As both TLB and POB trot out their glossy remembrances of the deeply troubled man, odd things get said. POB producer James Guerico notes that during recording, “Dennis was the most present person I’ve ever known.” Which is a slight deviation from director Monte Hellman’s observation that:

I don’t think I’ve ever worked with an actor who was so unself-conscious. He had no awareness of the fact that there was a camera. Or even that he was acting in a movie. He got so involved in what was going on, not as a character but just as an observer with these other people. He really related to everybody in a completely realistic way. It was the perfect definition of what acting should be. He believed everything that was happening.

Two-Lane Blacktop itself is paradoxical, both aware and oblivious. As Kent Jones notes in an essay accompanying Criterion’s DVD, it’s “a movie about loneliness, and the attempts made by people to connect with one another and maintain their solitude at the same time––an impossible task, an elusive dream.” Cooped up in a car, Hellman’s camera also shoots via wide-lens the expanse of Route 66. From the flicker and whirr of the projector over the opening title to the final frame melting in the gate that ends the ride 103 minutes later, Two-Lane Blacktop is a B-movie about racing that’s cognizant that it’s a movie about racing. Which means that it can therefore wholly embrace the subject of racing, while chucking plot and meaningful dialogue. It’s a movie as streamlined and trimmed of excess weight as the ’55 Chevy (lightened by fiberglass windows and an unpainted aluminum shell) itself.

The film also features Warren Oates’s most heart-breaking and uncanny character (which is really saying something), G.T.O.—that dashing, sweatered bullshit artist and friend to hitchhikers everywhere––who grows more and more inscrutable and mysterious with each subsequent viewing of the film. That Wilson’s Mechanic matches up enigmatically onscreen with Oates speaks volumes about his own gravity, playing (or rather not playing) his part perfectly. Thumbing through the original screenplay from Rudy Wurlitzer (also included in the DVD set), the stage directions for The Mechanic are as follows:

his expression passive and unchanging

and

his expression remains passive and cool

which Wilson pulls off, all the while keeping his star core smoldering: the lone memory Melissa Hellman (Monte’s young daughter) has from that time is how great Dennis’s butt looked on set. And who else could answer a line of dialogue like “You aren’t the Zodiac Killers or anything like that are you?” with “Just passing through!” and have it make more sense?