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.

The Mask begins with a quintessential maneuver of the mid-century, an opening address from a man in a suit whose minor-key smirk and mix of self-importance and ease puts him somewhere between expert and huckster. The film conjures a phalanx of mid-century signifiers. A simulacrum of William Castle introduces us to the film’s world, laundering exploitation through the language of psychoanalysis and unsettling that very modern science by exposing its occult pre-history. He speaks of, and the film moves in, the primitivist and modernist language of masks as a metaphor for the subcutaneous, explosive violence and metabolic intuition lingering beneath the even temper of modern science. Is this man a scientist, practical man of affairs, a trickster, or a channeler of something more demonic? What, the film ponders, separates any of these from the others?

Masks abound in the film to which they bequeath a title, suffusing us in the intellectual miasma of mid-century thought. While the speaker professionalizes the film, The Mask poeticizes his language almost immediately with a cut to a woman’s screaming visage, then to a violent man’s assaulting face, two very different sorts of masks, expressive images exposing two consciousnesses locked in impossible conflict. What masks do they wear, and are they doomed to repeat themselves in an eternal cycle of fear and desire? The Mask offers another sonic bridge to a telephone, tethering the irrational to the technological, and suddenly we’re away from primitive ritual and into a sterile modernity already beginning to decay. Within a few shots, the film has already blurred science and mysticism and then linked swamp and skyscraper, plunging into the masks that modernity wears and then exposing the difficulty of defining a true face.

In Shunya Ito’s Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41, the titular penitentiary is mental rather than only physical. Its protagonist Nami Matsushima (Meiko Kaji), mostly called Matsu, is on the run with six other women, all of whom carry the history of institutional oppression on their psyches. The mean-spirited Hide Oba (Kayoko Shiraishi), who oscillates between victim and tormentor, is both an embodiment of that trauma and a reflecting mirror who casts the shadows of social violence back onto the world that circumscribed her in the first place. The first Female Prisoner Scorpion film was a comparatively uncomplicated slab of B-movie mischief, one of the more observant “women in prison” films of its era but broadly willing to color within the outline of its accepted genre. Ito’s sequel is a hallucinogenic waking nightmare, a follow-up that doesn’t so much expand as implode the original film’s exploration of carceral hierarchies and societal exploitation. In breaking down the confines of its genre, replacing a physically oppressive enclosure with a universe rendered almost completely ajar, Jailhouse cracks open the assumptions of its genre. While it is still superficially a revenge narrative, Ito frames it as a nasty-minded descent into psychic disfigurement, a long night of the soul in which imprisonment is an imagined space as much as a physical one. Where, the film asks, do you run when the prison is inside you?

The title doesn’t suffer any fools. This is a howl of cinematic nothingness, a pitilessly impotent roar. It’s a post-noir stripped to the wiry skeleton: no shadows, an open-air prison that hides things in plain sight. Allen Baron is the shaggiest of auteurs, a ramshackle one-man band who directs and writes a doom and then casts himself to wear it. He fashions himself as an icon figure of mid-century social disintegration that is nonetheless entirely integrated into himself, a man who is entirely cohesive, basically complete in himself, and yet essentially a void. He is a performer who is both a presence and an absence, a blank face that registers as an abyss moving through a land without shadows.

Contrast this with Orson Welles’ magisterial The Trial from the same year, the greatest Kafka adaptation in all of cinema. Welles may have been the surest hand and most preternatural eye ever to weaponize a movie camera, and his 1962 film is one of the great cinematic acts of abandonment, a brutal displacement of space-time in which reality folds in on itself as the modernist dream of productive experimentation and creative curiosity eat themselves alive. An amazing film, no doubt, one that formally turns the 20^th century’s Promethean vision of progressive order into its own death spasm. Baron’s much less famous film is, in some sense, more frightening, a hell that masquerades not as the good – with its pretensions of order and stability – but the neutral. Blast of Silence is a film for what Daniel Bell called “the end of ideology”: visions of a better world – visions of the world –  have been discharged, and the characters are all just tenants moving from store to store in the remnants of a world that functions but does nothing more.

There’s nothing grand about Blast of Silence. It promises no withdrawal in the form of utopia, and it promises no exodus in the form of an apocalypse. There’s only a now, a flatline. This is not Welles’s modernist promise interred in its own abstract Kafkaesque geometry – an architecturalization of Charles Foster Kane’s own morbid ego and elephantine charisma – but an essentially banal world. No one in Blast has any plans, least of all those in power. There are no totalitarian overseers enforcing and justifying a state vision. This is a city that needs no excuse to murder. It arrives like a train, “right on schedule.” Murder is a “business.” And Blast of Silence is business-like in its severe austerity, a corrosive and unsettling meditation on modern alienation and spiritual ennui that hits like a bullet. No one here is an ideologue. They’re professionals. That is an ideology, of course, but they don’t need to know that, and they don’t need someone to hide it from them. It feels like the open-casket funeral for the traditional film noir, deflating its romantic fatalism and sinister glamour and exposing an apathetic world, a planar space. There’s nothing in the dark.

Larry Cohen is one of the great cinematic provocateurs, but Bone is one of his few films worthy of being considered genuinely troubling. Cohen’s films are intrepidly amusing and almost always mischievous with their grasp of truth, but Bone, his debut, tilts normality in a subtler, and ultimately, more forceful manner. In the image of married couple Bill (Andrew Duggan) and Bernadette (Joyce Van Patten) lounging outside by their pool, Bone frames a horridly bland image of bourgeois suburban domesticity. In the image of Yaphet Kotto (Bone) appearing out of nowhere, dressed like an escaped criminal and ready to move to a decidedly more banal prison. Lasciviously grabbing a rat out of the pool, he impishly winks  “you wanna touch it.” The sexual joke is funny, but Kotto’s wryly menacing eyes and shit-eating grin makes it truly uncomfortable in a way that, say, The Stuff simply isn’t, even when the characters are exploding into morasses of liquid sludge. Cohen’s screenplay is working at a higher level than The Stuff because it goes lower, right into modernity’s cloaca.

“Is there anything I can do for you all?,” Bone asks with playful gruesomeness that exposes him as a hilarious perversion of the “magical Negro” stereotype, the black man as cosmic force who intrudes on the normal order of things in order to reveal the middlebrow monotonies and manicured calculations of their bourgeois lives. Rather than salvation, though, the titular Bone offers destruction. He comes not to absolve them of their existence, but to corrode the strictures of their being, to filter their sanity through a prism of psychological erosion. He’s the existential specter they need, a cinematic wraith who emerges, as if out of the liminal undulations of a cinema of the id, the infested impurity of their pool itself, to clarify their fears and catalyze their anxieties. When Bill walks through the city on a mission from Bone, he passes a sign that says “new adult theatre open.” You said it, buddy.

Burn, Witch, Burn, directed by Sidney Hayers and based loosely on Fritz Leiber’s novel Conjure Wife, follows Norman Taylor, a newly appointed psychology professor at a quaint British school whose professional identity rests entirely on self-confidently deconstructing irrational beliefs. An arbiter of post-enlightenment skepticism, he, and his subject position, necessitates that superstition be seen as a relic of primitive, pagan thinking. Taylor’s position reflects a characteristically mid-20th-century confidence in scientific rationalism, a worldview the film subtly interrogates as it evokes the early 1960s – a moment poised between postwar solidity and the creeping resurgence of countercultural forces. To those invested in the sanctified stability of mainstream forms, these new energies seemed to rekindle an occult past that had been only apparently foreclosed by the hegemony of rationalism.

In this film, however, these energies were only superficially dormant, less absent than silently constitutive of the very reason that Taylor grounds his identity in. An identity the film finally destabilizes, disfiguring Taylor’s self-enclosure by slowly exposing the protective influence of his wife Tansy. Her charms, written off by Taylor as trivial superstitions, ultimately prove entirely essential for maintaining the subterranean order beneath the internecine rivalries and bristling anxieties of the modern academic world, which claims that it thrives on order but can clearly not sustain itself without tensions and complexities it must superficially disavow.

When Taylor discovers these threats – in the form of his wife’s protective superstitious charms hidden throughout the house – he destroys them. His sense of self depends on this destruction, but this very act begins to scrap away the veneer of rational stability that had granted this practical man of mid-century academic affairs, and the social structures he represents, legitimacy. These seemingly irrational currents which he must deny are ultimately exposed as the hidden backbone of the system that must excise them to the margins in order to preserve its identity, revealing a science that is more vulnerable, and ultimately more fragmented, than it is willing to admit.

If only director Stephen Hopkins’s Predator 2 was quite as awful and empty as its reputation suggests. Turning from post-Vietnam parable to a vision of the U.S. as a police state, Predator 2 is at once too inadequate and ham-fisted to take home and too canny and cunning in its critiques of American society to write-off. If the first Predator was, at base, an imperialist fantasia of an action movie cracked in half, turned into a vicious thriller about an interracial group of American men united in working as puppets for American corporate and governmental hubris, Predator 2 figures all races, groups, clans, and organizations as one more front in a violent war of unceasing viciousness that reaches from the streets to the penthouses to the institutions of power. If Predator concluded with a set-piece that systematically reduced Arnold Schwarzenegger, paradigmatic icon figure of ‘80s American masculinity, into a sort of visual negative space reduced and stripped barren, Predator 2 lets the titular Predator loose in a high-tech, dystopian Los Angeles to reveal how empty the whole edifice of Western progress might be. The film is basically empty, but it also suggests, here and there, in moments and fragments, that we are too.

I’m only winking a little bit when I claim that Larry Cohen was one of the great New York artists, a bedraggled poet of a forlorn city. Evocatively directed by his compatriot William Lustig with an eye for spontaneous eruptions of brutality and an ear for the underlying violence beneath them, Maniac Cop II is curdled and vicious enough to leave a stench. It isn’t messing around. It’s also distinctly Cohen-esque, the work of a unique voice not because Cohen wanted to be an auteur or really cared about his personal vision but because he couldn’t but do it. This is evident in the near-fetishistic infatuation that a would-be criminal has with zombie police officer Matt Cordell (a Vorhees-esque Robert Z’Dar), which never plays out as straightforward attraction. Or the undercurrent of real melancholy that the lighting ropes around Cordell, who is presently on the war path for those who wronged him in his waking life, suffusing him in a melancholy menace despite the character seldom speaking and never expressing a vocal line. The suggestive relationship between cop and criminal keep the text remarkably ambivalent, transforming Cordell into an icon of entombed masculinity and silent devastation, a mutant man incapable of human expression anymore. That’s evident in more than just the titular character too. Robert Earl Jones, who shows up only briefly, nonetheless wears on him a century of racial violence, a much longer echo of a brutal world than Cordell does.

And Lustig, more than just a hired goon, is a true partner in crime. Some of the gruesome beauty he brings to the film is simply a matter of time passing. It looks better, of course, than 80% of any given year’s cinematography Oscar nominees, because it came out before Netflix turned everything into a homogeneous aesthetic paste. Whatever else Maniac Cop II is, you can tell it wasn’t made with the assumption that the people watching it are off doing their laundry or chopping vegetables. This is cinema, someone with a genuine eye exploring visual textures because he happens to be curious about them, no more and no less. Maniac Cop II evokes an entire sensibility with its style in a way that I can’t imagine another slasher from the dreaded early 1990s doing. This is expressive sleaze in the best sense, channeling – and frequently being confused about – the violence of an era it outlines in what we might, paradoxically, call ambiguous boldface.

What does it mean to watch a murder? What does it mean to meditate on the cause of a murder? What does it mean to plan one? What does it mean to watch one being planned? To what extent are these four things different, and to what extent are they the same? “We’re just not very skillful at that sort of thing,” the film reminds us, and demonstrates, and the statement might apply to all of the above. Even when we think we’ve got a bead on what will happen to Edward G. Robinson’s Professor Richard Wanley, or what bit of evidence will or will not convict him, we keep wondering what it even means to judge someone, or to find someone guilty, or whether we can or should rely on any evidence given how easily each agentive act is contaminated by context, each exhibit for the prosecution claimed in part by chance. The ease with which the two protagonists find themselves more prepared than they expected to cover up a death and facilitate a murder, and the methodical way they begin to calculate their own moral slippage, is quietly penetrating. When the lights go up and the machinations of fate are apparently reversed in the film’s final minute, the grim realization is not that this was all an unfathomable dream but that the membrane separating determinism from contingency, demarcating sudden relief from a nightmare of existential guilt, is only molecule-thin. 

For a director most associated with expressive harshness, Fritz Lang was an abnormally varied, prismatic artist. Even his American sojourn, long considered a fall rather than a fault-line, an adventure of its own, reveals multiple distinct periods emerging out of one another. His despondent ‘30s texts, evocations of a Depression-beset nation submerged in restless ennui, are preludes to his flourishing film noir American missives in the ‘40s. Noir itself was a trend that Lang had, of course, precipitated in his German expressionist classics, but he would go on to break them down as well, essaying several coldly analytical later texts in the 1950s that abstract noir to nearly Kafkaesque levels of conceptualization, reflecting the return of European thought to a mid-century America wracked with anxiety about its Byzantine bureaucracies, corporate homogeneities, and ambivalent position in the global fight for a freedom that America had long claimed but also inhibited.

These final films were among his most despairing, anticipating the post-modern criticism of the ‘60s and suggesting that the soul-ravaging violence Lang worked through as a young man in Germany was an all-too-perfect waystation for his discovery of a more distinctly American violence. While Lang adapted to the particular anxieties of multiple time periods, from Depression-era miasma and social neglect to ’40s-era social consensus politics, he became a dark poet of life within the apocalypse at its most fatalistic.