weird dialogue

I thought the strangest piece of dialogue was in the previously deleted scene between Nicholson and Schneider where Schneider walks ends up walking off on him...

'Which me?'

'The old me is hungry'

it's a great phrase, why not? It sounds brillitantly

I can not only imagine someone saying it, but countless thousands have done so, at least in a classroom. I refer to the very same line in the "daisy thread." It's from Plato's Phaedrus and is one of the most famous lines in antiquity. In fact, Ted Perry wrote an essay on the Passenger when it came out whose title is "Men and Landscapes."

I would never say that Plato's dialogues can be definitively interpreted, but I would suggest that the reference is absolutely deliberate: the co-writers were quite educated: Mark Peploe went to Oxford and Wollen was a film theorist. Antonioni himself is arguably one of the most literate filmmakers in the world. For example, he said Lucretius was one of his favorite poets and he translated F. Scott Fitzgerald into Italian.

Socrates says the line about men and landscapes to Phaedrus when the latter is admiring the countryside outside the city walls of Athens (as Locke is outside normal society). Socrates (as depicted by Plato) is arguing against the romantic notion that nature has something to tell us. Or, at least, that nature has more to tell us than men. It is the political, the interaction between men, that he is interested in. The dialogue goes on to discuss the nature of rhetoric (Locke is a famous journalist who records politicians speechifying--"Locke? David Locke?" says Robertson) and madness (clearly present too, of course).

That Locke uses the line could be interpreted in a few ways: one, that he is rational (Locke!) Western man with a sententious line that clearly shows his interest in the human, the political, and not nature. With Daisy, later, she says "isn't the landscape beautiful?" To which he replies wearyingly: "Yes." Whether he actually does know the human is developed during the movie. He goes from knowing television journalist to despair and his Socratic or pseudo-Socratic confidence dissipates.

Interestingly, Antonioni fuses men and landscapes in his films. It is not pure landscape (other than his short films) but men and women within those memorable landscapes (L'Avventura, Red Desert)that chiefly articulate his stories.