Film editor Aram Avakian
made his solo directorial debut with this uncompromising phantasmagoria, which
was slapped with an “X” rating during its original release. Telling the story
of a young man who goes insane after receiving his master’s degree—thus tapping
into the zeitgeist of youth-culture ambivalence toward American ideals in the
Vietnam era—End of the Road features
assaultive editing patterns, crass images, pummeling sound effects, and
stylized performances. It’s a deliberately bizarre experience, derived from a
1958 novel by John Barth that fits somewhere on a continuum with Joseph
Heller’s Catch-22 and Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Unlike
the movies adapted from those books, one of which is an admirable misfire and
one of which is a stone classic, Avakian’s End
of the Road doesn’t strike a nerve so much as it gets on one’s nerves. The
picture is filled with dynamic visuals, impassioned performances, and offbeat
themes, but the style of the piece is so aggressively ugly and weird that it’s a
chore to watch.
Plus, like most counterculture-era films, End of the Road is best defined in terms of what it shuns. The
movie avoids conventional storytelling tropes and “traditional” American values
at every turn, so it’s something of a position paper railing against the Establishment,
delivered in the confrontational and fractured idiom of the generation that
brought psychedelia into the mainstream. There’s a germ of something human
buried inside the trippy flourishes, but good luck latching onto that simple
core while enduring headache-inducing montages.
Stacy Keach stars as Jacob
Horner, who walks from his graduation ceremony to a nearby railway station,
where he stands in a catatonic state for what appears to be several days before
the arrival of a concerned psychiatrist, Doctor D (James Earl Jones). Combative
and sarcastic, Doctor D drags Jacob to a facility called “The Farm,” where
Doctor D lets lunatics play out their fantasies as a form of therapy. (One
patient cross-dresses as a nun, one endures S&M abuse while crucified, and
one rapes a chicken.) Doctor D leads Jacob through harsh therapy sessions
complete with heavy audiovisual gimmicks and occasional physical punishment.
Then he declares Jacob cured and ready for a job.
Jacob bullshits his way into
a gig teaching English at a university, soon befriending fellow teacher Joe
Morgan (Harris Yulin) and Joe’s long-suffering wife, Rennie (Dorothy Tristan).
Joe’s a weirdo who spends most of his time wearing a Boy Scout uniform, and
he’s prone to slapping Rennie around. Jacob begins an affair with Rennie, and
their loveplay includes a strange scene of spying on Joe while he thinks he’s
alone—as Jacob and Rennie watch from a hiding place, Joe shoves a gun in his
mouth and pantomimes suicide, then masturbates while reciting Shakespeare.
Meanwhile, Jacob exhibits loopy behavior of his own, at one point parading
around in a toga. Eventually, the story resolves with a painfully detailed
abortion scene.
Avakian, who also edited the picture, benefits from the
participation of cinematographer Gordon Willis, who notched his first feature
credit with this picture; Willis’ muscular images impose coherence onto the
madness of the onscreen events. Avakian also makes ample use of Jones, Keach,
and Yulin, all of whom provide frightening levels of intensity. Still, the big
question remains: Is End of the Road
anything more than a hearty fuck-you to normalcy? Further, even though time has
not lessened the film’s ability to shock, has time erased the relevance of the
narrative—or whatever it is that Avakian employs in place of a narrative? The
answers to those questions are very much in the eyes of the beholder.
Nonetheless, thanks to its mercilessly abrasive textures, End of the Road is bold and innovative filmmaking that’s deeply
evocative of a certain time. While far from essential, it’s at the very least
emblematic.
End of the Road: FREAKY
