I’ve been on a binge of 70s movies lately. I wanted films from that era that provided the feeling of inhabiting the 1970s. One that ChatGPT recommended was Jack Nicholson’s 1970 movie Five Easy Pieces. I actually tried watching it years ago, but I didn’t connect with it enough, so I quit about a quarter of the way through. This time I felt differently.

It follows the character of Bobby Dupea, a former pianist prodigy who abandoned his family, who are a bunch of intellectuals and artists, to live as a drifter of sorts, never settling for long enough at a single place and among a single group of people. I got into this binge of 70s movies because I remain haunted by Cormac McCarthy’s last two novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, both of which belong to the same story set in that era. And I was surprised to find out that Five Easy Pieces undoubtedly influenced McCarthy’s last two works.

McCarthy died about three years ago, so one might think that a movie from 1970 is a bit too distant to be considered a clear inspiration to his last two books. But The Passenger and Stella Maris were conceived, worked on, and majorly planned in the mid-to-late 70s, as well as early 80s. It pertained the real-life institutionalization of McCarthy’s love-of-his-life Augusta Britt, who ended up in some mental hospital somehow related to Stella Maris. As I kept watching Nicholson’s movie, the similarities became obvious.

Bobby Dupea, the movie’s protagonist, comes from a highly cultured/intellectual family. He’s a musical prodigy. His sister is a musician. His sister desperately wants him back. Bobby abandoned his privileged/intellectual origin. Bobby is angry, restless, alienated. He can’t tolerate the feeling that a life is settling into place. He moves from place to place. He has an almost pathological resistance to permanence.

Bobby Western, the protagonist of The Passenger, comes from an intellectually and scientifically exceptional family. He plays mandolin; deeply associated with music. His sister Alicia is a musician/intellectual. Alicia’s entire relationship with Bobby is haunted by his absence and her longing for him. Bobby has abandoned conventional society and spends his life moving around. He’s restless, melancholic, alienated. He’s made flight his mode of existence. He moves from place to place, ultimately leaving America. Bobby’s entire existence becomes a kind of permanent exile.

In the movie, Bobby’s explanation for his restlessness is that he can’t bear the moment when a new life starts to look like a settled life. He gets frightened when something begins acquiring the shape of a future. Bobby Western feels that he can’t become anyone because the world no longer provides a place in which such a becoming is possible. You see the family resemblance.

In the movie, Bobby’s sister is the person from his old life who still wants him back. She’s a musician, she understands him in ways no one else does, and she serves as the emotional bridge between Bobby and the world he rejected. Alicia fills a far more elaborate version of the same structural position. In the movie: sister waits, brother comes home, brother leaves again. In McCarthy’s story, it turns much darker: sister needs brother, brother fails to save her, sister dies, brother spends the rest of his life unable to return home.

Both Bobbys possess the capacity for civilized/intellectual life but refuse to inhabit it. I can imagine that McCarthy felt reflected in Nicholson’s character. Dupea can play Chopin beautifully, but he lives as an oil worker. He’s capable of being something “higher,” yet he’s miserable when he inhabits that world. Bobby Western is a physicist, mathematically gifted, musically inclined, yet he doesn’t belong to any of those worlds. He’s a diver, a smuggler, a mechanic, a gambler, a fisherman, a wanderer. Dupea runs away from society. Western runs away from civilization. Ultimately, McCarthy’s protagonist seems to run away from existence itself.

I asked ChatGPT if McCarthy had mentioned Five Easy Pieces at all. Not only he had: he mentioned the movie was one of his favorites. One of the references mentions it as his favorite. So that’s that.

I’m sure this won’t matter to anyone who doesn’t occupy my mental headspace, and who doesn’t retain an unhealthy attachment to Alicia Western and therefore to McCarthy’s last two novels. But I found it interesting enough to record nonetheless.