approaching the end, Maureen finally hooks up with Chuck. She imagines it happening at the altar she came on before. The three figures—the priest, the clown, and the politician—all menace her but are driven away by Chuck’s fuck eyes. Meanwhile, Carol wakes up, starts dancing around the fire, and the guys from the pick-up truck at the start find her. It goes how you’d expect since, don’t you know, sexual assault means it’s a serious movie with themes.

Chuck and Maureen spot a plane flying overhead the next morning and, when trying to wave it down, find Carol’s body. Suddenly we cut back to the beginning of the movie. Maureen opens her eyes as though the entire film was a vision she had when meditating. This time, though, Maureen is happy that Chuck is an Aries and eagerly gets in the RV. The RV drives off as the clown’s balloons fly up from behind it. THE END.

“Interminable” would be one of the words I’d use to describe this movie. Also “ill-conceived.” The people involved clearly watched too much of the new American underground and misunderstood what made those movies good. This tries to have the same subversion of form and narrative that films like Easy Rider have, but not the sense of what is communicated by subverting those forms. So the movie imagines itself as an imagistic spiritual meditation on America while throwing the culture’s hang-ups with religion, property, and sex back in its face. Only it doesn’t. This is a film by the edgelords of hippiedom who imagined that free love and free drugs would destroy the system. Coincidentally, I’m about to reread Brave New World, you know, the dystopian novel about a population kept under the thumb of the ruling class through hedonistic indulgence of sex and drugs? The novel written in 1932?

The movie’s neither clever, nor interesting and the cinematography, while nice, isn’t nice enough to entertain for the seventy-seven minute runtime. Skip it.