“Vanishing Point,” Richard C. Sarafian’s existential car chase across the American West, will screen Tuesday, Oct. 14, at Woodmere, the second in this fall’s Tuesday Night at the Movies series presented by the Chestnut Hill Film Group.
The 1971 film’s focal point is a gleaming white 1970 Dodge Challenger that hurtles across desert highways toward an inevitable, unbelievable finish. The car is perhaps better known than any of the characters in the film, which stars Barry Newman as Kowalski, a Vietnam veteran and disillusioned ex-cop, and Cleavon Little as the blind disc jockey who narrates his flight from the law.
Written by Cuban novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante, the screenplay is simpatico with the late 1960s counterculture rebellion of drugs, sex, and rock and roll. While enjoyable as a simple car chase film, the writer’s more cerebral and political messages may have contributed to its original struggle at the box office. But, over time, “Vanishing Point” gained cult status. Steven Spielberg counts it among his favorites. British filmmaker Edgar Wright includes it in his list of must-see films. Quentin Tarantino named it “one of the best American movies ever made,” while staging a chase with a Challenger almost identical to the car in “Vanishing Point” for Tarantino’s own 2007 film, “Death Proof.”
“Vanishing Point,” like other car movies traversing the open road, can be situated as a subcategory of the Western film canon. In American mythology, “The West” has long represented freedom, the promise of space beyond fences, landlords, and society’s rules. If there was ever a geography of freedom on this continent, it was westward. Yet, by the 1970s, filmmakers were already questioning that myth. In Sam Peckinpah’s “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” (1973), Pat tells Billy that freedom is gone, fenced off and parceled out to cattle barons. Billy replies that the times may have changed, but he hasn’t.
In “Vanishing Point,” Kowalski is also reckoning with an inner and outer landscape that has changed. He has seen the corruption of the police from the inside, the trauma of Vietnam, and the hollowness of institutions that claim moral authority. There is nothing left to believe in except the exhilaration of speed itself. Starting in Colorado, Kowalski points his Challenger still farther west, toward California, toward freedom. The problem is that there is no longer an unclaimed frontier. The moment he starts driving, he collides with the law. The film suggests that the old dream of boundless American freedom no longer has geography - if it ever did.
Mythologizing Kowalski over the airwaves is Cleavon Little’s Super Soul. As a blind radio DJ, he casts Kowalski as a folk hero fighting racist, authoritarian cops. It’s through Super Soul that “Vanishing Point” articulates the broader struggles of 1970s America, including the civil rights movement, antiwar resistance, and distrust of the state. For Kowalski, freedom exists only in motion; it’s not a place but a velocity.
Car movies like “Vanishing Point,” “Thelma and Louise,” and even installments of “The Fast and the Furious” are fueled by what Freud called the “death drive.” Freud distinguished between the pleasure principle - the desire for gratification and avoidance of pain - and a darker, yet still fundamental, impulse toward dissolution and nothingness. French psychoanalyst and writer Jacques Lacan described it as the paradoxical drive beyond pleasure, a longing for the end. Car chases, especially those against the police, stage this tension perfectly: the thrill of speed, the pleasure of escape, and the looming inevitability of a crash.
Kowalski embodies this death drive. His journey has no practical purpose; it is not about money, revenge, or even survival. It is about asserting freedom in the only way left to him, acceleration. The white Challenger is more than a car; it is the vehicle through which the film dismantles an American myth. There is no open frontier, no untouched horizon, no West left to ride into. Yet many will identify with Kowalski, and long to press the pedal down, drive fast, and prove, if only for a moment, that we are free.
“Vanishing Point” screens at Woodmere, 9201 Germantown Ave. in Chestnut Hill, on Thursday, Oct. 14, at 7 p.m. Light refreshments will be served prior to the screening. Admission is free, but donations at the door are greatly appreciated.
Heather Gray is president of the Chestnut Hill Film Group.
