Southland Tales (2007): The Revolution will be satirized

Southland Tales (2007)
dir: Richard Kelly

Is it too soon to start the Southland Tales redemption movement?  Because, this movie is the messiest mind explosion that has ever exploded in pure form on screen.

The original form of Southland Tales shown at Cannes was an unfinished film that ran 160 minutes, and ended up with disastrous results including critics booing the screen. But the time it reached theaters, it was shrunk down to 144 minutes, but the final version of Kelly's movie is still border incomprehensible, tonally uneven, and just a big brains-on-the-wall splatter criticism of everything.

Southland Tales is a savage indictment of everything that existed in 2006. This is just a partial list of the topics Richard Kelly directly references: war, military, oil, energy, pollution, pop culture, porn, celebrity worship, commercialism, government, surveillance states, Republicans, class warfare, anarchists, Marxists, drugs, television, marketing, police, armageddon, and slam poets. Kelly is weaving a tale so sprawling, and so huge, that he didn't even keep it contained to the movie on screen. The movie starts with chapter 4, with the first three chapters being designated to a series of graphic novels which were released just before the movie. The problem is that the first three chapters do not provide a key to what Kelly is saying.

The closest experience to Southland Tales is the sprawling jungle of Infinite Jest, which took on many of the same subjects in an even more incomprehensible, sprawling, and lengthy take. Southland Tales is, in my opinion, far more successful than Infinite Jest, and I believe that Southland Tales is one of the most unfairly maligned films of the 00s.

To try to unravel the story of Southland Tales is an exercise in futility. The Rock is an action star who had been lost in the desert and comes back with amnesia. He had been married to the daughter of a prominent Republican politician, who is also in the pockets of big business, and also the biggest pusher of the surveillance state which has the politician's wife at the head. The big business in question is Treer, who is developing a new energy source pulled from the waves in the ocean to create a wireless energy field. Treer also has discovered another energy source from beneath the mantle of the Earth. Both are named Fluid or Liquid Karma. The liquid form is also a drug which was tested and given to people, and it causes them to bleed into the past and the future. Treer is also a mega-airship company who has created the largest airship.

Meanwhile, The Rock, with amnesia, is dating a porn star who is also psychic and created a script which is a metaphorical version of the end of times, which is a hilarious commercialized version of Southland Tales. She is also tied, by another porn director, to a neo-Marxist movement which is trying to rebel against, and overthrow, the fascist government mentioned in the earlier paragraph. They plan to do this by creating controversy around the amnesiac The Rock, and also using an ex-military officer who had been partying with the porn star before the movie.

The ex-military officer also has a second form, who is actually the true form, and is a guilt-ridden aggressive racist. He had been serving with another military officer who is overseeing the Los Angeles area, and also dealing Liquid Karma to those who need it. The two forms of the military officer meet up in the end on a floating ice cream truck to bring about the end of the current times, and bring about a new world under Christianity.

And, that's just the basics. This doesn't include the pre-movie graphic novels, in which The Rock and the military officer had been partying with the porn star, did Karma, and jumped through a time rift where both of their versions came out separated by 69 minutes. A car explosion killed one version of The Rock, but left the second version alive. Or, the subplot of the arms dealer who is suppplying everybody with their weapons. Or, the side character of the racist cop. Or the porn star's attempts to commercialize herself as a pop culture artist.

This is also all founded in the Book of Revelations, where Treer is the anti-christ, the government is the false prophet, the porn star is the whore of Babylon, there are two witnesses, and the re-connection brings about the second coming of Christ.

This actually all exists in Southland Tales, and it really is no wonder why this was savaged by critics and given up by the audiences. I don't think that most people are ready for sprawling messy headtrips that are also angry sci-fi twinged dark comedies which have the effect of listening to 2.5 hours of some guy ranting about everything under the sun. That being said, Southland Tales will never have the mass audience that it so badly wants. It's completely cerebral head-candy for those willing to take the trip.

But, what it is is nothing short of amazing. I mean, this movie is near perfect. It reflects the chaotic and distracted times that we live in. It's multi-media. It uses books and advertising and screen scrolls and scripts. There are groups upon groups warring with each other. It's about everything under the sun. It's raging against the system that surrounds us. And, when unweaved, the movie is an embarrassment of riches.

Southland Tales has a shitton of actors, all playing fucked up versions of themselves, if not against type. Jon Lovitz is a serious racist cop. Justin Timberlake is a pop star whose career was derailed by WWIII. Sean William Scott is a military guy who is amnesiac and innocent. Cheri Oteri, Wood Harris, and Amy Poehler all play self-important artists who are also anarchic Marxists. The Rock plays an action star married to the government but who really doesn't have any action sequences. Sarah Michelle Gellar is a porn star who is trying to market herself as a news icon. This brings a layer to the movie that will be lost in 20 years, as all of these stars start fading into the silence of the past.

But, really, Southland Tales is just constantly pushing. It is more aggressive than Moulin Rouge in its constant assault of the senses. In that, it is reflecting the world we live in. We are constantly bombarded by advertisements, music, news, commercialization, and information. We have groups constantly warring for our attention and our dollar. Even in the current, incomplete form we have now (where Janeane Garofalo was completely dropped, as was the motivations of a sorceress who has a key role in the movie), Southland Tales constantly reminds us that we're never meant to get the full story all at once. It's only on repeated viewings that Southland Tales fully reveals itself as a snarling full-plotted movie.

This isn't a movie of little heart, either. This is a combination of cerebral calculation, emotional rage, and faith. Richard Kelly cares about this movie, perhaps more than he did for Donnie Darko. This is his version of a primal scream. We're struggling out here. And, the thing is, with primal screams, it will resonate with those who share it, but also reflect by those who don't want it. It is more like a wolf howling, where it will probably be amplified by other wolves.

It is about time for a re-evaluation of Southland Tales, especially with it available on home video and in need of rewind and repeat viewings. In theaters, it flies by. You have no idea what brick you were just hit with, but you have an idea that it was amazing. It's not an obvious movie either. Southland Tales will not take your hand to walk you through its themes. It throws them at you and sees what sticks. In a world where everything seems to be spelled out for people, this is a needed novelty.

Highly highly recommended, and required viewing.

P.S. This review doesn't even mention that the movie poster used the 2004 Presidential cartogram as it's logo. Nor the musical number of The Killers' All The Things That I've Done. Nor, the amazingly bizarre dialogue like "I'm a pimp, and pimps don't commit suicide." Nor "Nobody rocks the cock like Krysta Now." There is so so much detail in Southland Tales that to make reference to everything that the movie is would be a multi-post, book version of an undertaking.

Descent (2007): Rape-Revenge as a tone poem

Descent (2007)
dir: Talia Lugacy

Recently, I went off looking for horror movies directed by women.  Reel Grrls recommends Pet Semetary, which leads to the catalog of Mary Lambert films.  There is Stephanie Rothman, whose pre-1980 catalog will certainly get looked at here as I find copies of the movies.  Mary Harron has a couple under her belt, including last week's review American Psycho.  The Soska twins who directed American Mary, a rape-revenge movie crossed with body horror.  And, then I stumble upon Talia Lugacy's Descent.

Descent is as much a tone poem as it is a horror movie.  It attempts to explore the depths of the emotional devastation a woman suffers when she is raped and the distance she'll go through to get revenge.  Yeah, guys, this is yet another rape revenge movie...but this one is quite different.

The story of Descent is a bit different to begin with.  It's the story of Maya (Rosario Dawson), a college girl who swings both ways.  She's experimental and intellectual.  She's aloof and a little bit pointy when she talks with men.  She has men run the gamut of her brain through trials in order just to go on a date with her, nevertheless to hook up with her.  She also lets down her walls with women a lot easier than she does with men.

While at a house party, Jared (Chad Faust) forcibly hits on her until she gives in and chats with him at the party.  They hit it off enough to go on a separate date.  The date is nice, though it is a bit of an intellectual ping pong game.  Maya goes home with Jared.  He lights candles.  Puts on subtly sexy music.  And, they start making out.  Until Maya decides that she doesn't want to go all the way, and Jared date rapes her because he is too far gone.  This isn't the explicitly anti-woman rape of American Mary or I Spit On Your Grave or Victim.  Nor is this the drug-clouded crossing the line of The Skin I Live In.  This is a date rape where the lines weren't explicitly drawn prior to making out by 2 adults, and then 1 adult draws the line as the other is charging right over it.  It's still just as violating, but the situation is much more common, and risky to report.  It is all the more violating when the date rapist knows he is forcing himself on the woman and is whispering all sorts of misogynistic and racist epithets in her ear.

After Jared violates Maya, she dives into a hazy world of distanced depression, alcohol, and drugs in a hip hop club that may be kind of underground.  The details of this fall are left intentionally vague to make a more poetic universal representation of depression instead of something more explicitly plot laden.  Through this, she connects with Adrian, a DJ at the club who takes in the helpless.  Adrian is also a powerful force, as shown by some guy who worships him enough to smoke a cigarette from between his toes?  Yeah, the movie is going into D/s land here.

The movie is also exploring the racial reclamation of Maya.  In the first act, she had been the usual college girl, generally reserved to doing average white college girl things like going to white college house parties.  Or, so the Talia Lugacy wants you to think.  Apparently, house parties are only the domain of whiteness while the underground hip hop club is the essence of blackness?  Lugacy's racial politics here are exceedingly amateur, especially compared to the loving care that she puts on the feminist touches of the rape revenge portion.

During the second act, in a vague sense, Maya and Jared concoct a revenge plan on Jared, which provides the third act of the movie.  The revenge has Maya making Jared strip naked, tying him up, then violating him...and then has Adrian violate Jared as well.  This rape scene finale is over 20 minutes from strip to to end in the NC-17 edition.  Just to contrast, the rape scene in Irreversible is 9 minutes. To further contrast, Descent's first rape scene is about 10 minutes from basement wine to end, with only 3 of those being the actual rape portion.

Descent works and it doesn't.  And it doesn't work for the same reason it does.  The whole film is practically tonally flat.  From the opening scene all the way up to the strip scene, the tone and pacing of Descent remains remarkably cold and distancing.  For the middle portion of the film, this makes sense as it matches Maya's descent into depression, but the opening of the film is tonally exactly the same as the post-rape sequences, leaving an similarity that shouldn't exist.  We should feel like Maya is more in love with life before the rape than after.  Instead, it feels like she's as disaffected as she always was.

The second act also stalls almost.  The emotional descent is more of a meander in a vaguely downward direction.  Maya wanders into this club life and becomes infatuated with Adrian for some reason or another.  But, its all so vague and hazy and then there's school and work.  This feels exactly like life. The dialogue really doesn't even need to exist in this film for it to work.  You could watch this movie on mute, and it would be an even better film.  In that manner, it is a much more emotional film that tries grasping at the depression.  While the second act of the movie totally achieves the distancing emotion of post-trauma, the first act is so similar that the impact just isn't there.

Where the movie really really differs from the other rape revenge movies is that there is hardly any sexualizing of Rosario Dawson's body.  She never gets naked.  She isn't wearing slutty clothes.  She is just a woman.  Even in American Mary, Mary is frequently traipsing around in more revealing fetishwear for the camera to linger over. However, in the NC-17 edition of Descent, which is (surprisingly) streaming on Netflix, Chad Faust gets fully naked.  Fully frontal nudity.  And, Adrian is stripped halfway down his ass.  Descent allows for the sexualizing of the male body while denying the men the pleasure of sexualizing the female body.

Through the eyes of Descent, this is the first feminist rape-revenge movie that truly doesn't pander to an assumed male audience.  It violates the male, and also sexualizes the male completely.  It provides a completely different experience to the other rape-revenge movies with those changes.  But, that doesn't mean that it isn't problematic.

The main moral problem is that the movie uses homosexual acts as a punishment, thus othering the gay act even as Adrian is exclaiming that he's not a "faggot" and that he's just raping Jared as revenge. Basically, Tulia Lugacy thinks it is more OK to use homophobic epithets than it is to use racist epithets, which...ugh. Adding on top of that the D/s relationship of the foot smoker in the club, it really makes for a disappointment in the edges of the message.  Considering the innovation that Talia uses for the rest of the movie and the great pains she goes to in order to successfully desexualize the female, and exploit the male, I can't help but feel a bit hurt that she couldn't have innovated a way to not make the rape scene use so much homosexual action.

However, Descent gets the tone of the finale correct.  Even though we're not given the explicit build up, nor even an honest feeling of how Maya turns from depressed victim into vengeance seeker, the climax is astounding.  It's intimate.  Maya is excited despite herself.  Adrian, the tool of the vengeance, is eager to violate the man that violated his friend.  But, Maya has no satisfaction from the revenge.  In the end, she still is violated and has now participated in and perpetrated the violation of another human being even if that human was her violator.  With just one look, Descent calls into question the revenge based justice system that people frequently tout.  Is revenge justification enough to completely punish offenders?  Will it actually bring closure and satisfaction to the families of the victims?  Will it just compound the hurt and the anger?  Descent doesn't answer these questions, it just brings up the idea that revenge does not make everything whole again.  This same final shot is used as the final shot in Zero Dark Thirty to call into question the moral toll of torture.

Descent isn't a pleasant movie to watch, but it also isn't as raw and disturbing as other rape/revenge movies reviewed here.  It is more harrowing, and more of a tone poem than a horror movie, though it is quite horrific.  Make no mistake, it is quite explicit in the finale (though it doesn't go so far to feature actual penetration if you're looking to get your kinky jollies out on the screen).  But, the feminist changes in Descent make it an intriguing and different addition to the rape/revenge genre.