Five Easy Pieces
Washington State—Ram Island, New York
I.
The second half of the 1970 film Five Easy Pieces takes place on an island off the coast of Washington State (presumably located in the Puget Sound) at the home of a family of musical prodigies. The home belongs to the Dupea family, whose patriarch, Nicholas, moved the family to the island so he could raise them and educate them on his own.
Bobby Dupea (played by Jack Nicholson), the main character of the movie, is returning home to visit his family for the first time in years. He’s coming home because Nicholas, his father, is dying. A classically trained pianist, Bobby doesn’t play the piano anymore, instead he drifts from place to place. He’s come to this island from somewhere in Texas, where he works in an oil field and lives with a waitress named Rayette Dipesto. Rayette moves around their small home singing Tammy Wynette songs and tries to make Bobby happy, to make him love her, to make him at least pretend to return the affection she shows him.
But Bobby can’t show her any affection because Bobby doesn’t love her. Bobby doesn’t love her because it’s impossible for him to love anyone, including himself. Why that is, we don’t know, but as a viewer of the film we know it has something to do with whatever happened to him (or didn’t happen to him) growing up in that home on an island off the coast of Washington.
There are perhaps only two scenes in Five Easy Pieces where we see Bobby undertake what could be described as an “act of kindness.” One of those scenes is when he changes his mind and asks Rayette to come with him on his trip from Texas to Washington. It’s exactly what Rayette wants—to share a roadtrip with Bobby, to be beside him, to learn more about him—and Bobby knows that and gives her what she wants. Whether that is a good thing for Rayette, as the rest of the movie shows, is another question.
Five Easy Pieces is now over 50 years old, so I am well within my rights to spoil it. Bobby returns home, gets in fights with his family, makes love to his brother’s girlfriend, apologizes for the life he has led to his catatonic father, and then leaves with Rayette. As Bobby and Rayette are driving back on the mainland, he stops off at a gas station where Rayette goes to get a cup of coffee at the cafe. While Rayette is inside, Bobby approaches a trucker. We can’t hear what Bobby and the trucker say to each other, but in the next shot Bobby gets in the truck cab. The trucker asks Bobby if he has a coat and Bobby tells him that it got burned up in a fire. The trucker offers his coat to Bobby, but Bobby responds by saying, “I’m fine. I’m fine.” The truck pulls out of the gas station and begins to drive away. Then we see Rayette emerge from her and Bobby’s car. The camera holds on her from a distance as she looks for Bobby and then wanders out of frame as the truck Bobby is riding in disappears down the road. The movie ends.
It is one of the most heartbreaking endings to a film I have ever seen—and I love it. The power of that last scene, the sadness of that last shot are staggering every time I watch the movie. Five Easy Pieces is, to me, one of the most honest movies that exists. It’s honest because its main character is honest: except for when he apologizes to his father, Bobby is unapologetic about who he is. Because he doesn’t feel bad about the things he’s done or the life he’s led—until maybe he does, but even then he isn’t sure. And by that time, things have gotten bad and as Bobby says, when things get bad that’s when he runs.
Save for the select few, Bobby is like most of us: he is both a coward and not a coward at the same time. And, like most of us, Bobby has a desire to escape, to be alone, to walk anonymously through this world until you can’t anymore, which is when you start over again. That desire is deep within us; it inhabits a dark part of who we are and what we want.
It does for me anyway. Maybe that’s why I love Five Easy Pieces so much.
II.
Jack Nicholson’s filmography is so extensive, and his performances are so frequently great, that Five Easy Pieces has the strange distinction of both being a masterpiece that a lot of people know about, but also a movie that feels as if it is not discussed enough.
For me, Five Easy Pieces is Jack Nicholson’s best performance. It is not his best movie—that would be Chinatown (1974), which is one of the best films ever made. And it doesn’t feature his best acting. Nicholson’s best acting, in my opinion, occurs in The Last Detail (1973). In that movie, the choices he makes as an actor become undetectable from the decisions that the character Billy L. “Badass” Buddusky would make. There are moments where Buddusky walks, shakes his arm, or grimaces that are breathtaking in how natural they are. The only thing I have seen that closely resembles it is when Daniel Day Lewis walks down the stairs as Reynolds Woodcock with Alma at the Christmas party near the very end of Phantom Thread (2017).
What makes Five Easy Pieces Jack Nicholson’s best performance as opposed to his work in a film like Chinatown or a film like The Last Detail is the way his individual acting fits within the reality and the scope of the story. Chinatown is a capital “M” movie with a legendary script, an iconic ending, and a winding plot that leaves you feeling exhausted and somewhat empty when it is over. It is a period piece—a noir movie with a stylized production. Jake Gittes is a hardboiled detective who has relatable faults, who gets in too deep, and who encounters other incredibly flawed characters. But you never feel as though Jack Nicholson is Jake Gittes or that Jake Gittes is someone you might encounter in life. The Last Detail is a slight “road movie” about two U.S. Navy officers who are assigned the duty of taking another officer to a naval jail. “Badass” Buddusky feels like a flawed and damaged real person and, as I’ve said, Nicholson fully inhabits who he is. However we don’t get a sense of Buddusky outside of who he is in the moments we are with him in the story. That’s not Nicholson’s fault or the movie’s fault—that’s just the story. It’s a testament to Nicholson’s performance that Buddusky feels so alive, so much like someone you have known in your life.
Five Easy Pieces is only 98 minutes long, but by the end of the film you have the sensation of knowing as much as you can about the story of Bobby Dupea’s life, even though Bobby Dupea is in many ways unknowable. In the film, Nicholson plays Bobby as arrogant, sardonic, gentle, cruel, desperate, vulnerable, and desolate. We see Bobby as maybe three or four versions of himself set against three or four different backgrounds. Depending on your count, those are: his time in Texas, during the roadtrip he and Rayette take to Washington, at his family home on the island off the coast of Washington, and at the gas station on his way north at the very end of the film.
Chinatown is a longer, richer movie, and Jake Gittes is a perfect character for the screen. Nicholson spreads out in the film’s length and the fact that Gittes is more of a character who is beholden to specific tropes of his kind of character. Why Nicholson’s performance is so great is that he brings his unique qualities as a movie star to the character of Jack Gittes and makes him feel as real as he can. In Five Easy Pieces he gives us as much of Bobby Dupea as we possibly can get from the story itself and because he is a movie star, makes a very real character become larger than life. The scope of the The Last Detail is smaller in comparison to these other films, and “Badass” Buddusky could be a caricature within that film in the wrong hands. Instead, Nicholson drives him with electricity.
Each of these films addresses major and important themes, but it is Five Easy Pieces that perhaps asks and addresses the most central themes of life: Who am I? Why do I do the things I do? Will I ever know myself or love myself enough in order to love another person? And by portraying a character like Bobby Dupea, who both knowingly and unknowingly confronts these issues, Nicholson gives his greatest performance in a movie. In just over an hour and a half, we have lived Bobby Dupea’s past and his present, and can see his future as he abandons Rayette at the gas station, sits in the cabin of that lumber truck, and heads north without a winter coat.
III.
The car ferry ride Bobby takes from the Washington State mainland to his family’s island home always reminds me of the ferry ride from Greenport to Shelter Island.
I grew up on Long Island but I had never been to Shelter Island until I was 32 years old. My girlfriend and I went in the middle of September, two weeks after most of the people that inhabit the island during the summer have left. Since that first trip, we’ve stayed on Shelter Island for a week in September two other times.
Every time I go to Shelter Island for a vacation, I feel the deep need to disappear. By the time September arrives, I’ve somehow allowed almost a year of work to pass without taking a full break from work. I’ll take days off or even weeks of vacation, but still feel the temptation to check my email or my Slack to feel connected to a version of myself that is needed or relied upon—that feels essential to something. And each year my desire to be needed, my attraction to the value that work has given me, compounds and transforms into repulsion and resentment. Suddenly, I’m not appreciated enough; my career isn’t progressing the way I want it to; I am not the person I was meant to become and I am not living the life I was meant to have.
That thinking doesn’t take into account all of the things I have: a stable and steadily upward-moving career, a comfortable apartment in a nice part of Brooklyn, and a partner who loves me despite my flaws. But those things don’t matter because when I am exhausted and feel the need to disappear, I can’t see them. My sights are only set on what I don’t have, what my life doesn’t currently offer me. And all I can think about is what it would be like to start all over again.
To get to Shelter Island, we rent a car and drive. That means I always travel across the length of Long Island, passing the various towns my relatives have lived in, died in, and moved away from over the three decades of my life. That means I pass by the area of Long Island I grew up in, where my parents still live. And that means even desiring to see nothing but a blank future, where I could be anyone or do anything, I must remember who I am and where I came from.
However, by the time I’m on that ferry from Greenport, gliding over the Peconic River, the sense of possibility arises again. Shelter Island is locked between the two forks of Long Island but each time I approach it on the water, it feels as if it is sitting in the middle of the ocean. I arrive ashore and roll my rental car along the sleepy roads, now empty as the summer edges to fall, and feel as if I am no longer who I am.
The first thing I do when I’m on Shelter Island is drive to the peninsula known as Ram Island, a bulk of land that juts out into Gardiner’s Bay. As I approach Ram Island, it has become a tradition for me to listen to Max Richter’s “And Know The Place For The First Time,” which is from the score of the third season of The Leftovers. The song is featured in what is perhaps my favorite sequence in the entire series.
It is the end of the first episode of the third season and the camera pans across a vast expanse of green fields dotted with sheep as a figure rides a bicycle along on a dirt road. The figure eventually rides up to a church and we see that the person is delivering a cage full of birds—they appear to be doves. A nun greets the figure (we still can’t see their face) and attempts to make conversation. The figure doesn’t respond until the nun asks, “Does the name Kevin mean anything to you?” Then, we see the figure’s face: It is a character we have known for the show’s entire duration, but she has aged. She is an older woman now and appears to be living a completely different life in the middle of nowhere.
Richter’s score builds over its nearly three-minute length. An organ, strings, and a horn repeat on a melody that slowly rises until a full brass section joins in, almost sounding like a synthesizer, and raises the intensity so that your hair stands on end. The effect is one of the most powerful marriages of music and image I have ever seen on television and fills me with longing and awe each time I watch it. I know the story. I know what this character’s journey means and how she got to where she is. But each time, I long to be her, to be able to be at the end of the world and alone in a new life I made for myself because I couldn’t bear to live in the one I had before.
I listen to “And Know The Place For The First Time” as I ride the hills on the way to Ram Island, knowing with each rise and fall of the road that I am getting further away from everything I am. Then, I park my car and walk out onto that spit of beach where I can sit alone and swim underneath the September sun. As I look out over the Gardiner’s Bay, I know I’m not at the end of the world—I’m not even at the end of Long Island. Just over my shoulder, large, expensive homes stand facing the water. Everything is close and everything is convenient. Yet deep within me, I feel as though I could step out into the water and swim and keep on going until I meet the next bulk of land; and once onshore there, I could keep on walking just as I am and be that person, whoever that is, and start again. No one would need me—and I wouldn’t need anyone.
But once I’ve finished swimming and sitting underneath the sun, I inevitably get back in my rental car, spilling grains of sand along the upholstery. So, slightly damp, I return to the home I’ve rented for the week where my girlfriend is waiting for me; for that is where love is, that is where my life is. I am who I am, and who I am has a lot to do with her. I need her, just as she needs me. The desire to escape, the need to become someone entirely different to inhabit a different life, that dark part of my soul, begins to subside.
And I can remember that it feels good to be needed in the life I lead; that it would be impossible to turn my back on everything I am and everything that has led me to where I am on that day.
IV.
In Five Easy Pieces, Bobby Dupea doesn’t experience anything that could be described as an “epiphany.” But in the last act of the movie, he is offered two chances at epiphany—each one comes through the words of a woman.
The first is from his brother’s girlfriend, Catherine. Bobby has already slept with Catherine and causes a scene one night trying to get her to talk to him. When they are alone the next day she dismisses any chance of the two of them having a relationship. Catherine calls Bobby a strange person and then says: “If a person has no love for himself, no respect for himself, no love of his friends, family, work, something—how can he ask for love in return? I mean, why should he ask for it?”
The second is from Rayette, moments before Bobby abandons her. They are driving in the car and Rayette is trying to cuddle up next to Bobby while he drives. Bobby pushes Rayette away, which causes her to snap. “Son of a bitch, Bobby!” she says. “You been pushing me away. I’ve had enough of that for an entire lifetime. Why don’t you just be good to me for a change?” She is silent for a moment and then says: “Isn’t anybody gonna look after you and love you as good as I do.”
That last line that Rayette says to Bobby is what I remember each time I come back from the shoreline of Ram Island, at the far east end of Shelter Island, and feel like I want to escape into a new life. I remember the people I have who do love me. I think about my selfishness for wanting more or wanting something different without appreciating what I have. And I feel foolish for thinking that I’d ever be capable of forsaking that love.
What Catherine says to Bobby directly gets at the heart of his character—and it is one of the things I fear the most in life. If a person proceeds through life without respecting or loving themselves and the life they lead, that means they have no love or appreciation for the friends, family, work, or anything else that has helped to define the shape of their life. And if a person can’t love themselves or any of those other parts of their life, how can they expect to be truly loved in return? What I have always feared the most in life is that I have never respected, loved, or shown myself the kindness that would allow me to actually be loved by another person. Maybe that is irrational, but so many of our deepest fears are irrational.
In both of these instances, Bobby is given a chance to confront the darkest parts of himself and change. But he elects not to. It’s not because he is incapable of change, but because he is too afraid to.
The climax of Five Easy Pieces comes when Bobby takes his father for a walk in his wheelchair. His father is in a catatonic state after a series of strokes and can barely move his face. Bobby takes him to a spot overlooking the water, crouches beside his father’s wheelchair and says, “I don't know if you'd be...particularly interested in hearing anything about me. My life, I mean...most of it doesn't add up to much...that I could relate as a way of life that you'd approve of...I'd like to be able to tell you why, but I don't really...I mean, I move around a lot because things tend to get bad when I stay.” He then finishes by referring to his past as a piano player, and making an attempt to apologize to his father. “The best that I can do is apologize. We both know that I was never really that good at it, anyway. I'm sorry it didn't work out.”
At that moment, Bobby is resigned to his fate. He is firm in his belief that when he allows himself to be one particular version of himself, to inhabit one particular life, for too long that things will go bad. So he has to keep moving around, drifting from place to place, from one false start at a life to another. And each time all he can do is apologize and say, if only to himself, that he’s sorry that it didn’t work out.
When Bobby and Rayette pull into the gas station in the final scene of the film, we know that Bobby is incapable of epiphany. Rayette goes to get her coffee and Bobby goes to the gas station’s bathroom. Inside, we watch as he hears the cars passing on the road and the sound of a truck’s engine idling outside the bathroom walls and an idea seems to cross his mind. He looks at himself in the mirror and stares: he is exhausted, disappointed, and bewildered with himself. But he is also somehow not surprised that he is about to do what he is going to do.
Every time I watch the end of Five Easy Pieces, I know what is coming and still I am left feeling empty and sad as I watch Rayette wander offscreen and see Bobby and the trucker disappear down the road. Because we may not all be like Bobby Dupea in reality, but who he is and the fear he has lives in some part of all of us.
I know that’s true for me. And it's one of the things that frightens me the most.