Ok, so it's a motorbike....
but the final shot of Francis Ford Coppola's Rumble Fish (with Matt Dillon in front of the Pacific Ocean) is exquisite for the gull metaphor - the freedom, the freewheeling, the wind in the hair....
It's a film which (to quote from Pablo Neruda) sees Dillon (as well as his brother Rourke and his mates) as 'corpses in the city', only becoming free and alive when they escape it, following the river to its source, and reach the ocean's edge.
It recalls a passage in Nan Shepherd's wonderful The Living Mountain where she writes:
One cannot know the rivers until one has seen them at their sources; but this journey to the sources is not be undertaken lightly. One walks among elementals and elementals are not governable. There are awakened also in oneself by the contact, elementals that are as unpredicatble as wind or snow.
Whether the source of the river is a mountain spring or the ocean itself is really neither here nor there. One might argue that the river's source is everywhere and nowhere. But the point is, confronted by the vastness of aliveness (the elementality) that oceans and mountains present, and freed from the often diminished context of an all-too-human society, one is rendered correspondingly alive.
Mentality becomes elementality....
The ego becomes the geo...
Wheels become wings....
As for the great Pacific.... well, the ocean, as well as its name, speaks for itself.....
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