Sometimes I sense that to put real confidence in my memory I have to get to the end of all rememberings. That seems to say that I forego remembering. And now that strikes me as an accurate description of what it is to have confidence in one's memory.
          --Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason

I remember the movie Vanishing Point, which I mentioned before as an example of an M rated movie.  I didn't understand it.  The movie opens with what will turn out to be its last scene, then is almost all flashback.  In that last scene, time stops just after a car, roaring towards a roadblock, passes another car going the other way.  Freeze-frame, and then the car roaring towards the roadblock just... disappears.

Next scene is forty-eight hours earlier.  The car driver is an outlaw-type, trying to drive cross country at some insane clip, on a bet I think.  He ignores a trooper, and after that the whole thing is a more and more elaborate chase scene.  Cleavon Little -- his first major roll, I think -- is a radio DJ who gets interested in this outlaw hero and starts broadcasting useful information about where cops are congregating, etc.  He's getting this information from what we would now call crowd-sourcing: people have heard him praising the outlaw driver and therefore they phone the radio station with what they've seen, and he broadcasts the information and the driver uses it to evade capture as he keeps roaring westwards.

Eventually we get to the last scene again: road block set up, car tooling down the road, passing the other car as at the beginning.  But now, no freeze-frame, and the outlaw car crashes spectacularly into the bulldozers blocking its way.  And that's the end of the movie (I have a vague memory of a minute or two of sad, anti-climactic clean-up, people milling around, tension all gone out of everyone's life). The hope we'd harbored throughout, that he would escape the lifeless, unimaginative simulacrum of justice that the police represented, was smashed with his car.  We knew he's vanish, or thought we knew, and the only question we had was how?  We assumed the end of the movie would tell us. And then he didn't vanish.  He died.

I remember being very impressed by my parents in our car-ride home.  I was thirteen, so being impressed by them was a big deal.  I said I didn't know what had happened but they both understood and agreed intuitively, without needing to discuss it or work it out, that the opening of the movie showed the legend -- the legend that would live on.  The sad empiric ending (the sad, disappointing, deflating, but uninteresting truth), didn't matter.  The movie did tell us.  (As the John Ford dictum almost has it: film the legend.  And they did.)

posted by William 1:41 PM
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