It’s odd to feel like it needs to be said for a film that was, at its time of release, one of the five highest money earners (unadjusted for inflation) in US Box Office history, but Smokey and the Bandit really is one of the key texts of 1970s American cinema. Released in 1977, this is a film aware of, and blissfully ignorant about, the world it has entered into. Offering an innocently insubordinate but not very challenging vision of anti-authoritarian freedom and a celebration of mere personal charisma as a form of authentic rebellion, it is a text that is hopelessly inadequate to solve the problems of its environment. Beset on all sides by the neoliberal desecration of working-class solidarity, the desacralization of a particular American idiom of collective life rooted in an abiding belief in a contract between the public and its government, Smokey and the Bandit has little to offer to save the nation other than an irascibly impish vision of redemptive speed. It salvages hope via a zealous romance of energetic freedom, a libertarian insistence that the state only obstructs, and that its institutions are de facto illegitimate when they aren’t abusive. This is no image of leftist salvation. It isn’t a sustainable image of resistance. It isn’t what America needed, then or now. And yet…

Bandit is sticky. It gets all over you like, as the film says, maple syrup. Something about its empty evanescence makes it linger. Thematically, it’s basically a rewrite of It Happened One Night, another tonic for tough times about a perpetually smirking asshole of a protagonist and a runaway bride as a fellow traveler, a comedy not of remarriage – separation and reunion restored with a difference – but of survival, of getting by through pure guile. Co-writers James Lee Barrett, Charles Shyer, and Alan Mandel and director Hal Needham offer a vision not unlike Robert Riskin and Frank Capra’s: mostly without overt critique, but not without clear perspective. Six years before this film, Two Lane Black Top framed the highway as a void of existential emptiness, while, two years before that, Easy Rider metaphorized the finale of the 1960s as an apocalyptic cataclysm. Six years after this film, Paris, Texas would figure it as a dissociative fugue state, the rumination of a lost drifter unable to find a new future or to return to a stable past. Comparatively, Smokey and the Bandit revs up a path not forward or backward but outward through pure immanence. It kicks up so much dust that the timeline it is supposed to be looking for gets lost in the fray. The opening glimpses of the truck are less symbols of America than invitations to appreciate motion, the poesis of movement and minutiae for their own sake.

All in all, the film occupies a peculiar register of the American mind, a strangely aloof and blissful perpetual present-tense, a cotton-candy Americana of the eyes and the stomach. This is, of course, an image of the cinematic dream factory – as star Burt Reynolds says at one point, “It’s not a convoy, it’s a dream,” mechanical collectivity fused into human myth –  but the film quietly celebrates the various everyday people who have to work this desperate situation in this wayward country to produce the dream-machinery of Hollywood Americana. It isn’t going to save us, the film seems to know, but there is something decidedly worthwhile about its vision of a nation of nomads and itinerants, a convoy country that tucks you into a rocking chair safer than a “womb,” a fantasy that this is, after all, the birth, or potential rebirth, of a nation.

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