Zabriskie Point is Antonioni's clearest statement on a world that has perhaps already ended without realizing it, leaving us all hanging on by flywheel effect waiting for the desensitized apocalypse (like the Nathanael West who haunted airports hoping for planes to crash only-they-never-crash)….

Thematically, Zabriskie Point is something of a step backwards for Antonioni. Whereas in Red Desert he seemed to be working toward a rapprochement of "science" and "feeling," he has opted here for a mindless hippie-New Left and anti-technology, anti-rational, anti-organizational expiation…. Perhaps Los Angeles convinced Antonioni that it was already too late and that blowing-it-all-up was the only way out. Or perhaps that is where Antonioni has been all along, simultaneously fascinated and repelled by modernity, doomed forever to mix Marcusean heavythink, Tom Wolfe switched-on sociology, and Vogue photography. (p. 15)

Having, perhaps, bored even himself with boring accounts of the bored Italian bourgeoisie, Antonioni now...