For the first half of the 1970s Jack Nicholson was the American ubermensch. The man/character was able to funnel what is now a sociopathic Patrick Bateman capitalist acid-reflex into a socially acceptable, scrawny, give-all-your-worth brawl, flinging out a pent-up masculinity across all domestic landscapes and social classes like romanticized blood in water; waiting in horror, disgust and hyper anticipation to see what would strike all the while down-sizing the circumference of the bite like a rabid J.R.-terrier. Back then Nicholson was a man of labored and sinewy stock, with a narrow but well-bred home-view that cleared out extra brains like sidelines, and both men and women bought into the bravado and invested heavily, in face of contestants who were less virile, less American (and perhaps less connected), or so well-equipped as to usher in a washout - diminishing the risk found in a certain winking underdog appeal, albeit one that given an inch, yanked it around for blocks. The sonuvabitch had a face, the blessed, charismatic creases of an all-star go-getter dee kind of guy who was going to fuck your best daughter and ditch her a weekend (hopefully just not a day) later. But there was more in those eyes, eh - confidence doubling with each consecutive year of promise and success. He had the dismantling stare of a man who wanted to ravage every piece of hot pussy alive, and once he did it, what? Well, he didn't change much in the next decade - and even if he did, he faked it aptly enough to become "Jack" - but ostensibly that wah was trapped on celluloid, forever allowing onlookers to become acquainted-then-fond-and-jealous, before inevitably crawling inside and living vicariously. During the first half of the 1970s, Jack Nicholson was close to the generalized personification that hippies were to squares what donkeys are to elephants, it didn't matter: a side was a side. And upon whichever side's pile of bullshit one stood, eventually life and rebellion became frozen or stoned stiff or both from simply tail chasing biased faux ideology. What Nicholson symbolized didn't really have a costumed, blabbering opposition, there was just America and its thousands of dares, and past a nation's fractured tunnel vision there was life and death. True, throughout history a few righteous monks would choose meditation over kung fu like utopian footnotes, but in particular, America's notorious fair-weather filmgoers preferred icons, cinematic and otherwise, whom treated life and death not as one, but as abusive, divorced parents that both got the ole' Johnny Cash: Survival of the fittest with an Americanized box of popcorn. At some point, Jack's ambition left behind the auteur, the independent spirit of what film historian Peter Biskind has so well-defined as the American New Wave, to anoint himself with the refined and classy Hollywood thesps like Bogart and Brando; and with those devilishly arced brows and an insatiable hunger for being untouchable so as to minister that feeling in those around him, who can blame him? Stanley Kubrick's The Shining was released in 1980 and by ingeniously piggybacking off another old school icon, Johnny Carson, Nicholson finally succeeded at one-upping life - it was a pact with death, a choice for immortality. After that, a Two Jakes failure or an Adam Sandler shit storm were nothing compared to some no-hands courtside sunglass "magic." So, how the hell did he get there? [This isn't a self-help book asshole.] --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Nothing chops a man off at the knees as instantaneously as a choice woman's glance once, twice at his hairline, especially during a bit of allowed innuendo. This damning knick of flawed eugenics was the man's Achilles heel, and he used it onscreen to such dramatic effect as to carve a snowballing defense that conducted and stored priceless energy and machismo. By 1980, it had enraptured and aged into the persona we now know so well. Women were drawn to the face; men forgave it because the guy was battling this very un-Hollywood trait with such real world panache, confrontation, and attention - all during the heat of the hippie-runoff French-intellect boom of the New Wave and sensing this, women just fell for him more. Nicholson's thinning hair - which wasn't too premature, he hit his stride in 1969's Easy Rider at the age of 32 - lent the man the afternoon-booze-and-quick-romp charge of weathered believability that might have otherwise been undermined by his charming good looks and Southern gentleman exposition, especially in the company of a walking chemistry set like Dennis Hopper. His role as the charismatic, eccentric young esquire, George Hanson, in Easy Rider , who flies instantly to the outsider's need for exploration exemplified by Fonda's Captain America and Hopper's Billy, is revelatory: Rooted in Southern firm hospitality and intelligence, Hanson has different demons to deal with - ones poking with the guilt of privilege - another bender spent in the local slammer, and upon toking some grass under the stars and becoming entranced in a constellation of UFO theory, his character is lost with a rubbed-out ticket, while the others are on an idealistic search for beauty, before meeting the same end Hanson's memorable presence foreshadowed, the end of the Age of Aquarius. The triviality that arises in connecting a receding hairline to an actor's (of such renown) early success is drained due to the time-period of focus, essentially 1970-1973. American cinema was 'fessing up, the key players involved were united not just professionally, but using a potent mix of drugs and sexual freedom and social-sharking (it still was Hollywood). This aforementioned idealism and passion in creative, voracious circles, produced works that quietly sandblasted the fictional blueprint of plots until what was onscreen was organic, sobering and revolutionary . The people captured on screen were arguably who they were off. (I'm sure Jonathan Antin would agree.) (No thanks.) 1970: Five Easy Pieces "I'm sittin' here listenin' to some cracker asshole lives in a trailer park compare his life to mine. Keep on tellin' me about the good life, Elton, because it makes me puke." - Bobby Dupea Five Easy Pieces remains the defining film about being a single man in America. It is a transcendent road-movie fleshing out the slowly sinking anchors that latch onto the American male in the shape of friends, jobs, family, compromise and especially women, until they whisk out life itself. And Nicholson, the natural-born optimist and figure for down-home masculinity, is still dodging their tremendous pull as the end credits begin to droll by with the tedium of a lumber yard, his most recent means for escape a vanishing into the dreary pines. Director Bob Rafelson permits Nicholson to come into his own, and it's perplexing to read three-decade-old reviews that miss out on the broad, quasi-bleak message of the film by cheaply and quickly downsizing it as a study of social class or merely as one man's (one Robert Eroica Dupea) conflicted growing-pained walkabout. Nicholson flipped the script on Rafelson as well, nixing a typical grandiose ending of literal suicide for tell-tale ambiguity. The script for Five Easy Pieces was written by Carole Eastman, and Nicholson allegedly bedded her as a favor after her dancing career went bust. A scenic money-shot for an Oscar in which Bobby Dupea rolls his stroke-ridden father into the morning dew for a tear-jerker chat was also toned lower on cue by Nicholson, and the scene, done in one single fucking take, becomes not so much the character's selling out in-private as originally scripted, but a bookend of profound, uncompromised dissonance and anger that his father, a musical genius in a line of savants, has been reduced to his current vegetated state: the world has failed Dupea, its lack of resilience earns a tearful contempt. The voluptuous actress, Karen Black, puckers incessantly at Dupea and at vanity pools every chance she gets, a disgustingly vain Barbie-as-slut hanger-on whose only out is getting pregnant (obviously not becoming the country star she wishes to be, uh, in some dim galaxy). While conversing over supper with the reunited and eccentric Dupea troupe, she memorably slips, "When I was just one person, before I was with Bobby..." A man built upon the consistent payoffs of flight, Dupea realizes how quickly people sum up personal weaknesses, and thus actual people; within seconds, the first impression is moot and an enemy. Another observation of critics past and present concerns their shock that Dupea is not really the blue-collar oil-rigger portrayed in the film's first quarter. But is that a shock? Could Nicholson ever play a convincing, down-trodden sob in his youth ( The Pledge and the abominable About Schmidt in his mid-60s are arguably the only instances). Moreover, is that notion not entirely contradictory to the message of Five Easy Pieces and Nicholson's entire '70s-'80s filmography? Still, Bobby Dupea is at his most confident when out on the oil rig, consciously digging the down-in-it scruffiness charm exuded by the job's requisite hardhat. Down in a hole somewhere, playing cards with peers who are probably just temporary fellas to Dupea, Nicholson's familiar jolts of energy connect to his incognito, voluntary outsider status. The guy's about to explode with a giddy, dusty restlessness like it's a drug; nothing can bum him out until those around him bum him out, and then he's out. Simple, though the high isn't centered on happiness like a hippie movement, it's centered around being the energy of everything, usurping the lives of those around him and beating their systems with the same intensity that he throws cards down on the table. Who is this stuck-up asshole who possesses something everyone else doesn't? The guy's balding, how's he so optimistic and why can I not seem to get to him? Bobby Dupea's middle name is an homage to Ludwig Van Beethoven's Third Symphony, the "Sinfonia Eroica," described by author Maynard Solomon in Beethoven as "the incorporation into musical form...death, destructiveness, anxiety, and aggression as terrors to be transcended within the work of art itself." Hmmm, sounds about right. The one obstacle that gets to Dupea (the world itself is a conflict in flux long resolved by default) is his receding hairline. Laid back in a bowling alley chair, pissed that his indifferent flame Rayette (Karen Black) just botched a match against friends, two romp-y trollops find him of interest, mistaking him for a meteorologist. They immediately start to flirt, poking fun that he doesn't wear a wig on television, and implying it's not a great toupee since he's still openly balding. Dupea, offended and taken immediately off guard by the comments, tries to play it off but can't. Instead, he falls into a one-nighter of casual sadism with the commentator Betty, leaving her friend Twinkie to his quasi-friend Elton from the oil-rig. He's cheated on his pregnant girlfriend, which is not the source of dissonance -- it's the defensive reasoning behind why he did it. The film, which had a 35 th anniversary screening hosted by Director Bob Rafaelson at this year's Miami International Film Festival, is a masterpiece. Bobby Dupea is the character Alexander Payne wishes he could craft, and tried to with About Schmidt , with the same actor nonetheless. But while Payne's films have an inherent disdain for middle-class people in general, Rafaelson's film and Nicholson's performance stay free of Payne's condescending blame and caricature that he passes off for average people; perhaps because together their message isn't striking out but just telling it how it is and always will be for the American male. Damn right. 1971: Carnal Knowledge Speaking of hairlines, have you seen Garfunkel's kid on that recent cover of Rolling Stone ? Jesus Christ . Director Mike Nichols plus Nicholson plus that perfect film title plus Candice Bergen in her prime plus Ann-Margret's greatest-milky-white-tits-ever equals a sort of embarrassing let down. You could try to pass it off that "times have changed," but the sexual revolution had gone down already and Magic didn't come out with AIDS until 1991 (Jack's worst day ever?), so it's just a letdown, but still worth peeping. Surprise, the hairline-issue in this film is sort of nonexistent. It's still present but Jack's a straight-up womanizer in this, and a dash lame in his overestimated accomplishments at scoring pussy. The film goes through a good decade or so, from college to NY-exec-baller which further decimates the man's coiffure struggle. Mainly, Carnal Knowledge intensifies and expands on the traits of masculine defense and strategies seen far more subtly in Five Easy Pieces , a meager three-star link. Sex is dealt with sophomorically, "And then what happened?" is repeated in some form until the credits, though there's some billion dollar dialogue: "You can't fuck your life's work" - Jack Nicholson. "Don't tell me what I can and can't do. You're so well off." - Simon Garfunkel. I'm just jerkin' you, switch the fuckin' attribution. Garfunkel ends up with that zany preggers mom from License to Drive , who coincidentally almost gets some Randy Quaid bukkaki in this next discoursed flick, playing a whore. Nicholson ends up so untouchable in this after boinking half of the Big Apple, that he has to have his dick summoned like a literal cobra by a gypsy just to get off. It's like, dude, knock off the Rogaine for a quick sec, you can't keep killing Koopa forever. 1973: The Last Detail Jack pot (ugh). Another American classic, this time directed by the underappreciated Hal Ashby ( Harold and Maulde , Shampoo , Being There , c'mon), Nicholson rockin the Navy well-kempt do under his trusty flat hat. This optimistic, unpredictable Bad Ass is incredibly analogous to Dupea's resilient, anxious realist. I don't know what type of shampoo Nicholson was using on set (re: no set), but some delectable madness sank in: his character, Billy Buddusky, doesn't take shit from anyone and besides the close-cropped comb-over, he's got a well-conveyed Napoleon complex (5'9") for the entire film next to co-stars - the late Otis Young and a beyond-goofy, two-beer-queer Randy Quaid - both of whom nearly have him by half a foot. With that flat-hat he practically sleeps in, this chewy cigar aggression and a tendency to go completely ape-shit, Ashby pits Buddusky against the beautiful winter dreariness of America-from-a-train across Washington and New York and The Man's omnipresence. Buddusky's first full sentence to a whiny Navy answer-boy, all the while rubbing is nose into face and swishing and spitting from a libation in the throes of a mild hangover, is "Tell MAA to go fuck himself." He's being ordered alongside the more reserved "Mule" Muhall (Young) to do "chicken shit detail," forced to take a wimpy Navy kid all the way to jail for gripping $40 on naval grounds from the chief's wife's Polio charity box. Big whup. But kid's in for eight years, where he'll be a slow-to-react toy made of baby-fat for the Marines to bully, or as they're politely nicknamed, "the fucking grunts." Instead of Dupea's dilemma with the depression of the world, Buddusky's contentment as "a lifer" is handcuffed to the dilemma of a lesser man caught up by the world he's, for the good part, got by the balls. Life isn't hunky-dory, and Buddusky kind of likes it that way: up for scuffles, downing beer cans and the occasional Heineken (re: Kennedy used to drink it .), and devouring 50-cent New York Italian sausage sandwiches. It's the little details, keep life low maintenance and maintained (he's happy serving in the Navy). In Five Easy Pieces, Dupea slide-arms everything off a diner's table when he can't get toast from an exhausted waitress (he doesn't end up getting toast). Buddusky commands Meadows (Quaid playing the convict) to get his damn cheese melted on his burger - give life a sample of strong-arm and keep calm. Yet, when a racist bartender refuses to serve an underage Meadows and has the gall to simply degrade Mule with a "...you know" nod to Bad Ass, shit's ugly: [Pulling out a pistol and slamming it on the bar.] "I am the motherfucking shore patrol motherfucker...give this man a beer!" Meadows doesn't end up getting a beer at the bar, instead, the gang just goes on a run for cheap sixers and lays up in a motel room, which gets a bit trashed. "Let me tell you about a kid like Meadows, he's the kind of guy who's going to the brig and secretly he's glad." The world in Detail is as foreboding, unforgiving and bare-tree-scarce as the one in Milos Foreman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. And Meadows is just another clueless motherfucker, a calf going to slaughter. It eats at Buddusky constantly, he's trying to teach this kid the ropes, get him laid twice (by aforementioned zany preggers mom, God bless 'er), take him ice-skating in Times Square while he stares down the metropolitan broads and freaks, but the end is the end. Combing his thinning hair in a motel mirror like wet clockwork with two tidy, designated brushes to the 'stache, Buddusky knows the deal, has made a deal with the deal (unlike Cuckoo 's Randle McMurphy), and knows he's a lucky sonuvabitch not only to possess the stomach for it, but to be just a tad above it all: "I guess we're just a couple of lifers," is his last line, as Mule and Buddusky go their separate ways - kick in: the long impending march-beat of snares - after finally dropping a hesitant Meadows off at the brig. The underbelly immediately swallows the kid up like shadows on a canyon. There's rumor of a sequel to The Last Detail on the horizon with Morgan Freeman stepping in for Otis Young. Of all these characters, Billy Bad Ass Buddusky could be the easiest to find, same as he ever was - kinda like Jack knowwhaddamean?