You can tell by looking at Bobby Dupea (Jack Nicholson) that he has passed through the scale of society to absolute ordinariness. He has lived in the rarefied world of high culture and wanted to enter the core of real life, whatever that may be. The former piano prodigy is now a tough-skinned labourer who toils on an oil rig. However, the restless wanderer has not lost his sensitivity. He does not know who he is. In a startling scene, Dupea orders chicken salad. More than anything he wants toast, and when there is none, he refuses the chicken and the salad. He throws the tablecloth and silverware onto the floor. The scene reveals the principles of new cinema. Life has become divided into fragments whose secret is each person’s private property. Meeting his dying father is not the key to anything except the self-evident fact that we now live in an era of broken families, and that memories are another, now unattainable reality. The waitress interpreted by Karen Black may not be a spiritual giant, but she is a good person and can sing. Sudden explosions are important, and – as observed by Shirley MacLaine – the fact that Nicholson dared to remain an eternal experimenter. He defies everything that is expected and acceptable. Single-handedly, left to his own devices, he discovers a new way of acting, a brand new spontaneity that feels like acting without a script. Equally essential are silences, for instance, the quasi-meditations in the mirror of the gas station bathroom. They begin and end in emptiness. An insane sense of humour brings the promise of other, more pleasant realities. The director Bob Rafelson and Nicholson don’t get lost in the cliché of “spiritual growth”: “Bobby is at least as false at the end of the film when he sits in the cab of the truck on his way to Alaska, shivering and insisting that he is doing fine. He is on his way again to a new place, to a new, frustrating reality.”

Peter von Bagh, Tähtien kirja [The Book of the Stars], Otava, Helsinki 2006. Edited in English by Antti Alanen