| Phil Kolas |
Duel plays at the Heights Theater on Thursday, February 27th, as part of our collaboration on the 16th Noir Festival. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
I’ve been writing haikus, lately. There’s something so completely stupid and perfect about every single one of them. They are utterly impossible to do incorrectly, as long as you can count to 17. It is an unmissable endeavor. It is a great gift granted to every human being that has ever lived, even the ones that couldn’t read. You don’t actually need to know how to read and write in order to write and read in your head. There is no greater equalizer.
I’ve been joyfully wrenching about a half-dozen of these stupid little dumplings out of my guts every night before I go to bed. Sometimes I get so excited with the whole endeavor that it’s hard to quit in order to actually fall asleep. It’s 1:30am Phil, jesus tiberius christ!
What would DUEL be in haiku form you ask? Only the first and most primal story we’ve ever told since we started telling stories: “I left my house and, something huge tried to kill me, thank god I survived” (17 syllables, child’s play, incredible). So why has this movie gripped my brain so hard that I felt like I had to write about it for you and me?
As an originally made-for-TV movie that went gangbusters and won full distribution (fun game: see if you can pick where commercials were “edited-for” in the film), it’s an interesting case study for the past, and it’s also a metaphorical clump of dirty tea leaves for us to read our future.
What’s first worth mentioning is that I had no knowledge of it until I knew about it. There is something so incredibly important about accidentally finding art where you did not expect it (think of what curated algorithm suggestions have stolen from us, but that’s another conversation for a longer essay). And DUEL, in fact, reminds me that the brain will never let itself be starved for art; it finds it where it has to find it.
Every human physical body needs to intake art. It also needs to create, to output, art. Everyone has a threshold minimum for both requirements. Nobody has a zero scale for either. If opportunity is not given, it will be taken. We are not only social creatures, we are creativity creatures.
Exhibit A for my defense, we have George Miller, Mad Max director and overall apocalyptic Cassandra who demanded that the cars in Fury Road be works of incredible personal expression, scrapped and welded by some of the most nefarious cinema villains ever created—“Just because it’s the wasteland doesn’t mean people can’t make beautiful things.” (1). I would personally add the emphatic that people also can’t stop making beautiful things. It borders on genetically imprinted compulsion.
There is no such thing as unskilled labor. Ever. Anywhere. There is always a smooth way to do whatever you are doing, and each craft has a master who has found the smoothest way to do whatever it is they are doing, no matter how pointless you might think it is. If you never knew These Hallowed Secrets at your job, you just weren’t paying attention (or your coworkers never liked you and didn’t tell you the tricks). We literally cannot help ourselves, we physically cannot stop doing and making cool shit. Even when we’re being forced to make money. Even when we’re being forced to make money for someone else. Call it efficiency distraction. A game to fight boredom. Homo Ludens—Human at Play. At every available opportunity. Your body needs to perceive art, to feed on it. If it is not provided, it will be hodgepodged.
You also need to know that art doesn’t become “not art” when it has commercials. Steven Spielberg didn’t “start making art” when he moved from TV to movie theaters. The locale makes no difference. Even commercials are art. We will not be stopped. Art doesn’t doesn’t become art when it makes money. It doesn’t become not-art when it loses money. It doesn’t matter if it costs money to make or to attend. Whatever art might be, I know the answer doesn’t lie in the price tag on either end of the process. I may not know art, but I know what doesn’t make it not art. I can’t define art, but I know it when I see it.
DUEL reminds me that art will sneak up on you. It will even exist and thrive beyond your perception, around dark corners that you can’t even see exist in order to see around them. Just because you have not noticed the art is art-ing does not mean it has not Art-ed, you adorable little main character of the universe, you. In fact, you’d be literally robbing yourself of personal development by trying to gatekeep what “counts as art.” Your loss.
We are surrounded, by paradise on all sides, you just have to look (17 beats, #blessings).
Very soon, we might have to (re)learn how to enjoy and make art without money, but we will never run out of time to kill and time to fill. Shakespeare in the Park performances, fountain architecture, street musicians, flash-mobs, stand-up comedy, shower singing, movie essays on free websites. Made for TV movies, from the 70s, 80s, 90s, and today. Even public look-alike contests drive my heart to incredible heights; “Hey we have similar facial features and costumes, it’s a good enough excuse to meet strangers.” Art. Period. Any human interaction or activity can be blessed with the patina of cool. Your brain will snap and Make A Big Deal Out Of It, if it wants to. Mine sure did, just for a movie about a dude in a car getting chased by another dude in a truck.
We turn every tool into a toy. And as already irrefutably established, play is art. You’d only need to see the incredible amount of art made by human beings who own smartphones (I was never on tiktok, but those people will still thrive, they will still exist). Are we to believe that they are quite literally unlike any other type of human being who has come before them, or are we just looking at a particular phenotype that has always been with us and is finally enjoying their place in the sun?
Art is everywhere. If it’s not, it’ll be placed everywhere, by some wonderful brain-starved maniac. And this art will be economically feasible to attend, or they will crumble and dissolve and die. And every affordable art form that we watch suddenly and horrifically get monetized right before our eyes, that will just make a different flat-broke art form spring up somewhere else. And certain flat-broke audience versions will never die. And pirating art is always morally correct.* And supporting your weird independent local movie theater is always morally correct. And I’m not going to go so far as to say, “going in chaos-blind-ignorant to a movie (or any art experience) is always morally correct,” but I will say that it is one of the seven greatest activities you can do for your human soul and your mental intellect.
* Stealing is the goal of stealing an original, to the goal of personal hoarding, to society’s exclusion, of the item in question. Pirating is stealing a copy, ergo, not a crime. Only a crime in the false scarcity dystopia. This also, by de facto, makes library attendance a radical act.
References
1 Behind the Scenes – Cars : Mad Max : Fury Road
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon