Plasma Pool

Once I will say it, is all: that Crew does not live, it experiences. It does not create, it talks about people who do. Varèse, Ionesco, de Kooning, Wittgenstein, I could puke.

—Thomas Pynchon, V.

***

There are exactly three things that make Richard Kelly’s 2006 film Southland Tales worth watching:

• Sarah Michelle Gellar. As porn star political activist Krista Now, Gellar finally gets to flex all the funny-serious acting muscles that made her such a cult national treasure in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The film’s dialogue—which is, like the movie itself, supposed to be simultaneously uproariously funny and meaningfully allegorical—makes absolutely no sense, and Gellar is the only person onscreen who’s able to strike the right note. What a travesty that this is the only good film role she’s ever had.
• Justin Timberlake singing The Killers. Timberlake plays the movie’s narrator, an Iraq War veteran with scars that look more like Mike Tyson tattoos. His narration is god-awful exposition: it’s as though he’s reciting the italicized portions of Kelly’s overwritten screenplay. Timberlake spends most of the movie hanging out on a gun turret on the Santa Monica Pier, but he doesn’t just hang out. He never moves. Each time we see him, he swivels the gun from right to left in precisely same motion—it may well be the exact same shot repeated over and over. (At least Ed Wood was using stock footage.) Later in the film Timberlake pops up inside a video arcade, selling an existential injection drug called liquid karma to a character we’ve never met who will suddenly, in the film’s final five minutes, become the focus of the film. Timberlake injects himself with the drug.Then, in what may be a dream sequence but feels much more alive than anything else in this mediocre acid trip of a movie, Timberlake lipsyncs to The Killers’ unclassic single “All These Things That I’ve Done.” He chugs a can of cheap booze and stumbles through the whole dance number, but it’s delightfully choreographed stumbling; we remember that Timberlake has been a performer his whole life. Descriptions of the movie inevitably make it sound more interesting than it actually is, because it sounds madcap but plays dreary and stonefaced. This is one of the few moments that seems to really hit on what Kelly was hoping for—it’s the end of the world, and all I want to do is dance, dance, dance:

  Just as the song is cresting with dancing peroxide blondes, Timberlake gets a melancholy look on his face, the film shifts to slow motion, the Killers fade into Moby, and we’re back to shitty existential land.

• Finally, the look on the Rock’s face as he watches Sarah Michelle Gellar dance. There’s a lot happening at the end of the film. Marx’s vision of an underclass revolution has come true. The Messiah is rising into the air holding hands with his time travel duplicate, in an overturned ice cream truck. A mega-zeppelin is flying over Los Angeles. There are fireworks. So much is happening and it is utterly impossible to care about any of it. But onboard the mega-zeppelin, apropos of nothing, Sarah Michelle Gellar and her porn star girlfriends step onstage and perform a dance number set to Moby. In the audience, the Rock, whose role in the movie never makes sense, even to his own character, looks at Gellar the way that Gregory Peck used to look at Audrey Hepburn. He takes off his jacket, steps onstage, and, wonderfully, they begin to dance together. It is an incandescent moment.

Sadly, these three phenomenal aspects of Southland Tales aren’t nearly enough to salvage it. The film is the latest entry in a new canon of young auteur post-masterwork shittiness. It recalls Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) and Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain (2006), resembling the former in style (funny names! wide angles!) and the latter in its define-the-universe time-tripping storyline. All three should stand as cautionary tales to young filmmakers. When you make a great movie—and Donnie Darko, The Royal Tenenbaums, and Requiem for a Dream, back at the start of the decade, were great enough to get people talking about a new era in cinema—you will have a lot of people willing to give you money and a lot of good actors willing to work for you. But the people giving you money only want you for your golden-boy fame, and actors are exceedingly poor judges of which scripts make good movies. No amount of money will save a shitty script, and guys, believe me: few scripts are as shitty as those of Southland Tales, The Life Aquatic, and The Fountain.

That all three have moments of searing brilliance is no excuse. Moments like these demand and deserve better movies. These films just do not cohere in any meaningful way. They don’t even try. They are about incoherence. And you can find plenty of reviews online for all three by critics who try to make that incoherence sound genius. People who defend these films—including their directors—do not argue that they make sense, but that the fact that they make no sense makes lots of sense, deep sense, absolute sense. Bullshit. Some attempt, for instance, to tease out the supposed brilliance of The Fountain by comparing it to 2001. But as a narrative, 2001—unlike Southland Tales—is almost painfully straightforward. It’s a long movie that should be boring, because almost nothing happens in it. Many scenes watch people talking without really listening, as if observing animals making animal noises. It’s only at the end that 2001 turns into a head trip. The Fountain, The Life Aquatic, and Southland Tales are the wormhole sequence in 2001 without the movie behind it. In their mock-independent way, they represent the same filming instinct as Jerry Bruckheimer: “Let’s just get to the good stuff already! Wormholes! Religious stuff! Weird mystery!” Remember the end of 2001, when Dave Bowman watches himself age in an elaborately designed set? What better metaphor for these movies, which are all aesthetically beautiful but intellectually paralyzing?

Sarah Michelle Gellar in Richard Kelly's "Southland Tales"

Defending films like these because they have something on their minds does no one any good—not the directors, who are encouraged to think of themselves as hidden geniuses; not the critics, who could be defending tiny movies that are actually good; not young people, who discover the movie on DVD and, in a fit of high-school drug-induced miasma, start thinking that the key to great art is thin plotting and T.S. Eliot quotes. Since the 1960s, and especially since the 1990s, the defining image of the film director is less and less that of Alfred Hitchcock—dressed like he has a job, always working, never forgetting that “cinema” is just a word for where people go to watch movies—and more and more that of Peter Fonda directing Easy Rider—a young director with great connections trying to make some deeper point about all of humanity, ideally using all male characters, maybe with a few angelic whores thrown in.

I’m not saying that young directors shouldn’t reach for awesomeness. Todd Haynes took half a decade to make I’m Not There, a movie more overstuffed with ideas and embedded culture references than all three of the above movies combinedyet he never once forgot that he was making a movie about human beings with emotions. There are subjects, predicates, and objects in I’m Not There. Things are done by people. People don’t do things in The Fountain, in Life Aquatic, and certainly not in Southland Tales. They talk about doing things. They talk even more about having done things.  In Life Aquatic, people never stop talking about how great Steve Zissou used to be. In the three separate time periods of The Fountain, the Spanish Inquisition has been going on, Rachel Weisz has been dying of cancer, and spaceman Hugh Jackman has been traveling through space in a gigantic bubble. In Southland Tales, so many things happen before the movie begins that Richard Kelly wrote three prequel comics to fill in the backstory. This despite the fact that at least one, and maybe several, elements of the backstory are planted within the film so as to deliberately surprise. Perhaps I’m giving Kelly too much credit: toward the end of the film, a few characters explain the backstory all in one quick jumble, and although it plays like a surprise, much of Southland Tales is about explaining Southland Tales, so maybe it’s just reminding us to remember that we’re watching.

Yes, Southland Tales is attempting, valiantly, to strike a difficult tone—spoof satire apocalypse drama sci-fi messianic pulp noir thriller Marxist-Socialist revolution—but Kelly fails to make clear why this tone must be struck. The film is, to its credit, intermittently funny, but too many of the these moments are played too slowly, sometimes within slow-motion music scenes. Slow-motion music scenes are never going to be funny. They used to seem deep, back when Kelly shot this scene in Donnie Darko. Now that everyone can make a movie, we all know how easy a scene like that actually is. Get a bunch of people. Move the camera around them. Set it to slow motion. Turn off the volume and throw in a Tears for Fears song. Depth!

This film makes me furious because the three things I like about it—Sarah Michelle Gellar, Justin Timberlake’s dance number, and the look on the Rock’s face—are almost enough to make me want to love it. They are so good but so unearned. The dance number would be just as effective if it were as a two minute youtube video. Sarah Michelle Gellar’s performance could be cut down to five minutes and packaged as a trailer, “Krista Now: Porn Star Activist!”—everyone would want to see that movie. The few things that are great about this film have nothing to do with it as a film. There’s never a moment, suhc as those at the end of Donnie Darko and There Will Be Blood, when you can feel the full weight of all that has come before pressing through your eyes into your soul. There’s no moment that forces you believe this movie actually happened.

Southland Tales isn’t a film. It’s a great soundtrack with some cool album artwork and a shitty name. Richard Kelly must be a genius, because a lobotomized chimpanzee couldn’t make a movie this bad.

***