I don't get to escape much, or run away. I'm from England. Specifically Stockport, just south of Manchester. Second to London, Greater Manchester is the largest area of unbroken and consistent urban sprawl in the British Isles. You can walk from the northernmost westernmost tip of Chorley in Lancashire, diametrically heading southeast, for 35-40 miles, all the way down to Poynton in Cheshire, and you'll be surrounded by built-up areas for the entire journey. Motorways, cities, towns, houses, shops, traffic, people, life. Which is to say, I've never known what's it's like to be cast out of civilisation. Not truly. To be miles from any help or aid, to only have myself (and my car) to rely on to survive. You really have to drive quite a way, and for quite a while, to escape civilisation and urban areas in the UK. Your best bet, if you really want to feel alone in the universe while remaining on the British mainland, would be the Scottish Highlands. The Ardnamurchan Peninsula, for instance, has a rough population of around 2,000 people spread over 130km. That's about as remote as you're going to get without heading onto the Hebrides. I've been up there a few times. The silence is wonderful. The clean air, the diverse wildlife, the unconquerable hills and rivers that surround you. But, remote as it is, the Arndamurchan Peninsula is still green, luscious, and shaped by water. Things grow, water flows, people occasionally pass by, and you get the feeling that, if push came to shove in a desperate situation, you'd be able to survive.
That wasn't the feeling I had driving through the Nevada and Arizona portions of the Mojave Desert over Christmas 2024. I was in Las Vegas with my wife and her family. We decided to take a bus tour out to the western tip of the Grand Canyon. I acknowledged before the tour that we'd be leaving civilisation behind in order to get there - Vegas is literally just The Sims: Desert - but I hadn't quite prepared for the feeling that would come over me as we left Boulder City and the Hoover Dam behind. There's Arndamurchan Peninsula remote, and there's Mojave Desert remote. As we kept on down Route 93, cars behind us turned off, cars going the other way reduced in number, and once we turned down Pierce Ferry Road I realised how much I was placing my life in the hands of the nice guy driving the bus. If it went dark and the bus broke down, we were screwed, and if the bus driver wasn't so nice - well... gulp. The land there is barren, desolate, and wild. The laws of civilisation become the laws of nature, and you're at their mercy. Dolan Springs - which is essentially just a sea of trailers with no running water - feels like the last place you'll visit before driving off the edge of the Earth. Even Google's Street View doesn't turn off Pierce Ferry Road.
Duel immediately struck the same fear into me. Far away from California, Bakersfield, office buildings, business meetings, sales jobs, supermarkets, housing estates, banks, and whatnot, and far beyond the yellow horizon of the desert (which is almost always at the top or bottom of the frame here - very cute), something changes. It can quite easily become kill or be killed. Maybe some guy ticked you off, maybe you just wanted a taste of danger (to distract from your wife or your dead-end job that requires you to drive for hours just to speak to some twat named Forbes), maybe you don't know why - but you're suddenly sucked into a game of deadly cat and mouse with a giant truck and the nutcase behind the wheel. And that game of cat and mouse takes place where the laws of nature rule over the laws of civilisation. Life or death, kill or be killed. The modern world is a long way away. The further you are from those office blocks and supermarkets, the further you go back in time. The closer you are to the dawn of man, to entering a cutthroat race in the survival of the fittest, to relying entirely on primal and animal instincts to get home. The people you do meet are total strangers who could be anybody - they could be potential friends, potential enemies, a bus driver just trying to get on his way, or potentially the nutcase in the giant truck that's trying to kill you.
Spielberg manages to take the elevator pitch of "man in car is chased by man in truck - dangerous!" and spins it into a 90-minute pressure cooker that leans on the perilousness of driving through a remote land, even if it is just part of your mundane job. Even if a nutcase in a souped up truck wasn't trying to run you off the road, there are still no police, no phones, nobody to call for help, and no Good Samaritan waiting to rush to your side. It's just you, your car, and your instincts. It might as well be you, your horse, and your gun. Just as an aside, Better Call Saul is not a better show than Breaking Bad, but what it does do better - in episodes like Something Beautiful, Dedicado a Max, Wine & Roses, and (best of all) Bagman - is communicate the sheer fucking terrifying size of the deserts in the American southwest and northern Mexico. Once you're cast out, you're on your fucking own - and if you don't make it back alive, there's a chance your body might never be found.
Which brings me to the explosive end of this tense chase. David Mann is victorious over his faceless would-be assassin, who lies burned up and crushed in a car and truck wreck at the bottom of a ravine. We'll never know who he is (a brilliant move), and his family - if he has one - will likely never find him. As David checks for any signs of life, he scampers around like a bloodied chimpanzee, watches like a hawk, stares with dead eyes like a vulture. It's a mixture of relief and bloodlust. And even with the target now off his back, and with the psychopathic heavy goods transporter dead, David's still miles from a phone, miles from water, miles from help, and may as well be a galaxy from home. But he just sits there, calmly throwing rocks into the ravine where his nemesis lays - all soggy meat and sticky blood and broken bones - like some kind of lesser evolved being who has already moved beyond the need to go back to the modern world. He connected with something ugly and primal in this duel, and he likes it so much he could easily stay out there, among the sand, dirt, and Joshua trees.
The final shot makes you wonder why he didn't turn back at the start of the film once he realised something was wrong, and why he barely reacted when his wife reported to him that she was almost raped. He knew only danger lay ahead on that road, but he kept on driving all the same. Maybe a part of him wanted this - the thrill of the chase, the thrill of being chased, the thrill of going from hunted to hunter. Maybe the dull job, the average car, and the nagging wife weren't the life for him after all. David fights for his life in Duel because he's finally understood what it is to be alive - to really be alive - and he's addicted to it. He got to feel blood running in his veins. David Mann got the chance to escape. He got the chance to run away.
