Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger: a Study of the Subtext

by Nicholas Kostis

Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger (1975) is a thriller but it is an illusory thriller. In a thriller somebody or some cause is usually saved at the end. In Antonioni's film the protagonist is murdered and the illegal sale of guns to the rebels has faded away. This is because the film is not centered on whether or not David Locke, portrayed by Jack Nicholson in a nuanced performance, is going to get away with his imposture but rather on why he exchanges his identity for that of another man. If the audience finds the film elusive and is particularly perplexed by the protagonist's death at the end it is because by focusing on the suspense it fails to realize that through subtly metaphorical images and incidents the suspense story ultimately evolves into a portrayal of existential malaise.

In the opening minutes of the film Locke is seen soliciting the help of local inhabitants as he tries to reach a guerilla military camp. A boy catches a ride with him by forcing himself on his Landrover and then darts off leaving him in the lurch; an Arab on a camel barely acknowledges his greeting; and his African guide deserts him. The seemingly unexplainable inhospitality of the natives derives from past Western exploitation of Chad which was part of the French colonial empire from 1900 to 1960.

The scene that takes place in the desert after his Landrover has become stuck in the sand marks a turning point in Locke's life. In an act of resignation and surrender he whacks the vehicle, looks up at the sky in despair, sinks to his knees, thrusts his arms out, and brings his face and arms to the ground as he shouts, "All right! I don't care!" In an Antonioni film nothing is stated without implication or ambiguity. Locke directs his verbal outburst at the void and, being in a Muslim country, is induced to deride God and religion by assuming the movements of an Arab in prayer.

Locke confiding in the Girl tells her that he "has run out of everything: wife, home, adopted child, a successful job . . . Everything except a few bad habits I couldn't get rid of." When earlier he said to Robertson, "We translate every situation, every experience into the same old codes. We just condition ourselves," the latter replied, "We are creatures of habit." Locke as his name implies is locked up. He is imprisoned first of all by his professional and conjugal situation. The intensity of his desire to free himself from an oppressive existence by the transference of spirits with Robertson can be seen in the way he straddles the dead man while staring deeply and continuously into his eyes.

Blue by creating a sense of expansive space is associated with freedom. Upon assuming Robertson's identity Locke emerges from the dead man's room wearing his blue shirt and holding his own red checked shirt in his hand. As he waves his arms like a bird in a cable car, exulting in his new found freedom, he is clad in a blue shirt and is surrounded by blue water. And he happens upon the opportunity to free himself from a materially comfortable yet spiritually dead life in a shabby desert hotel (there isn't even any soap) whose walls are painted blue.

Locke's quest for transformation will ultimately end in failure because he cannot free himself completely from his "bad habits." Most noticeable is an emotional lethargy that is key to understanding his mental complexion. Locke's spiritless way of speaking and walking is a sign of this lassitude. As he stumbles back to his desert hotel room he is so benumbed that he appears to be totally unaware of the presence of a body lying in the street and which mirrors his apathy.

Robertson, who suffers from a weak heart, drinks alcohol knowing that it is bad for him in defiance of death. Death for Robertson is a natural happening, something for which one waits. "Beautiful. So still. A kind of waiting," he says to Locke as the two gaze at the desert landscape. Locke will eventually grasp the significance of Robertson's coded words. This occurs when he and the Girl have swerved off the road to escape the police chasing them and find themselves surrounded by desert bloom. As the Girl looks at the expanse of ashen mountains and blue skies she asks, "Isn't it beautiful here?" "Yes," he replies. "Very beautiful." Locke's soft-spoken reply conveys a consciousness and acceptance of death.

The first sign of a recognition by Locke of his coming death appears in the Munich airport. Locke, who is groping towards an unknown destiny, decides to go to Yugoslavia instead of following Robertson's itinerary. When the Avis travel agent asks how long he intends to rent the car he replies, "for the rest of my life." When he later informs Avis that he will be going to Barcelona instead of Dubrovnic he finds himself uttering the same phrase. Locke is subconsciously thinking about his death. In like manner his decision to stop renting a car from Avis disguises a desire to stop renting Robertson's life just as his purchase of a "second hand, maybe third hand car" reveals an unconscious awareness that his need of a car will be short lived.

The Girl (Maria Schneider) is first seen by Locke seated on a bench reading and soaking in the sun. The green blouse that she is wearing as she leans back with outstretched arms and which blends in with the foliage behind her associates the Girl who is utterly unaffected with nature. Her gesture looks forward to the overhead shot of Locke in a cable car above Barcelona waving his arms like a bird as he delights in his flight from the past and his new found freedom. When the Girl asks Locke what he is running away from as they are driving in an open top convertible he tells her to turn her back to the front seat. As she looks backwards, joyfully observing the tree lined road receding behind her with her arms spread, reminding us of the overhead shot of Locke in a cable car, she intuits without the need of words what he is running away from.

The only thing we learn about the Girl's personal life is that she is an architecture student. Because she is without traits of character she does not have a name. An idealized figure she is uncorrupted by convention. When Locke suggests that he could become a gunrunner, for example, she replies, "Then it depends what side you're on." Maria Schneider with her freshness and vivacity breathes life into the Girl who would otherwise remain an abstraction.

The Girl completely understands Locke, shares his way of thinking, serves as his guardian angel. Her personification of the latter is made clear by the shorthand symbol of the ad for St. Michel's beer on the back of the bus that takes her away from Locke. St. Michel is the archangel and warrior in the battle of good versus evil. As she stands at the rear of the bus waving goodbye to Locke she is signaling that his guardian angel is abandoning him.

The exterior low angle shot looking up at the two as they peer out of the window of their hotel room on the top floor, by suggesting aloneness and moral ascendancy, emphasizes that their perception of the world and response to it does not comply with the commonly accepted ways of thinking and acting.

The long shot of Locke and the Girl lying naked on a bed after they have made love is fraught with meaning. The long shot by itself connotes remoteness. Instead of seeing them making love we see a post orgasmic Locke in a prone position his face turned away from the Girl who lies next to him with her arm protectively around him. Because sexual passion in Antonioni's world does not lead to communication the couple's amorous relationship is restricted to a passing gratification of the flesh. The shot ends as Locke reaching behind him takes the Girl's hand in an attempt to connect that is free of sexuality. The closeup of the two in which the Girl, overcome with pity after listening to his self revelatory story of the blind man, embraces Locke compassionately retrospectively draws a telling comparison with the long shot of them after having made love.

The connectedness of Locke and the Girl brings to mind two individuals tenderly attached to each other. We observe them walking in the street their arms around each other or Locke running his hand tenderly through her hair. No sooner has she left him than he goes after her and brings her back. He sends her away only to find her waiting for him in his hotel room. Yet their relationship is not exclusive. The Girl who would rather visit the remaining Gaudi buildings without the others finds pleasure in her solitude. If neither Locke nor the Girl seems inclined towards forming a permanent relationship it is because they know that salvation does not come from another but from within.

In the end the excitement provided by a new and dangerous life cannot get the better of Locke's apathy despite the Girl's attempt to dissuade him from throwing in the sponge. The shot toward the close of the film of the Girl seated on a chair, huddling unto herself and starting to weep, denotes defeat and her sense of the imminence of Locke's death.

Rachel (Jenny Runacre} plays a pivotal role in the plot by unintentionally leading her husband's assassins to him. It is her role as Locke's wife, however, that is of greater consequence. If Rachel has never connected with her husband in a deep-felt way, neither she nor he having known the other beyond outward appearances, Rachel and her lover Stephen (Steven Berkoff) share nothing beyond sexual attraction. The scene between the two that takes place in Stephen's apartment exposes the shallowness of their love affair in comparison with the intellectual and moral intimacy shared by Locke and the Girl. The all too common unoriginality of their romance is encapsulated in the note for Rachel from her lover that Locke finds. "Where were you today? Tomorrow afternoon at Ossington Street, Love u. Stephen." The possessive nature at the core of their relationship is visible in the verbal and physical jousts between them. "If you try hard enough," quips a jealous Stephen, "perhaps you can reinvent him." Love for Antonioni leads to failure not only for lust crazed characters but in any form that it assumes.

The sequence in which Locke observes a bourgeois wedding in a rococo Munich church depicts the ceremony and its trappings as a stereotyped ritual. The virginal white carriage with flowers attached to the exterior and drawn by a white horse, the grave facial expressions of the wedding guests, the ornateness of the bride's wedding attire and the trance-like beatitude of the bride and groom all paint a caricatural picture of the institution of marriage.

The next sequence shows Locke burning leaves in the yard of his home in London and laughing as he reduces his unsuccessful marriage to ashes. Rachel in a show of the disaffection between them appears precipitously in her slip perplexed and incensed by her husband's comportment. The camera then cuts to Rachel now dressed and gazing at the burnt remains in the empty yard. What is going through her mind? Is she aware of the motive behind her husband's action? Antonioni does not let us know. It is the spectator who is asked to interpret the meaning of the image.

As Locke slouched over a park bench is waiting for the arrival of a contact that never arrives he chats with an old man while children play nearby. "When I watch them I just see the same old tragedy starting again," the old man says. "Other people look at them and imagine a new world. But me when I look at them, I just see the same old tragedies about to begin all over again. They can't get away from what we are." The old man's words suggest circuitously that Locke's feeling of futility also derives from the impossibility to be free of history, of social conditioning and genetic heredity. Such use of ellipsis is a common trait in an Antonioni film. The scene ends as the old man begins to tell a receptive Locke the story of his life.

As Locke runs from the heels of his television producer Martin Knight (Ian Hendry) he passes stacks of bird cages. The camera then cuts to a shot of Knight who, poking a finger in the bird cages, threatens anew to cage Locke who has liberated himself from his profession as journalist. Still fleeing his pursuer Locke rushes into the closest building where he encounters the Girl. When Locke asks her what the building is the Girl instead of answering his question replies that the man who built it was killed by a bus and that his name is Gaudi. "Was he crazy?" Locke asks. Gaudi was a Catalonian architect who began by designing buildings for wealthy clients and ended by building churches for God and giving up a life of luxury to live in Franciscan simplicity. When Locke asks if he was crazy he is questioning the merit of commitment in an irrational world as evidenced by the senseless death of the architect. After Locke has explained how he became another person the Girl remarks that "people disappear all the time" to which Locke retorts, "Every time they leave the room," a reference to the continuous transformation of the self in space and time and the ephemeral nature of existence

The sequence in which we observe Locke and the Girl in a lush green pasture is a parody of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden with a lemon grove substituting for an apple orchard. The camera initially focusses on a lemon hanging from a tree. The Girl then picks the lemon but failing to take her cue from Eve is not tempted to eat the acidic fruit. Nor does she offer it to Locke who lying asleep is oblivious of another lemon hanging from a tree above him. The biblical story narrates that by eating of the tree of knowledge Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden and knew the pain of death. For Lock and the Girl the story of Adam and Eve is a myth to be ignored. The scene ends with Locke saying, "My old self is hungry. Let's go and eat." In other words the old Locke who is unable to find a reason for living has no appetite for a divine explanation of the world.

As the two are seated on a terrace facing the sea the Girl asks, "What are you thinking?" Locke replies, "Nothing." It is not clear whether he has been looking at the sea or at a lady sunbathing. The ambiguity is resolved by the sequence in which a firing squad is about to execute a Chadian rebel leader and the camera cuts successively to shots of the sea, the victim and a coffin on the seashore. The sea, evocative of infinity, in juxtaposition to the coffin becomes synonymous with death. In line with this reading Locke's response to the Girl's question conceals another meaning: nothing = nothingness = nonexistence. Locke has been thinking of death but dissembles his thoughts out of delicacy.

At one point Locke and the Girl stop to ask directions of an old man seated under a huge white cross. This is a reference to the Stations of the Cross. The fourteen Stations of the Cross are a series of images that portray Jesus bearing the cross on the Via Dolorosa to Mount Calvary. They were first evoked when Locke, unknowingly about to commence a spiritual transformation, discovers Robertson's body and turns it over so that with its arms thrown out it resembles a cross. They are next evoked by the crosses on a gravestone in the cemetery outside the rococo Munich church and by paintings of the Stations of the Cross on the walls inside the church. They are evoked yet again when the car is unable to make it up the hill and Locke who is wearing a wine red shirt symbolic of the blood of Christ is forced to continue on foot as he nears his journey's end. The parallel between Locke and the Stations of the Cross is undeniable.

The shot of a squating Locke squashing a bug and smearing the white wall with blood is a presentiment of the precipitate manner in which his life will be snuffed out. Such a reading is reinforced by Locke's being placed at the bottom of the frame and feeling crushed by the composition. The gratuitous nature of the bug's destruction also conveys a sense of man's insignificance in the face of his mortality.

When Locke checks in at the Hotel De La Gloria he possesses only the clothes he is wearing. The deprivation of passport and luggage (the latter containing the revolver with which Robertson, unlike Locke, would have defended himself) tells us that he has stopped being Robertson and has taken control of his destiny. But dispossession in this instance also has another connotation. In response to Locke's impassiveness before the beauty of the African desert and his preference for men to landscapes Robertson oberved that there are men who live in the desert. This was an allusion to the original monks who, deprived of personal belongings and intimate relationships, chose to live a life of poverty in the desert. Robertson's observation was prophetic. Locke who began his spiritual journey in the Sahara ends it in the sun-dried land of Spain where the desolate landscape surrounding the Hotel De La Gloria reflects his spiritual state as he renounces all terrestial attachments, a stripping away that began with the abandonment of his camera and tape recorder, and prepares to embark as a lone passenger on a voyage to the beyond.

When Locke finds the Girl waiting for him in his room at the Hotel De La Gloria he asks her to tell him what is happening outside. She describes the everyday sights in the courtyard ending with the observation: "It's very dirty here." Why does Locke ask her what is happening outside instead of looking himself? The answer lies in the parable of the blind man who after recovering his vision was unable to bear the sight of a dirty and ugly world. The Girl now leaves for Locke does not want her to risk being in danger; the real reason is that he wishes to be alone in his encounter with death. After she has left Locke goes to the window to cast one final glance at the world. He then lies down on the bed and turns his body so that it faces downward, the same position in which he found the body of Robertson.

There ensues a long, slow tracking shot in which the camera becomes the embodiment of the departing psyche of Locke. Among the sounds heard during the trajectory of the camera is that of a trumpet which together with the walled bullring courtyard evokes a Spanish corrida and the concomitant vision of death. The modest hotel room with bars across the window brings to mind a prison cell, while an isolated telephone pole silhouetted against the desertlike landscape perceived during the tracking shot evokes Golgotha, the place of Jesus' crucifixion. This tells us that Locke's Calvary has ended and that he has been liberated from the prison of existence. The sound of a motorcycle stuttering, followed by a muffled shot and the sight of a car driving off imply that Locke died of a bullet wound. If Antonioni avoids showing Locke being murdered it is because violence would detract from his conception of death as a natural occurrence, a notion reinforced by the camera as it pans several times to a picture over the bed depicting a scene of nature.

Our last image of Locke reveals that his body is not face down on the bed, the position in which it was last seen, instead it is face up. This implies that he died looking death in the face. When asked by the police officer if she recognizes the man lying on the bed Rachel replies, "I never knew him." To the same question the Girl replies, "Yes." Rachel does not recognize the body because she only knew the old Locke, whereas the Girl recognizes the body as that of the Locke who borrowed Robertson's identity to free himself from the old Locke and then, to escape from a dirty and ugly world, freely chose to die. After Locke's passing the camera returns to the courtyard where ordinary life that has ended with nothingness for Locke will continue unaware and unmindful of his death.

Antonioni was not religious. During Locke's return to his London apartment a scaffolded church, blackened by decades of polution, is visible in two exterior shots, a sign that institutional religion has declined despite efforts to preserve it. Yet as the film draws to a close the image of the Hotel De La Gloria at sunset, accompanied by melodiously melancholy guitar music and with light emanating from within, conjures up a vision of celestial harmony that is evocative of a Gloria. In Christianity a Gloria is a hymn that extols God's glory while in both the Old and New Testaments God's glory is often associated with dazzling light. Locke's death by opening the way for a moment of transcendental liberation is likened to a Gloria. Yet there is no suggestion of an afterlife, only the intimation of a desire for nonbeing which brings to Locke a feeling of tranquility that he never found in life. Thus The Passenger draws to a close with an image that celebrates Locke's death as serene acceptance.

The dichotomy of red and white, the latter symbolic of purity, which is implicit in the white convertible and its red leather interior, and in Locke's white trousers and socks and his wine red shirt, intimates that in death Locke will be cleansed of the filth and ugliness of the world. The same melodiously melancholy guitar music that accompanies the closing image of the Hotel De La Gloria was heard when Locke squashed a bug. Instead of serving as a reminder of man's insignificance in the face of death, however, it now proclaims that man's mind sets him apart from bestial life. For the manner in which Locke confronts death ennobles him, extols him, glorifies him. Whence the increase in volume of the music and the poignancy of the final moments of the film.

The appearance of the young boy in a bright red shirt playing in the courtyard of the Hotel De La Gloria foresees the suffering of a future spiritual kinsman of Locke.