One Shot is a series that seeks to find an essence of cinema history in one single image of a movie.
The more you watch John Boorman’s Point Blank, the more its terrain keeps shifting underneath your feet. It should be a conventional crime thriller about a Magnum-toting brute’s (Lee Marvin’s) quest for the $93,000 heist cache he’s been cheated out of. It ends up being something much more elusive and impossible to pin down: a ghost story that brings Alain Resnais’s unstuck-in-time fluidity into the familiar realm of U.S. pop? a photo essay on the piercingly lonely surfaces of 1967 Los Angeles? an allegory about our doomed mortal quest for the unattainable? There’s one image that always flashes in my head, Boorman-style, any time I feel unmoored by my surroundings—which, lately, has been all the time. It’s when sharklike Lee Marvin surveys the havoc he’s wreaked in a nightclub in less than 60 seconds, as a liquid light show shimmers across his empty face of concrete. Weirdly enough, it’s also the very first image of the film—before we have any context that it’s the final shot of one of the most inspired fight scenes known to cinema. Besides nailing the eternal truth of how alienating it is to go out clubbing at the witches’ hour, the shot is the epitome of the sinister Point Blank interiors. Modernity is having your senses drowned by the sounds of a go-go dancer who screams like she’s just been stabbed, underscored by a funky guitar riff and backbeat like Archie Bell and the Drells’s “The Tighten-Up.”1 You need to leave this hell, but you also need to groove. Is this the new world order?
1. https://youtu.be/Wro3bqi4Eb8?t=11. Thanks to Duran Alvarez for pointing out this similarity.