The Vanishing Point on the Edge of Town

Somewhere along the line, Bruce Springsteen must have seen Vanishing Point, the 1971 movie about a guy drifting through life’s disappointments who finds consolation – maybe even discovers his life’s work – driving a supercharged Dodge Challenger through the mountains and deserts from Denver to San Francisco.

(I’d like to think Bruce caught the flick at that long-gone drive-in by the Driscoll Bridge where the screen faced the Garden State Parkway. Catching a few seconds of some film from a speeding car was always a highlight of the drive home from the Shore).

After the cinematic, operatic, Wagnerian – pick one or all three – Born To Run landed him on the covers of Newsweek and Time, Springsteen spent more than two years waiting out a lawsuit forbidding him from entering a recording studio, a forced retirement that left him to write the Darkness on the Edge of Town album; hits for other artists – Because the Night, Fever and Fire; and several dozen other songs that he and the E Street Band later recorded, then discarded. All in all, a remarkable output.

It’s the Darkness song at the end of Side 1 that brings Vanishing Point to mind. The film and the song, Racing In the Street, are concerned with finish lines, literal and existential, and the connection only came to me when TCM showed Vanishing Point around the same time I was listening to the Darkness on the Edge of Town CD collection.

The narrator of Racing in the Street finds some spending cash, local notoriety and a girl racing like-minded motorheads on summer nights. By the song’s end, he’s three years older, but no wiser, still running cars while his girl sits at home alone wondering just how and when her life slipped by. All to the accompaniment of autumnal, elegiac keyboards that make the characters’ inability to fulfill the promises of youth feel like a longing that never goes away.

The driver in Vanishing Point, Kowalski, a Vietnam vet, has lost his job on the police force and his girl. Juiced on amphetamines, he ignores speed limits and the highway patrol’s attempts to pull him over. Leaving Denver in the early hours, his focus is only on getting the car to San Francisco by 3 p.m. to win a bet. Even a “naked girl on a motorcycle,” as she’s listed in the credits, can’t move him.

A vanishing point is the spot where the outside lines of the highway seemingly converge at the horizon. An illusion, to be sure, and no matter how hard you push or how fast you go, the vanishing point is always out of reach. Kowalski meets his personal vanishing point when the police set up a wall of bulldozers on the highway, and rather than stopping, he hits the accelerator, crashes into the barricade and goes up in a ball of flame. In Racing in the Street, the narrator keeps fumbling his way to a finish line he’ll never reach. His girl, on the other hand, vanishes a little more each day.

In my last post, I listed Racing in the Street as the best song of 1978. Its maturity is amazing to this day, and I’m not even getting into how its lyrics celebrate summer and acknowledge Motown’s Dancing in the Streets.

Early on, Springsteen got saddled with the “New Dylan” label, but while Dylan wrote often-inscrutable lyrics about personal relationships. Bruce was writing short stories about people trying to reconcile their past with the future. A few weeks after Darkness came out, Dylan’s album Street Legal hit the stores. The title refers to a car that is roadworthy – most cars used for racing are just street-legal enough to get from a garage to where the next race is. Maybe it was a comment on Dylan’s durability versus that of the new kid. Maybe not. But in this case, the student took the teacher to school.