Life in the Fast Lane

We all have choices about where we are going in our lives. Sometimes a lot of people play it safe and go for whatever is easy in their lives. Others decide to take the long road and live life in the fast lane.

            In Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop, two men, the Driver (played by James Taylor) and the Mechanic (played by Dennis Wilson) drag race across the United States in their 1955 Chevy. Along the way they meet a young woman and a man driving in a GTO who challenge them to a cross country race for pink slips to their cars.

Though it is popular in films, it is not always necessary for characters to have a dramatic character arc where the character’s personality is forever changed. This is seen in this film as none of the characters really change their ways even by the end of the film.

The character GTO (played by Warren Oates) is a loner on the long, lonely road going nowhere. He picks up random hitchhikers on the road and tells them a different story every time he meets someone new. When GTO meets the Driver, Mechanic and the Girl, he feels that he can take a new journey and challenge with him. The audience gets a feeling that he’s going to change with the Girl on his side as he drives to win the race. But life throws a curve ball straight at him when the Girl decides to walk away. This brings GTO back to where he was before, someone on the open road driving to nowhere.

The Girl (played by Laurie Bird) throws the biggest monkey wrench into this film. When the Driver and the Mechanic pick her up along side of the road, they don’t realize what kind of toll she will put on the three men in this film, especially the Driver. The Girl shows a different side of life that isn’t a part of the fast lane. She brings out different sides to the men that they never felt or dealt with before. They each, in their own way, fall in love with this girl, who is on this journey just to get to somewhere besides the life she’s been living. When she walks away from the men and onto a motorcycle with another guy, it breaks their hearts. That shows how much impact she had on these guys and how, now, they revert back to where they were before having met her.

The Driver is the silent type who only cares about driving along with the Mechanic. When he meets the Girl, he starts thinking of her and how life can be different than life on the fast lane. When she leaves to go find a different life, he’s torn and returns to the life he led before. In the final race, we see the Driver staring down the fast lane, ready to go. But before the race, he looks off and sees a barn where he thinks about life where he can settle and maybe one day have a family. But then looks back to the road and decides this is where he wants to be.

Sometimes we don’t know where we are going. Sometimes we wind up right back where we started. We are all living in our own fast lane and we can either choose to get off the road or just keep rolling.