Lasting just 27 minutes, James Benning and Bette Gordon’s The
United States of America is nevertheless a film as big as its title,
following a spring 1975 road trip from New York to the West Coast, the two of
them in the front seats, the camera observing from the same unchanging fixed
position behind them. The approach quickly establishes itself, holding a shot
for ten seconds or so before replacing it with another one from further along in
the journey, passing through small towns and large ones, through mountain
ranges and plains; with each transition, the sound of one radio station merges into another, providing a snatch of yet another staple of the period (Minnie
Riperton’s Loving You comes up several times) or of the latest news
update on Patty Hearst or Vietnam. There’s no conversation between the two, and
we never get a good look at their faces – as such this might seem like a bizarrely
reductive approach to the subject. But it’s a film where the smallest variation
- such as the couple of times when she takes the wheel -
becomes almost thrilling, and the editing is superb, establishing the time and
distance elapsed while evoking a kind of transcendental, above-it-all state of
being. The last thing we hear on the radio is a dumb quip about the President’s
golf game, after which there’s emptiness, an abandoned vehicle and the vast
ocean stretching ahead, a moment of arrival that can’t help but be
anti-climactic, even banal, for how much can one ever understand as a
spectator, whether the seat is in a car or before a screen? Seen as such in the
present day, the film seems to be foreseeing the subsequent fracturing of
American unity and resolve, positing it as a structural construct imposed on a
near-infinity of unresolved diversity and difference.
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