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01/25/2009

The other night I was revisiting the classic final sequence from Antonioni's messy counter-culture experiment, "Zabriskie Point." The film, co-written by Sam Shepard, was a notorious box office bomb. An anonymous commentator writing in the booklet that accompanied the CD soundtrack to the film notes unblinkingly that "critics of all ideologies — establishment, underground, and otherwise — greeted the movie with howls of derision. They savaged the flat, blank performances of Antonioni's handpicked first-time stars, Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin, and assailed the script's confused, unconvincing mix of hippie-buzzword dialogue, self-righteous, militant debate, and free-love romanticism."

Nevertheless, the film's last scene, in which the young female protagonist imagines the violent destruction of a modern home in the desert and many of its contents, is still devastating. It's a nice bit of catharsis for overworked architects, as well as for anyone who occasionally feels hemmed in by the unchecked materialism of modern life. The music for the sequence was written by Pink Floyd for use in the film.