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An excoriation of the Eighties fetishizing of the Fifties, along the lines of Christine and Blue Velvet. The central image has Willem Dafoe swathed head to toe in leather, posed against roadside verdure and bathed in bluish light. As it did for Kenneth Anger, The Wild One provides Kathryn Bigelow and Monty Montgomery with a key into a culture's trance of polished metal and violent sensuality, l'amour et la mort. "This endless blacktop is my sweet eternity," declares the biker leader, "a weekend in the country" pits the daddy-os against leery, envious small-town squares. He steps into a café in a rhomboid composition set to Brenda Lee, then into a bit of Hawksian courting around the Corvette of the jailbait tomboy (Marin Kanter): "What's a bum gotta do to drive this thing?" "Turn the key." The gang hussy heads out for a Coke while the fellas throw switchblades between each other's legs, the tangled flesh of Dafoe and Kanter in the motel room is intercut with race-riot footage on a flickering TV screen. Finding the kinetic melancholia of this material is a job for Walter Hill (Streets of Fire), for angular, languid, deadpan distillation, there's no beating the tangible hunger for pure form here—the South is a coiled abstraction of extra-crimson soda machines and cavernous garages, a phosphorescent green cloud that surrounds a waitress as she strips down to her pointy bra. "Dollar chips in one big floatin' crap game." Lichtenstein pop contours for days, a disproportionate intensity humorously reflected in a bit where a matchstick is lit by a hail of bullets. With Robert Gordon, J. Don Ferguson, Tina L'Hotsky, and Lawrence Matarese.
--- Fernando F. Croce |