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Seeing McLuhan's "Electronic Age" on the horizon, Jonathan Demme spreads his arms wide and welcoming. A cacophony of scrambled transmissions during the opening credits establishes rural Nebraska in the grip of CB-radio mania, with imagery and soundtrack continuously and pointedly wavering between static and harmony. For the characters, it's not just a novel technique but a new dimension to be explored: People turn on their "idiot channels" and their psyches take flight, suddenly they're racy storytellers with handles like "Electra" or "Warlock" or "Chrome Angel" or "Hot Coffee." At the center is the repairman (Paul Le Mat) who takes upon himself to enforce the rules and regulate the crackpots clogging up the airwaves. ("Small minds and big antennas," he sighs of a local bigot broadcasting venom.) While he plays with his vigilante persona, his girlfriend (Candy Clark) doubles as a raunchy on-air seductress and his brother (Bruce McGill) turns into a threatening disembodied voice in order to articulate their familial tensions. Inverting their romantic triangle, the parallel narrative finds two women (Ann Wedgeworth, Marcia Rodd) realizing they've been married to the same trucker (Charles Napier), "a communications problem." Fantasy can breed isolation yet heaven here is other people, everybody is brought together by the crusty father (Roberts Blossom) who sits sullenly at the table but bubbles with joy when jabbering lingo into the CB speaker. "It's a funny country. Everything's going mobile. If you can swing that..." A vivacious poem of American restlessness, a sprawl of motels, campers and junkyards lovingly captured by Demme's freeze-frames and dissolves, a vision of technology made vibrantly human. In the rear-view mirror are The Sugarland Express and Nashville, up ahead is Peckinpah's Convoy. With Alix Elias, Richard Bright, Ed Begley Jr., Michael Rothman, Will Seltzer, and Harry Northup.
--- Fernando F. Croce |