
All the rock stars who contributed songs get star billing early in the credits, which roll over multiracial revolutionary arguments at the UCLA student union in a semi-documentary commune style reminiscent of Billy Jack but with a Godardian edge of disbelieving cynicism. The bands are all good: Pink Floyd, Jerry Garcia, Roscoe Holcomb singing "I wish I was a single girl again." I had this LP decades before seeing the film and the film doesn't do it justice, then again there is no justice in an Antonioni film.

Gradually all the harshness and industrial "Red Desert"-style offenses -- red cans, black trailers and malevolently inexpressive hick faces-- lead to epiphany, freedom and "nothing's terrible anymore" ("far out") revelations which are then dissolved in the simple grace of a beautiful Jerry Garcia guitar solo and the sex/orgy scene to end all desert sex/orgy scenes, an ecstatic release into mellow gold after all that nerve-wracking industrial clatter. Daria's dress and costume changes in a quick montage and she looks like the ghost of an old settler; the interchange of actors hips us to the mythic ego dissolve of groovy love. They are no longer themselves but man and woman in the primal sea of masks and derivations; a long shot of the orgy resembles a Bosch painting or what the final scene in the Beyond would look like if Fulci had the same budget. It's Antonioni trying to be open-hearted even as he recognizes this new paradise is just the old inferno with a forced smile. The "nothing's terrible" mantra is spoken by Daria but then--even by her--forgotten and so revealed as an elitist vanity clique high. If nothing was terrible then the by-now very sandy hippie chick should bless and show love to the ugly tourists Antonioni satirizes. She also fails to show love to a cop who pulls up near her probably just to see if she's all right.

For Antonioni then, it's really a matter of (r)evolution rather than the acceptance Daria preaches (but doesn't practice); even the revolutionaries seem stuck on the hateful caterpillar trip. The butterflies awaken and are usually shot down by the sheriff within a few reels (this time one gets to literally soar in a stolen plane) during which they may or may not love a lifetime's worth. The wild destructive children of the wrecked car playground are just the end point of the revolutionary edge of butterfly, the sort for whom a lifetime of caterpillar misery is preferred to the deadly brevity of transformation. Cocoon phase is the long journey in the plane or on the car and the gradual shedding of inhibitions and clothes (but nothing is terrible - far out, yeah right). Drugs too, maybe, though Frechette doesn't turn on, just like his alter-ego Travis Bickle wouldn't and like Travis, we're never sure which of any of Frechette's exploits are real or vividly imagined.

If we too feel a little excluded from the party of Zabriskie Point its perhaps because Antonioni seems to be coming to terms with the realization he'll always be an exile, even in the post-post-modernist cultural landscape he's helped shape/destroy; he doesn't know what to say, only how to look at the items on your shelves, like an apartment party wallflower. The new world is for the young and tripped-out and he has no clue how sit around paradise playing games; all he can do is help blow up the old world, then just keep the camera rolling while he whispers like a proud parent to the corpse by his side: "That's my daughter up there!"
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