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In the counter-culture of the 60s and 70s a lot of films
appeared that resembled a kind of recontextualization of The
Odyssey, that Homeric classic that sings the ten-year
long wanderings of Odysseus who is diverted and blown-off
course again and again as he makes his way home to Ithaca.
These cinematic recontextualizations all contain the original Odyssey's
characteristic longissima via, the long snake-like
path "whose labyrinthine twists and turns", Jung
points out, "are not lacking in terrors." But they
also contain a new element: there is often no 'home', or
for that matter any goal at all, that the central protagonists
are heading towards – they wander with the open road
before them and without any clear idea of where they are
going. Jung tended to view such undirected wanderings as
a symptom of the modern individuals' estrangement from the
ground plan of his own guiding instincts. It could certainly
be taken as a marker of the modern human condition and one
that hints at the less positive side of a remarkable period.
Cisco Pike can be seen in this light.
The 60s are over and Cisco ( Kris Kristofferson ) wants to
renounce his life of dope-dealing dope-taking epicureanism
and reclaim the successful music career he once had. The
film begins with an ironic scene: Cisco trying to pawn one
of his guitars so he has some hard cash to help him on his
feet with his music career. Its irony, however, is almost
over-looked by director Bill L. Norton, and only becomes
apparent in retrospect. Though Cisco knows the direction
he wants his life to take, this scene makes clear that he
goes about setting his bearings in all the wrong ways. This
inability to find his bearings is a central thrust of the
film and is reflected in one of the songs composed for the
soundtrack by Kristofferson, the now-famous The
Pilgrim (Chapter 33) whose chorus would be quoted
in Schrader-Scorsese's Taxi Driver a couple
years later: "H e's a poet, he's a picker, he's a prophet,
he's a pusher/ He's a pilgrim and a preacher and a problem
when he's stoned/ He's a walking contradiction, partly truth
and partly fiction/ Taking every wrong direction on his lonely
way back home."
Though his starring role debut, (he had a bit-part in Dennis
Hopper's little-seen The Last Movie, released
in 1971), Kristofferson vividly inhabits the role of Cisco
and holds his own against actors of such stature as Gene
Hackman (who already had 10 years of movies under his belt
and previous experience in the role of frustrated explosive
full-of-anger redneck cop) and now-cult-figure, (thanks in
part of Wenders' Paris, Texas, releasedin
1984), Harry Dean Stanton who'd already been in classics
such as Cool Hand Luke and had begun his
career back in '57 as Pvt. Miller in Tomahawk Trail .
Kristofferson's performance works because his acting career
was not treated as merely an adjunct to his music career,
as merely a way of giving him greater exposure. As such,
neither the film nor Kristofferson burdens his character
with a 'cool' onscreen image, a fanciful imagining of how
he wishes to be seen, (compare Kristofferson's character,
for example, to Bob Dylan's appearance in Sam Peckinpah's Pat
Garrett & Billy the Kid two years later in which
Dylan spends the entire movie trying to project an image
of himself as the mysterious, almost mystic, loner. In fact,
Dylan's character is continually suggesting an importance
that, by the film's end, is seen as an empty pretension).
Kristofferson plays a failed musician – a washed-up
junkie – a man who can't even keep his girlfriend around.
His music image is left solely to the four songs on the soundtrack,
and resultingly he is freed from the constraints of pop celebrity
and has the room he needs to develop his character. Over
the years Kristofferson has continued acting and has always
set him image aside when he steps in front of the camera.
Bill L. Norton is not primarily a director of feature films. Cisco
Pike is his directorial debut, and the rest of
his career has mostly been in television where to this
day he still directs episodes of series such as Threshold, Medium, The
Guardian and Hack. His rather
straightforward conventional style certainly draws its
interest from the demands of the small screen. He always
has his eye on the human interaction and emotional content
of a scene – the one scene where he allows himself
the luxury of an 'artistic' top shot, looking at the character
in frame from above, it is in a very evident way placed
in the service of expressing the character's predicament.
Cisco and Jesse Dupre (H.D. Stanton) are partying late – Jesse needs some
smack. He shoots up in a bathroom, and we get a kind of
sinking feeling that this will be his last trip. Needles,
drug paraphernalia and toiletries are scattered everywhere.
Jesse falls into the tub. Here we have our first above
shot, Jessie lying there motionless for second or two.
Then the above shot is repeated after he OD's, his wiry
arm jutting out from his body, the coldness of bathroom
helping to accentuate the hard edge that existence can
take on, and the utter emptiness of Jessie's own life,
and by extension, of Cisco's too.
H.D. Stanton's character, Jesse Dupre, is in a similar
position to Cisco: he's trying to put his life back on track,
but is also unable to. Not because, like Cisco, he's being
blackmailed by a corrupt cop into selling dope to pay the
cop's debts, and not because he's doomed in some greater
cosmic sense like every second or third movie character in
American films in the 60s and 70s, but because of himself.
He is standing in the strangely dark shadow of the hippie
lifestyle: free love, drugs and a career as a musician has
left him wasted, aged, diseased. It's the spectacle of the
hippie movement self-destructing and giving way to … what?
It's a question that is not answered. Perhaps in 1971 it
was enough to merely pose it.
And Cisco Pike? Well, he never found his lonely way back
home. If American cinema of the 60's showed that Freedom
was a very real possibility, and that the Kerouacian vision
of the open road did in fact stretch out forever, then many
American films of the 70's showed that this wasn't true,
that the open road led only as far as the next cop station
or graveyard. Death or disillusion was all our protagonists
can hope to ultimately find. And all we are left with here
is the dark night road down which Cisco escapes in the final
scene of the film.
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