cinema history class: duel

Session: TV Terrors, Week 2
Movie: Duel (1972)
Directed by Steven Spielberg

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Plot:
A salesman, driving to meet a client, encounters a sociopathic truck driver who wants him dead. Horror ensues.

Reaction and Other Folderol:

Let me start by noting that the original version of Duel was a 74-minute made for TV movie. But Spielberg and company shot and added some extra scenes to lengthen it for the European cinema market. What we watched was the lengthened version which the extra scenes. I bring this up now because I will refer to the added scenes below and I want to give context.

When I was summarizing the plot (above), I initially characterized the salesman as "mild-mannered." Upon reflection I took that part out because the character, David Mann, isn't really mild-mannered. And that's a big part of the problem. To put it in perspective, let me suppose -- hypothetically, of course -- that I am in Mann's shoes. I'm on a long drive, and I get caught behind a slow-moving, smoke-belching tanker truck. When I have an opportunity I pass the truck. The trucker's response is to come roaring past me and then brake-check me. What would I do? I might figure out an alternate route. I might give up on my meeting and go home. Most likely I would simply drive behind the truck -- even at the cost of going annoyingly slowly and inhaling fumes. But Mann decides to do battle with the truck. He becomes a willing participant in the titular duel, even though he has seen that the trucker has a screw loose. And he continues the duel, even as the truck driver makes his murderous intentions clear.

And that flaw in the plot -- the idea that Mann, despite being outgunned, allows himself to get into this duel -- is why Christina and Bob rated the movie a 9.5 instead of a 10. I was willing to look past this flaw because not everyone is as sweet and accommodating as I am. But, in fact, one of the added scenes helps to explain Mann's possible motivations. At a gas station, Mann calls his wife who is apparently angry at him about his inaction at a party the prior night. It's not clear exactly what happened, but she characterizes another man's actions as practically raping her. And Mann failed to defend her to the degree that she feels he should have. This implicit challenge to his manhood could have been a factor in his aggression. That said, the phone call comes after the first round of sparring. Of course, since it's kind of a continuation of an argument from the night before or the morning, we can infer that Mann had already had his manhood challenged and it was on his mind as he set out on the open road.

Related, during the early part of the movie before Mann first encounters the truck, he is listening to talk radio as he drives along. For an extended time he hears a man questioning some census form. He is being asked whether he is the head of his household. He feels he isn't the head because he's a househusband and his wife earns the money. But he doesn't want to say "no" because he worries about what his friends will think. So that bit may have been intended to explain Mann's motivation.

One of the amazing things about Duel is the way Spielberg creates dread of the truck. He turns it into an animal, and gives it the same sense of menace as we see in Jaws, or the titular menace in the Alien series of movies. We never see the trucker's face -- we rarely see any of him. Occasionally we see his arm or his feet. But they seem to be nothing more than extensions of the truck/monster.

The simple fact about this movie is that it got my adrenaline up and it got my heart pumping in a way that few movies do these days. And that's having seen it several times and therefore always knowing what's coming. For it to have that effect on me, it deserves all ten of the points I gave it.

Ratings

Me: 10

Bob: 9.5

Christina: 9.5
Joe: 10*

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* or 10.5 or 11 or 11.2 or 11.9, depending on what point in the post-screening portion of the evening we're talking about. Don't get me started.