"Why did I go this way?"

On Spielberg's Duel, Rolling Coal and the Gender Police

This week, I asked my students to watch Duel. Steven Spielberg’s 1971 TV movie (released theatrically in a 90 minute cut later that year) was based on a teleplay by Richard Matheson, adapting a short story that had originally appeared in Playboy. The movie tells the story of David Mann, a Los Angeles-area salesman who, on a desolate state highway near the Sonora Desert, finds himself shadowed by a threatening truck which repeatedly tries to kill him.

One of the question that came up when discussing the movie with my students — many of them drivers, many of the Californians — and a question that I had not previously considered was: why does Mann find himself on this stretch of road. The film’s opening (at least in the 90 minute version) begins in suburban LA, on busy highways, only to gradually usher the camera into ever more sparsely populated areas (and roads). As best as I can tell, Mann’s drive takes him up I-5 to Santa Clarita, but before long he appears to be on State Route 14, heading towards Palmdale and and Lancaster.

Why characters in horror fiction do things matters not just for reasons of causality, but also for reasons of morality. For every horror that is triggered by someone picking up a hitchhiker there is a horror that is triggered by someone not picking up a hitchhiker. Curiosity, overconfidence, lack of perspicacity — all of these may bring on calamity. Lord Oluf tarries in the woods with nymphs and sprites rather than heading home to his betrothed. Jonathan Harker finds himself in Dracula’s castle because he takes his job (and capitalism) more seriously than his commitment to his young fiancée. It’s often male characters that find themselves sidetracked in this way. That explore the sirens along the path to Ithaca. So that raises the question: why is this man named Mann here, on this road, somewhere between the Santa Clarita Valley and the Mojave?

In Matheson’s screenplay, Mann asks himself exactly that question: “Why did I go this way?” and he gives his answer “mockingly”:

This suggests that most enduring cliché of the car-bound horror film: the joyride. He’s doing this to liven up his day, to relieve the sheer boredom. Not coincidentally, the 2001 horror film starring Leelee Sobieski and Paul Walker that is clearly riffing on Duel is called Joy Ride.

But at the same time, there’s also a suggestion that Mann feels safer on the “old scenic route”. Safer, perhaps, than on the Tejon Pass, the Grapevine Canyon, with its infamous grade and (irony alert!) it’s many dangerous trucks? We don’t get told for sure (at least I didn’t catch it) whether Mann is here just for kicks, whether he is here for a reason, or whether he is here perhaps out of fear.

The first 3 minutes of the film stage a transition from a civilized suburban world, one overflowing and choked with traffic, to one of almost existential aloneness. Mann is no longer one driver among many, but rather finds himself — fatefully, fatally — as one of two. His little red car goes from the dominant feature of the landscape to a glaring outlier. When we first see Mann (Dennis Weaver), after a few minutes of POV shots, he’s nattily dressed, hunched over his steering wheel, maybe a little scrunched up in the driver’s seat. He feels small, out of place, squinting through large sunglasses at the insanity that is about to come his way. For the 70 minutes that follow he ends up visually dwarfed and dominated: by the landscape of the vast Antelope Valley, by Spielberg’s masterful compositions, and by the giant Peterbilt 281 truck that begins to harass him.

It’s on this forlorn stretch of highway somewhere around Acton that Mann gets into a terrifying game of cat and mouse with a trucker we never see and his truck that dominates the soundtrack and the visual field. At the same time, because Spielberg shot the film on location, and on location meant a stretch of road about an hour’s drive from the Hollywood Sign, it’s not really accurate to say that Mann is driving into the wilderness. Rather he drives through a no-man’s land criss-crossed by power lines, fences and, well, car infrastructure. It’s still a car-dominated world, what has been pruned away is the architecture of choice: overpasses, off-ramps, interchanges. Like a camera dolly on its rails, their confrontation is highly dynamic, but the dynamism works only, because there is almost no free choice anymore.

A case in point: When discussing the film with my students, we ended up wondering about the moment when Mann first overtakes the Peterbilt. I made the point that in the logic of the horror film — Spielberg is definitely warming up for Jaws in Duel —, there’s usually something the characters do to bring on (and possibly even deserve) the horrors that befall them — think skinny-dipping on a Massachusetts beach. Does Duel think Mann brought the confrontation with the killer trucker on himself to some extent?

On one level, the answer seems to be no. When Mann overtakes the truck, he is polite, maybe even a little tentative. He doesn’t curse, he doesn’t honk, he doesn’t cut off the truck. Nothing to “justify” the rage, at least according to the emotional logic of our traffic interactions. It takes until minute 17 of the 90 minute cut for him to honk at the truck for the first time. His first real verbal attack (which of course the trucker can’t hear) — “Come on you miserable fat-ass, get that fat truck out of my way” — comes only after the trucker has already tried to get Mann killed.

There is a moment right before Mann overtakes the truck for the first time, that is more potently politically coded in historical hindsight. The truck — to use the parlance of the TikTok Age — “rolls coal”, i.e. deliberately emitting large quantities of Diesel exhaust. It’s a form of conspicuous air pollution, it’s associated with anti-environmentalism, but also a form of gendered and political agonism. In practice, drivers “roll coal” when face-to-face with traffic participants who are perceived as soft, emasculated, and judgy — it’s often jokingly referred to as “Prius repellent”, but there’s also a really terrible case of a driver hitting and severely injuring several bikers while “rolling coal” in Waller County, TX. “Talk about pollution”, Mann mutters to himself resentfully before deciding to overtake the Peterbilt. How are we to read that? Is Mann our surrogate at that moment? Or are we to infer that he is being a bit of a priss, who’s about to get rolled by a real man and his real car?

Maybe it’s not that Mann is arrogant that’s the problem, maybe it’s the opposite: Mann is too tentative, too polite, too, well, unmanly. Maybe the movie wants us to infer that his wimpy driving style sets off the trucker. Look at the side-by-side Spielberg stages between the truck and Mann’s Plymouth Valiant (hey, it’s Christine’s 70s offspring!): the commuter car, pristine and professional (Matheson’s screenplay calls it “a low power, economy model”), with the salesman in his shirt and tie inside. Spielberg himself claimed that the “class warfare”-reading of Duel never occurred to him until the film was released theatrically in Europe and European critics kept raising the issue. But perhaps that’s because the juxtaposition in this shot is not about working class vs. middle class: it’s class as a cultural signifier, as lifestyle, participation in a particular economy, and ultimately a style of masculinity.

Spielberg has said that he picked a red car, because he wanted it to stand out against the desert setting. What he doesn’t mention: the truck, in its rusty earth tones, feels like a visual extension of the desert. (It too is artifice, of course. “The truck was put into makeup each day,” Spielberg pointed out in the same interview.) Mann has wandered into a wild animal’s native habitat. At the same time, another plot choice Matheson and Spielberg make seems significant: the trucker is not somehow in league with the human inhabitants of this area. He does not stand in for them, “red America” against “Blue”, or some pop sociological bullshit. The sequence in Chuck’s Café, where Mann tries to figure out who among the various diners might be the trucker is certainly staged as a fish out of water sequence — the urban yuppie against the rural cowboys. But the men in the bar, even the one who ends up in a fist fight with Mann, seem more bewildered and full of pity at this not-very-scary guy clearly in the process of losing it. In fact, nearly everyone Mann meets during his ordeal other than the trucker seems very decent and wanting to help. The trucker, we finally learn, has never been in Chuck’s Café. That payoff isn’t just about providing a punch line to the film’s best suspense sequence, and it isn’t just to further humiliate the Mann-character. It also contains a sociological point. His cowboy boots and vintage ride notwithstanding, the mysterious driver and his truck — with its trophy of license plates from six different states — is as much an itinerant, an alien in this world as is Mann.

No, what Mann comes face-to-face with isn’t the spirit of the Californian backwater. It’s a competing version of masculinity. In that gas station scene, Mann fixates on the unseen trucker’s hand relaxed on his steering wheel, while throughout the movie Mann’s own grip of the steering wheel seems overly tight and neurotic. As so often in early 70s cinema — think Straw Dogs, released the same year — this is a confrontation of a beta with an alpha. Or in our own 2020 terms, Mann brings his duel on himself by being a cuck. “I gave you the road, why don’t you take it?” he yells at the trucker at the beginning of the movie. It’s his deference, his politeness, even meekness that seem to bring on the punishment. A punishment, as it were, from the gender police.

This becomes most clear in a sequence that seems to be missing from Matheson’s script (at least the version of it I have). During his first gas station visit, Mann makes a phone call home. Unlike in Matheson’s script, where he is revealed to have a “seventeen year-old daughter and a fourteen year-old son”, in Spielberg’s film we cut away to a much younger family — kids of the age kids tend to be in Spielberg movies, which is also to say kids that need protecting and reuniting with their family. It’s a first appearance, as far as I know, in the director’s oeuvre of the prototypical Spielberg-family: the one whose protection and reunification trumps everything else. But like so many Spielberg-dads after him, Mann has been lacking: his upset wife chides him for not protecting him during a party the night before, going so far as saying a party attendee “practically tried to rape me”. This is, again, Straw Dogs-logic. Mann is not protector enough, not man enough. He now has to contend with dark, irrational forces to prove and improve himself.

At the same time, unlike so many car-based thrillers of the era, Duel is not about who we become behind the wheel. It isn’t saying that when we get into our little orange Plymouth, we become this new, scary person. It’s instead about a man finding out, via his car, how fatally un-scary he is. The only act of violence Mann commits, when — spoiler alert for a 53 year-old movie — he lures the trucker into hitting his car and crashing into a ravine, he commits pointedly by leaving his car (his biggest previous confrontation before that, arguably, is running after the truck on foot).

Spielberg’s film — unlike so many of the era’s great car chase movies — isn’t secretly about what it would feel like to do everything in your car that you felt like. The movie is set on a stretch of road with nary a turnoff; it was filmed, for budgetary reasons, almost entirely on a straight stretch of road, going back and forth. It is a film about constraints, about the car as an index of our ultimate unfreedom. And so it’s probably only logical that David Mann never cuts loose through his car. That he refuses the gendered pact with automobility. That, in other words, he evades his fate only by cutting loose his car.