It is rare for a short movie to be filmed in such epic surroundings - on the road towards the American West - especially one that is essentially a joke, a twist in the tale, a shaggy dog story. The film works by setting up a number of cliches and expected complications, and simply reversing them.
The film begins with the Woman on the road, enthused, presumably happy to be Free. She spots a red land rover behind her, and we wonder how long it's been there (we later discover 3 hours). Her car breaks down, and the land rover drives on. On the radio, the news reports yet another desert murder by a presumed serial killer 'The Sidewinder'. The Woman claims she's not scared, but it seems like empty bravura - do we feel this because she's a woman, on her own, vulnerable, in this huge open space, and believe she should be scared? She gets out of the car, in tight top and hotpants, burns herself against her sun-ironed car, and begins shaking to Booker T and the MGs' 'Green Onions' - the emphasis is on her physicality, her reckless exulting in her own precarious freedom, as we take it.
The land rover returns, looming ominously, the occupant a Texan slickster in snakeskin boots. Before this, the film had relished in the Woman's point of view, her surveying the open landscape, her claim to interpret it as a subject; now she is a tiny figure in the Man's window frame, cut down to size, exposed. Her sniping at his help is understandably self-protective, but we fear she may provoke him into rage; when he rings the tow-truck people to no answer, we fear the inevitable.
The huge dun sandscape becomes a kind of boardgame for a battle of the sexes, and their playing out their roles has a ritualistic, fatalistic weight, underlined by the rhythms of the closing song, 'White Rabbits'. The film tackles the issue of gender directly, by putting a woman in the centre of two genres - the road movie and the serial killer movie - where she is normally, at best, a marginal figure, a hitchhiker, a girlfriend, a victim. 'Thelma and Louise' may have set their claim to the road movie, but they had to pay for their transgression - hands off, this is male territory, you will be punished.
Intriguingly, as with 'Thelma', 'Blacktop Afternoon' is directed by a man. What is more interesting that the deconstruction is the sense of place, the cooking sun flaying the monumental allegory - this is the Woman and the Man, no individual identities - playing out beneath it.
