"Fuck You America"

Zabriskie Point - a movie with a curious history. Staring two non-actors, Mark Frechette as "Mark" and Daria Halprin as "Daria" - the latter later would go on to marry Dennis Hopper, and and five later Frechette would be dead in jail after a conviction for a bankjob.

Almost universally derided at the time - by critics who saw in it a regression from Antonioni's supposedly more accomplished previous film Blow Up, by the American establishment - who did all they could to prevent Antonioni from making it in the first place, by American New Left - who felt that the portrait Antonioni painted of them was a patronising one. In London: "Pointless" sneered Private Eye.

In any case: when everybody hates something, usually that means there is something to it. I saw Zabriskie Point on Sunday, and thought it was a masterpiece.

Patronizing, said the New Left - because Antonioni depicts them as confused and naive dreamers. Well, no-one likes being slandered as a child - but... wasn't this the essence of their heroism? "I don't want to grow up," sang Tom Verlaine, "It's just too much contradiction" - and at the end of Zarathustra, we find in the philosopher the figure of the child.

Near the beginning of the film, a casual and stupid act of cop brutality turns Mark into a militant. Near the end of it, and another one kills him. Not really for any reason, not even on account of any particular malice.

Rather, just simply because this is the way the brutal stupid cop mind works.

"There's a thousand sides to everything," says Daria to Mark at one point "not just heroes and villains. So anyway... so anyway... so anyway... so anyway ought to be one word. Like a place or a river. "Soanyway River." But she's wrong - and after finding out from listening to the radio about the death of Mark she dreams of destroying the whole fucking thing - starting with the expensive desert house, where her boss is negotiating a business deal to turn Death Valley into cash.

An extended sequence follows: a desperate fantasy of annihilation. And when Zabriskie Point was first released to its US audience, most of it was cut - Antonioni apparently had wanted to finish with an image of an airplane writing in the sky "Fuck You America!" I know he didn't get his wish, but what the final frame of Zabriskie Point now is - I don't know that either. Because the print I saw had been corrupted, and cut-out in the middle - so that after the apocalypse, the last image that I saw was a close-up of Daria, and then nothing. And it doesn't matter. Because the point still holds. Fuck you America.