The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2019: Heavy Traffic (1973), directed by Ralph Bakshi

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "On the Corner", by Miles Davis

       Of all the directors I name drop during these movie reviews, I feel like Ralph Bakshi gets the most mentions while simultaneously being one of the least featured. I mean David Lynch, Terry Gilliam, Alfred Hitchcock, they each got 4 reviews to their name, which is a lot considering on average I only review 31 movies a year. Bakshi? Well, one of my first reviews was for his 1975 film Coonskin, a blaxploitation reimagining of Joel Chandler Harris’ racist Uncle Remus stories (which still turned out to be pretty damn racist), and then during the 2017 Marathon I covered ‘83’s Fire & Ice, of which I can recall little besides not caring for it. I’ve watched other Bakshi projects before and since, including his short-lived Mighty Mouse series, but for whatever reason I’ve always hesitated when it came to putting finger to button and hashing it out. So many movies and not enough time I guess, even though I’m constantly talking about how many familiar faces show up during the Marathon. We’re killing two birds with one stone in this case then, because today on the Marathon we’re going back to Bakshi.

       Heavy Traffic was Ralph Bakshi’s sophomore effort, released only a year after Fritz the Cat, the film which had earned infamy and controversy by being the first animated film to receive an X-rating. The film centers principally around Michael Corleone (Jonathan Kaufmann), a young man and aspiring cartoonist/animator (wonder where Bakshi got that idea from) living in New York City with his overbearing Jewish mother Ida and philandering small time hood Italian father Angelo. New York City is a rough and tumble town, full of colorful characters and even more full of sex, violence and crime, and Michael is getting none of it. That is until an incident with a legless bruiser named Shorty pushes him together with Carole (Beverly Hope Atkinson), a woman as street tough as she is street wise. The two have some big dreams, not the least of which is getting the hell out of New York, but to do that you need money, and to get that you need to hustle. Of course it’s never that easy, and even the simplest plans have a tendency to fall apart at the slightest provocation. Quite explosively, in this case.

        As it would be with Coonskin two years later, Heavy Traffic is a hybrid film featuring both animation and live action segments, most frequently blending the two together. Unlike, say, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? however, there isn’t really an attempt to unify the two mediums into a single reality. Rather the live action footage is used to give the impression of a setting, like the scene in the Samba Club where the use of old black & white stock footage and shadows in the background is used to create the atmosphere of a bawdy bar, occasionally delving into heavy surrealist territory like the female lingerie scene. The animation quality itself is fine, not as sharp as Disney obviously, but much snappier than some animated Marathon films in the past like Rock & Rule and Gandahar.

       I’ll give Rock & Rule credit however, in that it was trying to be this over the top fantasy movie and it delivered, even if it still wasn’t very good in the end . Heavy Traffic on the other hand is trying to be a drama, which means it’s trying to say something, while constantly undercutting any pathos it might’ve managed to generate. How about that scene where Michael’s acquaintances beat themselves into bloody unconsciousness for no reason? Or the scene where a bird shits on Angelo’s head after he’s just finished beating his wife’s face in with the butt of a pistol? Or getting to see all that slapstick while a trans prostitute is getting the shit kicked out of them? Isn’t that deep? Doesn’t that say so much about the human condition? Well maybe it was in ‘73, back when underground comix artists were drawing black people like they were the mascots for a minstrel show convention was considered hip and edgy, but nowadays where every other adultswim show is trying desperately to get you to believe they’re subversive it just comes off as a frustrating waste of time. Bakshi started his career in the 50s and yet apparently he still needs to grow the fuck up.

        Now some of you could point the finger and say ‘what about Coonskin?’, and it’s certainly true that a lot of Heavy Traffic made its way into that film. In the case of Coonskin however, which at the very least has the thin veneer of satire, the important difference is the sympathy factor. Even if you’re writing an ‘everything sucks’ story, especially if you’re writing one, you’ve got to give your protagonist something to make us care about them, to make us want to follow them down that road for good or ill . Rabbit, Bear and Fox might now have been the strongest written characters in the world (I believe Bear was the only one with an arc), but you liked them, you wanted to see them eventually pull one over on their enemies and seize the day. Heavy Traffic on the other hand has Michael, a guy who starts dropping racial slurs by his second scene and later reveals himself to be a perennial loser ripped straight from the pages of Catcher in the Rye who smacks women around when he’s angry. Why the fuck should I care about him? Why the fuck should I care about any of the characters besides Carole and Ida, the only characters that come close to feeling like real people? The fact that this movie even attempts a happy ending is almost insulting, considering how tone deaf it is to the rest of the film. What a way to spend almost two hours, am I right?

       I appreciate the work Ralph Bakshi put into pushing animation as a storytelling medium and for showing folks a world beyond Disney fare, but the fact of the matter is that so far his track record hasn’t lived up to the hype. I don’t think I’ll be recommending Heavy Traffic, as much as I liked some of surreal imagery the film felt tedious and juvenile and any buzz I might have felt was thoroughly killed. Watch if you so desire, of course, but the options for mature animated films isn’t as barren as it was in the 70’s, so feel free to explore. Or just take a bunch of mushrooms this Halloween and watch Akira, you know, whatever floats your boat.