DEATH VALLEY SUPERSTAR

"Nothing happens, man. It’s just a bunch of people going nowhere."

Mark Frechette on the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, 1969.

I’ve been following the life of a man who died long ago but who was made immortal in a film; a film that brought him sudden and short-lived stardom. His name was Mark Frechette. He was discovered one day on a street corner and was chosen over thousands of others to play the part of a doomed rebel. As it happened, he wouldn’t have to act, he was living the role. I’ve traveled across the States, gathering evidence and collecting threads and fragments of a life whose actions mirror a role in a film and a film role that mirrors an existence. I’ve been tracing out a past, setting my watch by ruins, and the rear-view mirror tricks me into thinking I might discover something about time.

1n 1966, a marginal item in the evening news described the theft of an airplane. A young man steals a small plane and flies off to see the desert. He later attempts to return it, but as he lands, the police are waiting and shoot him dead.

The story was noticed by Michelangelo Antonioni and became the basis of his most ambitious film – Zabriskie Point. A film that many expected to capture the revolutionary landscape of 1960s America. For months he searched the country for someone to play the part of a young rebel.

III

In the film Mark plays a character named after himself. A revolutionary ready to die, who buys a gun and takes action against the state of things. Sometime after the film, Mark and two friends, guns in hand, would do the same. Afterwards, sitting in a jail cell, the real Mark would say: “There was no way to stop what was going to happen. We just reached the point where all that the three of us really wanted to do was hold up a bank. It would be like a direct attack on everything that is choking this country to death”.

While shooting the film Mark would leave his young family for his Death Valley co-star who had become his real life lover. On their days off they would lounge around the Chateau Marmont or go cruising on his motorbike. With the film finished and Mark resurrected from its ending they would both head back east. “Those were the 60s”, I’m repeatedly told. One thing is clear, an ageless portrait stares back at his friends.

The last day of Mark’s life was spent in a prison cell. He compared doing time to dividing an invisible substance. Giving every day its unique number. His death was ruled an accident while lifting weights, but the rumors all point to murder. That day was September 27th, 1975. No rewind or freeze-frame, no map or story unravels the unique chaos of any one particular day. What’s left is to contemplate ruins. But why the so-called revolutionary act? Searching the biographical landmarks, I get lost in the few thousand days that made up his life. What emerges is a picture of someone dying to believe in something.

Whatever his details or motives, I’m left with an idealistic ghost. There were those in Mark’s life who’d rather not recall the past. Their places are left empty around this séance of a film.

Sometimes he would take off to travel, to drift across the country by car or motorbike. Speed, a vanishing point, unending departure, all of these make it seem as if one had something in common with hours and minutes.

The same is true for staring at ruins, collecting antiques, lingering at car wrecks or infernos: it creates the illusion of knowing something about time.