The Wages of Fear

Directed by Henri-Georges
Clouzot

France
(1953)

A great example of a film which is cunning in its simplicity. While the first half hour or so meanders in the establishment of characters and setting, the majority of the 143 minutes are structured around a plot confined to the movement between two points. Granted these points are geographically about 200 miles apart, in an oil-exploited South America, with inadequate trucks - crossing deteriorating roads - carrying an absurd amount of nitroglycerin, with each driver hoping to collect a reward of $2,000 upon delivery. Extraordinary circumstances aside, this is still a "point A to point B" situation.

This environment (some might consider it to be anything but simple) forces characters to confront perhaps the most basic element of human experience: survival. As it was with the Cro-Magnon (please fact-check the following statement), survival depends not only upon the individual, but a collective of individuals and their ability to work together, as well as factors which are completely out of their control. Lucky for early man that he did not have to deal with such a highly volatile substance.

And lucky for the viewer, who gets to enjoy the byproduct of this pressure-cooker: character development. All without the bad aftertaste of flashbacks; there is nothing like imminent death to cut the superficial baloney and reveal the ego. Specifically the character of Jo, an aging former gangster, takes on the most prominent metamorphosis with the erosion of his threatening bully persona. At times he is humbled to productive means, but ultimately Jo is left a pitiful shell of his former self, unable to cope with the ever-present anxiety. Others, such as the Aryan blueprint Bimba and the romantic Italian laborer Luigi, have smaller arcs. In the end all will fall victim to the extraordinary circumstances. If it is not a chance explosion that kills them, it is the constant fear of the inevitable, destroying their ability to reason within and with others, that will lead to death.

But is it not cheap to crush characters by forces which they cannot control? Maybe. However, nitroglycerin is not a meteor or a tsunami. It is a product of humanity; its constant harnessing of nature for supposed benefit and progression. The characters of The Wages of Fear are trapped in this subject/object relationship between man and nature. Though they appear passive (they themselves did not create nitroglycerin), they are nonetheless participants both in and of its destruction. Man's creations, extracted from a natural source, govern both nature and man himself according to forces he cannot fully control. Here lies another reminder that our existence is not a separate entity from the world we inhabit.