Out of the Past

When I was twelve or thirteen, probably in 1970, my parents took me on a drive up Highway 395, on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevadas. We stopped in a town called Bridgeport, and I was struck, even at that age, by how it seemed left from an earlier era. None of the high-desert towns we saw on that trip were what you'd call cutting-edge communities, but they had all been more visibly shaped by Post-War America than Bridgeport.
       About fifteen years later, my friend Will Jacobs showed me a then-obscure movie from 1947 called Out of the Past. I was startled to see a road sign reading “Bridgeport” appear during the opening credits, and still more surprised to recognize the town—not much different from the town I'd seen nearly a quarter-century after the movie had been shot. The movie was, of course, about our relationships with our pasts, and in it Bridgeport represented a lost, simpler America in contrast with the corruption of Reno, Los Angeles, and my own San Francisco. It kicked me into a fervent exploration of film noir, mostly because it's a great movie but I think partly because of the way Bridgeport linked me to its doomed protagonist through that same eerie sense of timelessness I'd experienced in my own past. 
       Some months ago, my wife and I decided to take a driving trip along that same Highway 395, and I made sure we spent the first night in Bridgeport. It had been forty-six years since I'd seen the town for the first time, nearly seventy since Robert Mitchum had filmed his scenes there. As if I'd gone back to it in a dream, I found it quiet, nearly empty, and almost unchanged. 
       The town knew nothing of me, and I knew very little of it, really. But walking down those nearly empty streets in the late evening and early morning, I had a sense of having stepped not only into a lost American but somehow into a lost part of myself that I can't clearly see, a part both real and imagined.