F Is for Fake
Thanks partly to the proliferation of movie-crit blogs, and partly to the steamrolling irrelevancy of professional film criticism (or, one could say, the perpetuation of movie review irrelevancy, a view in which the Agees, Farbers, Sarrises and Hobermans have been the freakish exceptions in a century-long sludge-glacier of bad writing and cinematic illiteracy), a film like Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales can actually get released to theaters, in an age when a smaller number of films get screen time than ever before, and, thanks to stunned reviewers, get seen. Every positive review of the film chalks up points for its audacity or ambition or hubris, which it has in gratuitous supply; if only hubris were enough. It may seem to be nowadays, because contemporary movies are more than ever the work of machines, not people, electronic machines as well as marketing-research tabulators and neo-liberal economic machines that aren’t interested in producing entertainment (or art) that audiences might enjoy, but rather in producing consumables designed down to their pixels to squeeze every discretionary penny possible from an overhyped populace. So Kelly’s utterly sophomoric nonsense seems, despite the readily acknowledged failure of the film to cohere or express a complete thought or tell a good joke, to be an event, a refreshing auteurist blast of textual irreverence that is, at the very least, the recognizable sound of one egomaniac’s hand desperately clapping.
But Southland Tales is a disaster, and a damningly dull one at that. Far be it from me to condemn it on the basis of bad taste or narrative experimentalism or flagrant risk-taking or allusionary recklessness or failed ambition, all of which are Pynchonian things I tend to go misty and swoony over in movies, from Freaks to I Am Cuba to Marketa Lazarova to Chimes at Midnight to The Mother and the Whore to Our Hitler to Once Upon a Time in America to whatever else. No, the problem with Kelly’s film is simple: it’s incoherent, not in a broad view, which is easy to take and sometimes easy to enjoy, but within virtually each and every scene. Most of the "plot" is told to us via the nearly context-less narration, affecting pretentious connections and significances to things and incidents and characters that otherwise demonstrate none. When that doesn’t do, Kelly throws in swatches of video-news exposition, which would be semi-fine if the narrative supposedly being revealed didn’t seem absolutely arbitrary, as if it were made up as it went along, by three or more writers who weren’t talking to each other. The scenes themselves are almost universally full of dead air, the actors standing around or sitting on couches with no apparent clue as to what the dramatic thrust of the set-up in question is supposed to be. The ideas Kelly is ostensibly dramatizing, or at least tossing in the air, are high-school-graffiti stupid: "neo-Marxism," a merely talked-about rip in "the fourth dimension!", the idea that Armageddon, or something, will befall us if "two identical souls shake hands," etc. Honestly, this is Ed Wood country. Some elements – the rise of porn actresses to primetime pundits, say – await a screenplay with some comic wit; others (a script written by an action star that predicts the future? yet another addictive designer drug that has no apparent affective properties at all except grogginess? a coterie of fey, evil scientists caked with makeup, bad wigs and space-age couture?) cannot be saved. The only sequence that has a cohesive energy to it, not surprisingly everyone’s favorite, is Justin Timberlake’s faux-music video fantasia with a Killers song; by even old music video standards it’s pretty uninspired, but in the middle of this shambles, it feels shockingly, pleasurably juiced and convincing.
Needless to say, I’ve seen the released version, some 17 minutes shorter than the "work in progress" that bored audiences at Cannes, and for once it seems the Cannes-goers had a relevant point to make. (Honestly, the film practically begs to be called Pynchonian, but for an honestly Pynchonian film experience, look for the hard-to-see Cuban film The Mists in the Palm Trees, or, hopefully coming our way soon, Guy Maddin’s new majesterially quasi-autobiographical "docuasia" My Winnipeg.) But the larger point is not that the accolades – all deserving, I think – for Donnie Darko have allowed Kelly to think any gout of uncooked ideas that pops into his skull is the work of genius, but that so many critics, blogging, publishing and otherwise, have agreed with him, that the landscape of movies in 2007 is so arid, so depleted of oxygen and protein and brain candy, that Southland Tales feels like an achievement to so many. I think perhaps getting it into multiplexes and brainwashing the cognoscenti is the true achievement; consider seriously for a moment what reaction Kelly’s film would’ve garnered had it instead been shoved out onto home video, and been seen in our living rooms. The movie’d remain the same, but instead of trying to rationalize its pitfalls, viewers would be turning it off not long into the second hour.
Nicely put. Southland Tales is like a Philip Dick adaptation by someone who doesn't understand what's interesting about Philip Dick. It's unfortunate that the critical discussion of the film has otherwise been divided into two camps: middlebrow reviewers who "don't get it" and the sharper blades who, shockingly, embrace the film as ambitious and full of ideas despite the fact that it possesses the aesthetic sophistication of a Limp Bizkit album cover and the political cunning of that loud-mouthed libertarian kid from your junior-high civics class. Also, who knew a movie about the apocalypse could be so boring?
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