Spielberg’s Duel & the Era of Weaponized Anonymity
My girlfriend and I have been on something of a Stephen Spielberg binge the last few weeks, inspired by the ubiquity of Jaws retrospectives as that film (my favorite of all time) enters its 50th year. Last week we watched Duel, a 1971 TV movie adapted from a Playboy article by Richard Matheson. It was directed by Spielberg for airing as the ABC movie of the week. It’s a very effective thriller; so much so that I did not find myself thinking that deeply about its meaning and symbolism, gripped as I was by the prospect of this dude getting killed by a truck.
The film follows David Mann, a mild-mannered traveling salesman, on his drive through the California desert to meet a client. After encountering a slow-moving 1953 Peterbilt truck hauling a trailer marked “FLAMMABLE” he grows impatient with its slow speed and opts to pass the truck. To Mann’s surprise and dismay, the trucker soon accelerates to pass him before slowing down again. When Mann passes the truck again, the trucker blares his horn. This continues after a brief interlude, and when Mann again intends to pass the truck, the trucker waves him on, signaling a clear road. As you might have guessed, the road isn’t clear; the trucker baited Mann into what would have surely been a deadly head-on collision. Things continue in this fashion for the rest of the film, which I won’t spoil any further because it’s worth watching.
The movie isn’t fantastic, in my opinion. Dennis Weaver, who cut his teeth on Twilight Zone, is bringing a sort of wide-eyed, overwrought paranoia vibe that reads as silly to me. But because Spielberg keeps the story so bare-bones (removing details even from the short story) the film is ripe for interpretation. There seems to be no consensus on its message, however. When Spielberg appeared at a press conference in Rome ahead of the film’s cinematic release in Europe, he squarely denied that the film was a class commentary. Instead, he says, Duel is purely “man versus machine.”
The story is essentially that of David and Goliath – the main character is named David, after all – in which a smaller, poorly-equipped but undeterred hero overcomes a seemingly unbeatable foe. But the film doesn’t really frame the battle as being of a spiritual nature. It torments its main character with the prospect of moral nihilism. Where David’s defeat of Goliath is a reaffirmation of the power of God, David Mann’s triumph over the truck is not even that satisfying to the viewer, let alone Mann. He never finds out why he was targeted.
Neither Matheson nor Spielberg seem to have planned for there to be an overarching moral at all, content with just horrifying the audience. The film is good for that. But the undercurrent I found most interesting, and most resonant in our age, was that the extreme, meaningless violence was made possible through anonymity and distance.
There’s real world evidence to suggest that affording someone anonymity (like by traveling in separate vehicles) causes a psychological phenomenon called deindividuation. We are more likely to assign malicious motives to others, and more likely to commit reckless acts and even inflict harm than we otherwise would be. It’s why study participants opt to administer a stronger electroshock to a stranger when they are wearing a hooded cloak. It’s why kids are more likely to steal Halloween candy when they don’t think anyone can recognize them. And it’s why drivers can get so aggressive.
Because we never know why the trucker is targeting Mann, we don’t know if he had a motive at all. But that’s sort of beside the point. It is impossible to imagine the film working on a crowded train or a bustling street. The emptiness of the highway, the sparseness of the roadside shops, and the distance from anything or anyone who might intervene and save Mann are the most effective devices in the film. In one devastating scene, Mann and the viewer are both convinced that he has happened upon a police officer. Surely the introduction of an authority will put an end to the madness! But it’s not a cop. Help is not on the way. Mann has no higher power to appeal to, which renders him incapable of dealing with the situation with the bounds of civil society. In Matheson’s short story, Mann similarly wonders where the authorities are: “He looked around with a scowl. Just where in hell were the policemen out here, anyway? He made a scoffing noise. What policemen? Here in the boondocks?”
The film made me think of anonymity, and the behavior it enables, in a modern context. The facelessness of the abuser. The lawlessness of the setting. The nihilism of it all. If the movie were made today, it could be about the internet. The internet, once itself described as a type of highway, is today flooded with harassment, abuse, and violent threats that too often make the leap into the real world. Undergirding both Mann’s experience and the experience of anyone living in 2025 is the brazenness and danger of anonymous malefactors held accountable by no one.
Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, despite their assurances that better moderation practices are either coming soon or already in place and working, remain the Wild West – and that’s to say nothing about platforms like 4chan or, increasingly, Twitter, where a lack of moderation is part of the business model. Of course, being run off the road by a crazed trucker and being yelled at on the internet are not the same. But increasingly, the risks associated with internet harassment are not bound to the platforms. 41% of Americans report being the victim of online harassment, with 16% of women reporting physical threats and sexual harassment. 32% of Americans report fearing being randomly attacked while driving. One of these is much more likely to happen than the other.
By 2024, 11 million Americans reported having been doxxed – that is, having had their personal information shared on the internet without their consent. In the same survey, half said their home addresses were made public. A quarter said their private photos were distributed. 1 in 5 said information about their family was shared. The implications can be really bad. Doxxing is sometimes a precursor to real world violence, which professional doxxers have attested to in graphic detail. When gangs are using anonymous online profiles to commit violence-for-hire, the parallel between Duel and the real world feels a little less abstract. At least the doxxers have a profit motive. More similarly to the film, the anonymity afforded to a generation of disgruntled, socially-isolated teen boys and young men is what leads to them calling in fake school shooting reports to towns they’ve never been to, just for the power trip and the laughs, and largely evading capture.
All of this is buttressed by the development sprawl that has come to characterize the United States. Those living in a far-flung suburb are nearly as removed from their neighbors in the same zip code as they are from someone across the globe. This is a form of functional anonymity, which has wide-reaching social, cultural, political, and health implications that we are only beginning to unpack. In my piece Something is Very Wrong from May, I discuss the degradation of community through sprawl from a sociological perspective. Increasingly, in the age of remote work, the people you see on the roadways and the people you see online can be the only people you see at all in a day. It can be easy to dehumanize them.
That the movie isn’t explicitly about these things doesn’t make it any less valuable of a lens through which to view our societal ills. In the film, Mann ultimately decides that his only option is to kill the trucker. So embedded in a Hobbesian state of war has he become that it’s clear there is no other way to survive. We should consider if the way we build communities and the way we employ technology might lead some folks in real life to feel the same way about their problems. After all, Americans’ trust in each other is down by double digits since Duel premiered.
It’s not far-fetched to imagine societal decay, emboldened by true and functional anonymity, endangering wider and wider swaths of our communities. A society in which a third of people feel violence is sometimes or always justified to get what they want might actually be on a dangerous trajectory. We might be approaching a desert crag of our own if we don’t take seriously the task of reuniting our communities and putting an end to weaponized anonymity. The alternatives are scary. We should consider Mann’s inner dialogue a warning for our age:
“You just go along figuring some things don’t change…And then one stupid thing happens…and all the ropes that kept you hanging in there get cut loose. And it’s like there you are – right back in the jungle again.”
Thanks for reading.
Devon
