In this episode of Movie of the Year, Ryan, Greg, and Mike hit the highway with Duel, the 1971 television movie that announced the arrival of Steven Spielberg as a filmmaker to watch. Long before Jaws turned Spielberg into a household name, Duel showcased his instinctive command of suspense, visual storytelling, and cinematic geography.
Though made for television, Duel feels relentlessly cinematic. The Taste Buds explore how Steven Spielberg transformed a simple premise—a man pursued by a truck—into a nerve-shredding examination of fear, pride, and survival, and why Duel remains one of the most influential thrillers of the 1970s.
Viewed today, Duel plays like a rough draft of Steven Spielberg’s entire career. Even at this early stage, Spielberg demonstrates the techniques that would come to define his work:
Ryan, Greg, and Mike break down how Duel anticipates Spielberg’s later films, from Jaws to War of the Worlds, in which everyday people confront overwhelming, often mechanical forces. Duel is not just Spielberg’s breakthrough—it’s his mission statement.
At the center of the film is Dennis Weaver’s David Mann, a character whose name underscores the film’s obsession with masculinity. Spielberg presents masculinity not as strength, but as something brittle—constantly tested by humiliation, fear, and wounded pride.
The Taste Buds analyze how Steven Spielberg uses the relentless chase to strip Mann of social niceties and self-image. Each confrontation with the truck becomes a confrontation with his own identity, forcing Mann to decide whether masculinity means dominance, endurance, or simply surviving long enough to escape.
This uneasy portrait of masculinity would echo throughout Spielberg’s career, particularly in his depictions of anxious men pushed to emotional and physical extremes.
Few films capture the anxiety lurking beneath the promise of America’s open spaces as effectively as Duel. Spielberg transforms highways, diners, and gas stations into zones of menace, where authority is absent and help never arrives.
Ryan, Greg, and Mike discuss how Steven Spielberg’s vision of America in Duel reflects a growing cultural unease: freedom becomes isolation, mobility becomes vulnerability, and technology becomes an anonymous threat. The truck itself is never humanized—it’s industrial, faceless, and unstoppable, embodying a uniquely American nightmare.
This episode features special guest Eric Vespe, a veteran film journalist and podcaster with decades of experience covering cinema and genre filmmaking. Eric is formally known to many longtime film fans as Quint, the byline he used during his...
