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The Sugarland Express Sugar-Coated Pill
The Sugarland Express Sugar-Coated Pill
The Sugarland Express Sugar-Coated Pill
The pair snare a ride with an old couple who drive so slowly that a
policeman (Maxwell Slide, played by Michael Sachs) stops them. Lou
Jean panics, roars away in the couple’s car, and, after a frenzied chase,
smashes up in the woods. Because the policeman is new to the force and
inexperienced, Lou Jean and Clovis Poplin (Goldie Hawn and William
Atherton) hijack him and his car. They take off for Sugarland, and as the
news gets around the trio collect a following of several hundred police
cars and an adoring public. Finally, Clovis is wounded by sharp
shooters, the fugitives careen across the Mexican border and come to a
jarring end on a sandbar. A postscript informs us that Lou Jean, after
serving a part of her sentence, got her baby back and is now “living
quietly in a small town in Texas.”
Although THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS is a brilliant technical
achievement, the more one probes the shimmering surface, the more
confused one becomes—what is the movie about? In a recent Newsweek
review of the film. Spielberg gave his own view:
And certainly this movie is one about people pursued by large forces and
people with obsessions. But if this were all the film were about, we could
dismiss it as one more action picture, motorized western, domestic war
film, rural cops and robbers movie with a firm place in the Hollywood
family tree.
The film portrays four distinct strata. The foster family, headed by a
John Connally look-alike, and their lovely white house represent the
upper class or bourgeois establishment. By the end of the film, this
house becomes the focal point of the film and the center of power. The
house and what it stands for is the Poplins’ destination—the dream that
motivates them.
On the other hand, this family unit is the one thing Captain Tanner, the
head of the police forces, must defend even if he has to kill someone to
do it. Captain Tanner and his police form a kind of classless middle
strata whose function—to defend the wealthy—defines them. Spielberg
makes Tanner’s equivocal position between power and powerlessness
very clear in the two scenes which introduce him. In the first one,
several lawyers interrogate Tanner about police procedure. The tone of
their voices and his obvious discomfort make their relative positions
clear. Then word that the Poplins have hijacked officer Slide arrives,
calling Tanner to duty; he marches down a corridor flanked by two
uniformed officers. The camera is below eye level and martial music
booms in our ears. The harassed civil servant becomes the powerful
police captain taking charge of a major case.
The people who make up the small town crowds—the Poplins’ fans—
represent the lower middle class and the working class. In the war
between the Poplins and the police, most of these people support the
Poplins and make them popular heroes. Finally, the Poplins represent
the lumpen proletariat. Despite their winning ways, they are the detritus
cast off by a fiercely competitive society. Neither can hold a job; both
have records of arrest and convictions.
Because Spielberg fails to recognize or deal with the basic class conflict
at the heart of his film, we have to do it for him. It also means that his
total vision is blurred and inconsistent; his attitude toward his
characters fluctuates between heartfelt warmth and estranged dismay.
For example, a naive sexism permeates the film and Spielberg’s attitude
toward Lou Jean and makes Hawn’s characterization inconsistent. Her
conscious manipulation of her flaccid, velvet-eyed husband jars against
her foolish plan and mindless joy riding: “We're the Poplins!” she
shrieks, hanging by heels and hands between car window and a Chicken
Delight drive-in restaurant. Her hysterical repudiation of the public’s
gifts as she careens into Mexico also fails to convince. We warm toward
Clovis because he is weak and dumb, and we accept Slide because he is
inexperienced and sympathetic to his captors. Lou Jean, however,
evokes a lurking fear because the director himself is afraid of her
hysterics and her cheap sexuality. She emanates craziness; we cannot
see her as a maligned innocent.
Another problem the director can't work out is a conception of Captain
Tanner’s proper function. Tanner hasn't taken a human life in his 18
years of police work. He wants to capture the Poplins, not assassinate
them. And Ben Johnson (whom everyone remembers in his soothsayer
role in THE LAST PICTURE SHOW) comes across as a wise man,
relying on personal relationships rather than on institutional clout, and
warmly human. However, the police force as such is presented as a
collection of dehumanized, ravening appendages to guns and living cars.
A Ben Johnson/Captain Tanner cannot exist in this context. This
discrepancy, which goes almost unnoticed because of its precedent in
other much less sophisticated movies, exemplifies the split running
through the movie. Spielberg is attempting to present characters who
are at the same time caricatures—idiosyncratic, three dimensional
people who are also slapstick cardboard figures.
AMERICAN FETISHES