Superficially, The Passenger is an assumed-identity film that observes the conventions of the genre as if they were rubrics for an ancient liturgy. The genre works according to a formula that admits of some variation depending on whether the masquerade is a comic ruse (Wilder's The Major and the Minor and Some Like It Hot), a means of saving face (Capra's Lady for a Day), or a matter of survival (Paul Henreid's Dead Ringer). In its more serious form, the assumed identity film has the following features: (1) the masquerade ends in failure, often in death; (2) the pretender becomes a fugitive from society, forsaking even his wife and friends; (3) if he takes on the identity of someone with underworld connections, he will run afoul of the syndicate because of his inability to deliver what it expects of him; (4) the pretender then becomes a man on the run, and his odyssey will, for the moment, transform the film into a road movie with its own conventions including the travelling companion with whom the fugitive has a short-lived but blissful affair, and the fortuitous event (e.g., car trouble) that brings the journey to a close; (5) the key figures in the deception assemble in the same place for the dénouement.

What distinguishes The Passenger from other films of this type is Antonioni's approach to the genre. In one sense, it is impossible to take the film literally because Jack Nicholson does not play both Locke and Robertson…. Clearly Robertson and Locke are twin aspects of the same person, like Elisabet and Alma in Bergman's Persona. Locke is theoretical man, an interviewer to whom Third World revolutionaries are material for a documentary; Robertson is practical man, a gunrunner to whom they are a source of income. (pp. 66-7)

Antonioni takes the conventions of the assumed identity film and pushes them to their epistemological and existential conclusions. Any serious film or work of literature that centers about masquerade, deception, or the discrepancy between illusion and reality ([Miguel Cervantes's Don Quixote, Luigi Pirandello's] Six Characters in Search of an Author, [Jean] Anouilh's Traveller without Luggage, [Jean] Genet's The Balcony) is, at least implicitly, epistemological….

Furthermore, if a writer really intends to explore the consequences of exchanging one life or one mode of being for another, he will inevitably move into the realm of the existential. Why would one man switch places with another unless his own life were purposeless, unless he wanted to become something and not merely be? It is the philosophical core of the film, along with the literary analogues it evokes, that makes The Passenger unique in its genre. (p. 67)

The same charge that has been levelled against Sartre has been levelled against Antonioni, namely that his works are static. This is hardly the occasion to place Sartre and Antonioni within the context of the static that extends all the way back to Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound. Still it should be noted that Antonioni expresses visually what Sartre expresses verbally: the state of being trapped in the glue of existence. When fluidity has congealed, when freedom has ossified, there can be no movement.

David Locke is a man whose freedom has ossified. He has no being-for-others, only being-for-itself, which is mere nothingness. He will remain in that state until he frees himself of David Locke and becomes David Robertson, who, despite his shady (or is it?) profession, was at least committed to something….

It is impossible to watch the opening scenes of The Passenger without thinking of Camus' The Stranger, where the Algerian sun melts a freshly tarred road into a sheet of adhesive and dyes the golden sand red. It is an indifferent landscape, as unfeeling as Mersault, who responds to his mother's death, an Arab's murder, and his own execution with the same virile silence….

While Locke is a kinsman of Mersault, he is the brother of Roquentin, the narrator of Sartre's Nausea, who finds recording his thoughts in a diary as agonizing as Locke finds interviewing uncommunicative subjects for a documentary. Both suffer from mauvaise foi (self-deception), for neither is free. Roquentin is a slave to his diary and the book he is writing about the Marquis de Robellon; Locke is trapped in a job that holds no more surprises and a marriage that has turned sour. Both are moral sleepwalkers, acted upon rather than acting, influenced not by freedom of choice but by the presence of objects. (p. 68)

Roquentin's past was his diary, Locke's is his documentary, which Antonioni intercuts with the force of a flashback, although within the context of the film it is being viewed by Mrs. Locke and television producer Martin Knight. We learn much about Locke from the documentary. While he had the interviewer's knack of asking the right questions, he received answers that were so politically cautious that they meant nothing. In one instance, a witch doctor, annoyed at Locke's perfectly appropriate question about the disparity between his education and his current profession, walks off camera. The documentary form restricts Locke to the role of dispassionate recorder, limiting him to a life of fact, not fancy. Clearly Locke wants not only to change lives but also to change films; as David Locke he is the faceless creator of a documentary, but as David Robertson he can be the star of a road flick or a cloak-and-dagger movie….

The Passenger moves between the two poles of the absurd and the existential; between Camus' incongruous universe where Sisyphus pushes his rock up the hill, only to have it roll back down, and Sartre's where men must struggle to achieve an essence even if it means keeping a rendezvous with death. Because the existentialist is more aware of the incongruous than the rationalist, he can see as basic truths what a more parochial mind would see as paradoxes. To ask if Locke's parable is Antonioni's indictment of self-knowledge is to ask if The Stranger is Camus' criticism of the absurd. Even Sartre did not know if Camus were writing for or against the absurd in the novel. Obviously he was doing both, for The Stranger shows the glory of absurd man in maintaining his stony silence even to the end and the tragedy of absurd man who never says all he might have said.

What we learn from the film is more important than what Locke learns. The spectator's knowledge is always greater than the protagonist's because the spectator can relate the protagonist's knowledge to something beyond fiction—to some school of philosophy or religious thought, even to the problem of evil….

[In the final scene] of The Passenger, Antonioni combines the existential and the absurd into an aesthetic. It is no longer a question of what Locke knows or even what we know, but what the camera knows. (p. 71)

The camera is free, and we are also. But free for what? To speculate on what is happening (or has happened) in the hotel room? Ironically, the frustration of not being out in the square has changed to the frustration of being in the square when we would rather be back in the room. (p. 72)

This incredible sequence is Antonioni's answer to the question that haunted Roquentin: Can one ever record what he sees or experiences with total accuracy? Certainly not with words which make an adventure of the present an exploit of the past, but perhaps with the camera whose eye is more exact than man's. Yet Antonioni would deny this, for cinematic knowledge is also limited. Life conceals its secrets even from the scrutiny of the camera. In his folly, man thinks that the closer he gets to an object, the better he can discern its nature. Yet the closer he gets to the object, the more ambiguous it becomes….

In The Psychology of the Imagination, Sartre writes: "There is accordingly something overflowing about the world of 'things.' There is always, at each moment, intimately more than we can see." Antonioni has respected the privacy of things and has not robbed existence of its mysteries. But he has taken life in all of its contingent sloppiness and by his genius stamped it with the seal of the necessary. Antonioni has also kept his appointment—with art. (p. 73)