Neil Young hits Human Highway
Canadian rock legend revisits his future shock satire filmed in 1982
The characters are dorks, the script is a joke and the special effects are as cheesy as radioactive cheddar in Human Highway, Neil Young’s 1982 apocalyptic satire.
Yet the message is a serious blast against complacency, and it’s as valid now as it was 32 years ago, the Canadian rocker and occasional filmmaker told a TIFF audience Wednesday night at the Elgin Theatre.
“There are so many things that we all see and we just live with,” said Young, 68, following the TIFF world premiere of the restored “director’s cut” of Human Highway.
“So now I think it’s time to not do that, and just start really making some noise.”
Human Highway was originally billed as a “nuclear comedy” when it had its erratic release in 1982, mainly at film festivals, before largely vanishing from view thanks to withering critical and audience reaction.
Set in a remote hick town called Linear Valley, which is dangerously close to an ominously glowing nuclear plant, it stars Young as bucktoothed and bespectacled auto mechanic Lionel Switch, who lives a life of carefree ignorance.
“We’re all a little dorky,” Young said of himself and his castmates.
When his pal Fred (Russ Tamblyn) mentions to him the deadly effects of radiation, Lionel replies he’s repaired “almost every radiator in every car in town” and never suffered any ill effects.
Little do Lionel and Fred know, but Linear Valley is about to be blasted from the face of the Earth, something we can guess from the bumbling incompetence of the “nuclear garbage persons,” played by members of the New Wave band Devo, who do a lousy job of handling the nuke plant’s radioactive debris.
The bright reddish-orange jumpsuits worn by the workers, adorned with safety hats with tubes pumping oxygen directly into their nostrils, aren’t that different from the outfits that Devo would wear on stage.
At one point, Lionel adopts a rock star pose and jams with Devo on Young’s tune, “Hey Hey My My (Out of The Blue, Into The Black).” There are a few other songs in the film, but Human Highway couldn’t really be described as a musical.
All anybody seems to care about in town is how money-grubbing diner and gas bar owner Otto (Dean Stockwell) wants to jack up prices and reduce portions of the breakfast special, which is cooked by a chef played by the late Dennis Hopper.
“It’s just the big picture of complacency and just how people saw everything but they just kind of dealt with it as being a part of reality,” said Young, whose songs and public statements often protest social ills.
He was wearing a T-shirt with “EARTH” emblazoned on it. “A lot of people think about it, they just don’t talk that much about it. A lot of people see things that are going on that aren’t right, they wish they could change it but they think they can’t, because they’re told all the reasons why they can’t. So they become complacent . . . that’s what happens when you forget about it.” The 80-minute film plays like an episode of Corner Gas as directed by David Lynch, whose Twin Peaks TV series would later use two of the cast members from Human Highway: Charlotte Stewart (who was at the Elgin screening) and Russ Tamblyn. “I wanted it to look like a storybook so people could realize that there was nothing real about it,” Young said. “The only time it got real was when Lionel was dreaming.” Although he’s billed as co-director (with Stockwell), under his filmmaking pseudonym Bernard Shakey, and also as co-screenwriter (the script was mostly improvised by the cast), Young seemed to think of himself more of a cinematographer while making Human Highway. “I liked directing the shots and coming up with really long tracking shots . . . I used to really enjoy some of the old movies that did that, and still do.”
He tried to imitate his filmmaking hero Jean-Luc Godard in the original version of Human Highway, which emphasized long, slow takes. The director’s cut is “quite a bit different,” Young said.
“The original was designed on purpose to be very slow. I really liked Godard and I loved watching these long shots just unfold . . . so everything is like really slow. I was laughing my ass off because I thought that was really funny with all these dorky stupid people talking to each other and really slow (camerawork). I thought that was hilarious, but no one else did!”
Among the crew for the production, which was mainly funded by Young and proceeded in fits and starts from 1978 to 1981, was a worker named Kevin Costner, who would later become known as the actor and director Costner. “He was like the janitor or something,” Young said.
Human Highway was conceived in an era of intense public discussion and protest over the growing use of nuclear energy.
The movie “was actually very, very anti-establishment when we did it,” said Elliot Roberts, Young’s longtime manager, who was also at the Elgin.
“That’s probably the reason we didn’t get any distribution. It couldn’t have been the film!”