“How About This?”: Refn’s Drive as Video Game Cut Scene

My friend encouraged me to see Drive. It had great music and a great feel, he said. He also noted the influence of video games. Nicolas Winding Refn doesn’t hide this influence. The pink fluoro script of the credits is straight outta Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and the opening scene, where Driver draws on guile and mad skillz to make the getaway, thus creating and earning his titular designation, is of a part with the episodic mini-quests that form first-person RPGs. 

Cut to the beat-down fatherly Bryan Cranston, the mechanic/Hollywood stuntdriver that hired our Driver and believes in him—the camera tracks Cranston as he limps across the garage, an injury sustained from a previous debt to Neno, Ron Perlman as a NYC Jewish gangster in LA whose front is a pizzeria, speaks an African-American patois—and the familiar man-boy world of the Xbox universe is set.

Furthermore, Ryan Gosling plays (the) Driver. Gosling is handsome and boyish and he also has a flat face: a lot of chin and cheek and forehead for light to play over, reflect, and pixellate. He looks like a video game person. By this I mean he looks rendered, and the strange lengths of time he chooses to pause during dialogue or to watch or to wait to react mirror a console desperately trying to keep up with the complexities of a cut scene in its latest game: hardware being asked too many questions by software.

His clothes are also strangely cut. The skinny jeans hamper his movement, and the scorpion jacket is cut a little too high, so the lower hem becomes a midway separating trunk from torso, cutting his body into polygons, a raster man who would be human but for the violence he metes out to protect the thing that might make him human: Carey Mulligan and her son, Benicio.

Refn also knows his American cinema, and the LA that we take in from bird’s and passenger seat’s eye’s views is familiar from Michael Mannscapes Collateral, Heat, and the Santa Cruz of Manhunter. The City, its motels and shops, and Gosling’s face become a repertoire of an European fanboy’s American film dreams: Scarfacial bathroom shotgun splatter, homo-homagerie to Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising, post-Paul Allen American Psychotic redface, and equal parts Terminator 2 and Grease when they take a vehicular stroll down stormdrains. But what hinges the film between video-gamery and cinema is the American Surrealism of David Lynch, especially the Angelo Badalamenti soundtracked ‘Mysteries of Love’ sequence from Blue Velvet. Godard said you need a girl and a gun to make cinema; just a gun will do for video games. Carey Mulligan is the girl, and every time she and Rosling share the screen there are pauses pregnant not with love, but unspoken robins of love that Laura Dern first revealed to Kyle McLachlan (another potato face) thirty years ago, whose song swells synthly—tellingly, the Europop faux 80s music in Drive switches from extra-diegetic to a television or radio within the shot across the film. Driver is of the movies: he crashes its cars, wears its leading man’s latex masks, and he gets shit done as he fucks shit up.

Albert Brooks (recently head of the evil EPA in The Simpsons Movie) is the highest level gangster in the film. He is also of the movies: he produced a bunch of films in the 80s. “You know, sexy thriller stuff,” he says. “People said they were European; I thought they were shit.” Apparently a woman has tried suing the makers of Drive because the trailer tricked her into thinking this film would be like The Fast and Furious franchise. Drive is slower but way more furious. 

The main difference is that its violence is European, not American. The body is wet and stretchy, able to be pulled over a rack as you were tortured in the 14^th century. The weapons are blades, forks, and a hammer, old extensions of the hand. “America” didn’t exist back then, but the medieval body did.

The violence visited upon it is extreme: shout out to Gaspar Noë and Luc Besson and even Jason Statham as the Transporter. Driver is an American badass like Liam Neeson in Taken; that is, he is not really American but he can wear the mask of one, look like a hero just long enough for the genre to impart some sense. The insane head-stomping Driver inflicts, like Vincent Cassell does with a fire extinguisher at the end/beginning of Noë’s Irreversible, betrays the film’s non-American roots—directed by a Dane, written by an Iranian—and the repetition of the headstomp, where the victim is more than dead, and blood pools out, is precisely what you do in Vice City when you keep kicking in someone’s head after they’ve given up there cash (Grand Theft Auto is the creation of Britons). For all its surface American sheen, Drive is Old World: Jews mediate between the Italians and the Hispanic and they are insulted by both, and our knight/cowboy, like Rohmer’s Perceval, is blank, destroys bodies, and does not see the bigger picture until too late, and the woman belongs to another. But onward he drives.

Screen memories: fork in the eye; a creek at the end of the floodway; thunderous synth; toothpick; Perlman's vulgar slo-mo laugh

Tony Abbott, Plucka Duck: What the --Hey Hey--

Travel and work have kept me silent here and my screen memories would have remained mute for longer were it not for chancing on the image below.

This is just too much. It led to an email conversation which provides the basis for this post. There's something to be said about the "alternative prime minister" appearing on an infamous show (and I don't use "infamous" like The Three Amigos), judging a talent competition comprising incest jokes, a geriatric hooking up with a teenager, and some other crap I can't bear to think about. I knew Abbott was going to be on the show but there was no way I could put myself through it. I mused that I couldn't believe I used to have fond memories of Hey Hey It's Saturday. Then I remembered Plucka: pure avian Id.

The internal rhyme of Plucka Duck and its homophonous wavering between a proper noun and a verbal phrase already indicates a self-referring subjectivity, one that runs checks against the self to determine its mode of address with the Social. This results in a recursive loop where that which is supposed to exist beyond the id – the ego that is the psyche’s apparatus of engagement with itself and the external world and the superego that internalises the structure of social relations – has little effect.

This creates not a human but a monster, a polymorphously perverse child, responding in a very basic and powerful way to the instincts and the drives. Plucka, that mute monstrosity, that foul fowl, humps whomever “he” comes across, chugs alcohol to satisfy an oral fixation that cannot be sated, and continually wanders off camera and out of frame, explicitly not recognising the conventions of televisual entertainment. His refusal to wear pants is an atavistic sign of the similarly aberrant Donald Duck, that curmudgeon sans culottes who warred against social mores with very little success. Donald’s failure derives from the presence of his nephews and Daisy who uphold the strictures of the Family.

Conversely, Plucka is open in his sexuality (either man or fowl, woman or Opposition Leader) and is quick to violence. Indeed, in his refusal to speak, his singular facial expression, and his wonderful, impossible contraption that is powered by his own volition and comprises miniature versions of himself, Plucka is more reminiscent of the great silent slapstick comedian Buster Keaton. Both cut across and violate what is expected, introducing the destructive elements of a desire unhinged and uncontained.
Thomas Pynchon offers a disturbing observation of Donald Duck in his latest novel, Inherent Vice. In No Sail (1945, below), Goofy and Donald get stranded at sea on a life raft. To signify their dire situation, the animators show Donald with stubble. This means the duck shaves his beak every day. There's some kind of man in there. There's no-one inside the Plucka suit, not a chicken nor a cow.

Julia Gillard, Sigourney Weaver, Jean Harlow

Australia has a new Prime Minister: Julia Gillard. Not elected, mind you, but an important first that must be celebrated in its firstness. And by that I mean, Charles Sanders Peirce’s firstness, a kind of mode of being without reference to object or subject. This is mainly me shying away from da politix, bro. I’ll leave that for the back of toilet doors and on the side of scaffolds.

However, we (the royal I?) mustn’t shy away from an unavoidable, incontrovertible fact of PM Gillard’s mode of being: she’s a deadset ranga. While this may be evidence enough for some of what lies beneath, the mauling mongrel, I prefer to take my evidence from an ABC “100 Best Movies of all Time” television broadcast in which she appeared a few years ago. I think The Lord of the Rings topped that poll—yes, I know, like, totes whatevs—but I remember the then Deputy PM, possibly even opposition spokesman on workplace relations, was asked for her favourite film character. She said something like, “I reckon being Sigourney Weaver in those Aliens movies would be alright.”

The ideal ego of my Prime Minister is Ripley, and that’s alright by me. I imagine she’s thinking of the infamous scene at the end of Aliens, when Ripley has entered into the mechanical body of an industrial robot and whisper-shouts, “Get away from her you, bitch” to the motherfucking queen alien, who’s already got all up in her face and shit-talked via her tongue-teeth xenonculus (excuse nonsensical neologism: “homunculus” just doesn’t work, and “alienculus” sounds like a link you might not want to click).

By identifying with Weaver, Gillard manages to tick some important re-election boxes:

(1) She stands up to The Company and their exploitation of nature’s commodities, whose raw, what I’ve previously called evolutionary perfection will be refined for intense profits by the military-industrial complex. Look out Big Mining.

(2) By using the robot, she not-quite-commits industrial sabotage (though blowing the whole operation up is always top of Ripley’s To Do list), but at least draws on the product of a no doubt heavily unionised manufacturing industry—Jules won’t forget where she came from.

(3) Finally, she performs this act of heroism in the name of Newt. Like Gillard, Ripley has no children of her own and is not married. However, the mother within, that essential component in the popular and populist punditry of what comprises women, emerges at the right time. By calling the queen a bitch at this moment, she recognises a shared femininity based in progeny and its protection. If some moron impersonates Mrs Lovejoy and brings up Gillard’s childlessness in reference to some failing or some inability to empathise with some rubbish point of view, they need to be silenced by that final scene in Aliens. And be used to host an alien. See how much they like babies then.

Jean Harlow: Red-Headed Woman (1932). Our Julia wouldn’t take this kind of treatment.

Sydney Film Festival VI :: Apart Together: From Eternity to Her

I met a Taiwanese philosopher last year. For real. He asked me a lot of questions about Australia (“Where are your Aborigines?”) and gave me his take on the difference between “Asian man and European man.” You see, he told me, when an Asian man drinks, he gets furious and wants to fight everybody. A European man just drinks and drinks until he falls down, and he will later die early from brain damage.

In Quanan Wang’s Apart Together, we get a great scene of a Chinese man getting drunk and getting furious and wanting to fight everybody. It happens around midway through the film, where Lu Shenmin (Xu Caigen) finally drops his unflappable accommodating and lets loose on the unusual situation. Shenmin’s wife, Qiao Yu-e (Lisa Lu) has received a letter from her long lost lover, Liu Yansheng (Ling Feng). He fled for Taiwan in the final days of the Kuomintang in Shanghai in 1949. He married during his exile, his wife’s now dead, and he’s coming back to Shanghai for the first time in fifty years.

His arrival is touted in a deadpan scene, where Yu-e’s granddaughter reads the letter aloud over a meal of soup, slurping her way through a monotone delivery. The abandoned son is there, Yu-e’s husband, their kids, everyone. What does he want? He wants her, she wants him, Shenmin gives it all his blessing. Incongruity is the film’s dramatic motor, a social comedy cum odd divorce farce.

I remember having to get a visa to go from one terminal in Beijing airport to the other; imagine the difficulty Shenmin and Yu-e encounter when they attempt to get a divorce, only to discover that they’re not considered married because they cannot produce the right papers. And so these common-law partners go to another room in the bureaucratic building to get married, so they can go back to get a divorce. (Need I mention I was reading Kafka during my transit?) This scene is built for obvious comedy, but Shenmin’s smile in the obligatory wedding photo is pure genius.

(Lisa Lu, looking nothing like her character. She doesn't smile like this for her photo.)

Wang knows that he has acting gold in his three elderly leads. Lisa Lu, Ling Feng, and Xu Caigen have all had half-century long careers in films, and it’s a total pleasure to watch them hit their marks with a tilt of the head, a lingering look, and, in the film’s best scene, singing over drinks. Ling Feng, spry and brown, plays off Lisa Lu’s still determination, offering possibilities that she has the power to follow or reject.

But Xu Caigen (on the left, below) is my boy: Talk of his strong appetite, buying the big crabs for their faraway visitor, soaking his feet in hot water, and, w/r/t/ the scene I began with, lashing out against his current situation and his needlessly penny-pinching path to get there, he completely steals the film. A Chinese student told me his name wouldn’t be recognised by many, but his face would, as he has played supporting roles in over fifty films. He’s hilarious, arresting, deferential, explosive. Like I said, he’s my boy.

Of course, this film is a parable about new China. Numerous skyscrapers exceed the frame, there is the metonymic tension of Taiwan v the mainland, visitors go on a tour of Shanghai where significant buildings are compared to international counterparts (the Sydney Harbour Bridge gets a guernsey), and a granddaughter’s fiancé is heading to America to study. But this is all handled in a muted way—if this is a necessary condition of Chinese film production I don’t know.

I’ve been told you can get underground films in Chinese bars that take on government dogma. If you can’t already tell from my appeals to anecdotal orientalism, I know little about mainland Chinese cinema, other than the big films of the last 20 or so years. I know they break their cinema up into generations, but I couldn’t tell you what number they’re up to. I’d guess 8^th. I do know this film won the Golden Bear at Berlin, where there must have been some resonance of a nation or a people internally and arbitrarily divided. But for me, this film’s significance comes from observing consummate cinematographic performance. And this all about what’s taking place in a room, not beyond its walls.

Screen memories: “ohhing" at a bus tour guide’s drone; a banquet drowning in the rain; the wedding photo

I think this song is sung in the great drinking scene:

Sydney Film Festival V :: The Sentimental Engine Slayer: "You found your doppelganger--congratulations."

Pop quiz: your boss (at right) at work is a big man. He starts telling you a story in a private back room after he’s showed off a big pistol. You’ve been having trouble getting laid, and his story of going to solicit a prostitute sounds like a sympathetic entrée. Then: “This girl was a man. I mean hairy balls and everything.” What do you do now? Silence, right? But your boss goes on, “No-one was around, so I said, ‘Fuck it.’ I fucked that shit like I was Jesus. And that shit felt goooood.” Pull back, the gun is under your chin. Yes, you agree to it being a secret, just between you and him. What you probably wouldn’t do is try to replicate this adventure.

This marks a turning point in The Sentimental Engine Slayer, and a welcome one. After wallowing in oblique narration and odd shot durations, the image-threads, colours, and icky, charged looks form a broken machine of the fantastic. This (kinda) makes it okay for the way the digital image doesn't always resolve itself, casting black lines that resurface the image.

The editing proceeds like the songs of The Mars Volta: crazy fast, uncertainty and risk coming from not knowing what is going on and long takes, where the danger comes from not finishing in time, from the variations and open-endedness. The band’s music, at its best, draws on rhythmic complexity. These may be frenetic, determining the lyric and melody, or they may develop from the searching spaces created by Omar Rodríguez-López, the band’s guitarist and chief songwriter, and, as credited at the start of The Sentimental Engine Slayer, writer, producer, and director of the film. He also plays the lead the character. He scores the film, naturlich.

Saturated in Mexican Technicolor Catholicism and a baking El Paso, one of the most visually interesting films in the Festival is surprisingly underwhelming for its sound. There are some fantastic passages of white noise, but volume is the main aural dynamic—the different channels are not employed.

But this does change after the introduction of the trans. Reality and fantasy become one – the psychiatrist is papa, sister is in your bed, man is a hot, available woman, you slay with impunity, your model car becomes the real deal.

López is all confidence and control on stage; here, despite being over 30, he manages to convincingly portray a geeky teenager (which I suppose is what he still is, producing album after album and involved in tons of musical projects). What works against him is his eyes: squinty and sunken, you probably see them for 15 seconds across the course of the film. This does not make for an engaging central character, which, while not fatal, makes it difficult to watch an already discordant film that is nonetheless relying on the urge to resolve narrative puzzles.

Screen memories: opiate skin poppers; bloody bathroom; the glance before shutting a door; Barlam’s arbitrary choking attacks

Sydney Film Festival IV :: The Tree: Kick It Root Down

Charlotte Gainsbourg stars in this French and Australian co-production set in Queensland. Her character, Dawn, explains the unlikely presence of a Frenchie with a Britishy accent in the small town, but they needn’t have bothered – we all know Gainsbourg is reason enough. It’s difficult not to resist this film, probably the one I’m least enthusiastic about of the 10 or so SFF films I’ve seen. A dead father’s spirit or soul or whatever living in a big-arse Moreton Bay Fig? It’s adapted from Julie Pascoe’s Our Father Who Art in the Tree, a book’s whose title makes me feel vomity. I hated The Riddle of the Trumpalar as a kid, and approach most human-tree associations with extreme caution.

Each of the four kids is affected in their own way by the death of their father. I couldn’t help but feel that the precocious Simone (a nuanced performance by Morgana Davies), whose save-the-tree-for/its-my-dad was an image of a real thornily-named girl who lost who her dedicated, Queenslander father, and her mute, strangely-behaving, blonde bobbed younger brother only drove home this association. This is probably just me.

The tree threatens the house, its roots messing up the plumbing, and a large branch crashes through Dawn’s bedroom. A wrathful wraith of the husband unappreciative of her nascent amour with the rugged, nice-as, successful local plumber? Better than this possibility is Dawn curling up with the branch, a human-tree coupling I can absurdly appreciate.

“That’s not a tree, it’s an octopus,” says the bitchy old duck next door. The shade of guilt follows the family to the plumber’s caravan by the beach. A thousand-tentacled jellyfish redoubles the neighbour’s image, and it spurts out a dozen or so fish. It scares Simone. Dawn similarly gets scared by a bat coming in to hang off her light fixture.

The film began with images of great potential. The soon-to-be-dead dad works as a truckie transporting entire homes through the outback. Very wide load indeed. There are great shots of these floating abodes, moving like land-boats through a parched oceanic outback. Foucault took boats as images of heterotopias, and said “In civilisation without boats, dreams dry up.” But it’s already dry out here, and all a coming cyclone can do is cause the film to run its course.

However, while these places without a place disappear from the film, they go underground, and root the temporality of a game Simone and her friend play: “I’m 15, I’m still top of the class, which is boring, and I have three boyfriends; I’m 18, and I’ve moved to Paris, I work in a bar, and I say, ‘Bonjour, Je m’appelle Simone.’” The girls invent scenarios, imagined futures, the slices of time Foucault called heterochronies. Here, Foucault’s exemplary figures are cemeteries, which “begin with … the loss of life, and with this quasi-eternity in which her permanent lot is dissolution and disappearance.” This exactly describes the trajectory Dawn follows after the death of her husband, a kind of subterranean undoing always riddling the foundations of the family, and especially so long as they stay in The Tree.

Screen memories: cutest bat ever wrapping himself in his wing-cape; Gainsbourg sleeping with a tree; Bob, I mean Charlie, farting in the bath; jellyfish spawning fish.

Sydney Film Festival III :: Life During Wartime: Forgive, Forget, I'm Still Wet

This was one of the films I was really looking forward to. Todd Solondz’s Happiness is close to a peerless film, and its sequel must be greeted with interest. More of the same? Yes, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing when the source is so good.

It’s 10 or so years on and almost everyone is living in Florida. The film begins with close to its best scene, a repeat of Happiness’s opening of Joy and a boyfriend in a restaurant. She’s married to Allen (Michael K. Williams from The Wire and, lest we forget, R. Kelly’s totally peerless hip-hopera Trapped in the Closet), a reformed criminal she met in her rehab work with prison inmates. Every day it’s a struggle: “The crack. The cocaine. The crack cocaine….” He’s got it all under control except for the dirty phone calls to strangers, as a waitress spitting in his face reveals. That’s right, Phillip Seymour Hoffman has become Michael K. Williams. (I admit, I didn’t click to this immediately – I thought the dirty phone calls were but an awkward remnant of “Hoffman’s character.”)

None of the original actors reprise their roles. And that makes sense: Happiness ends with the revelation that Bill Maplewood, your father, husband, son-in-law, brother-in-law, psychiatrist and all round family guy is a child rapist. That would change you.

Allison Janney, playing the wife of Bill, is a Solondz natural, with her tragicomic face. She’s told her youngest children that their father died. Billy is off to college, and so the probing pubescent is left to Timmy, his younger brother. When Trish reveals maybe a bit too much about her new beau – “He just touched my elbow and I got wet” – Timmy wonders, “Are you still wet?” And we just know it’s going to end badly when this new guy tries to give Timmy a hug.

Paul Reubens (yes, Pee Wee Herman and public wanker) is too much fun to watch as the ghost or hallucination of Jon Lovitz, amorously appearing to Joy. A figment of Joy’s imagination and guilt – he killed himself after Joy broke up with him – here he’s the response to the moans of her sister fucking Keanu Reeves. Why didn’t Keanu put in some face time? It’d would have been so much better for him to say, rather than just have it reported, that he’s sick of being treated as dumb, and to have him at Timmy’s bar mitzvah would have pretty much made my month.

Turning the boyish Dylan Baker into Ciarán Hinds is a good move. While I’m sure the Irish actor is Catholic, he carries over a badass Jewishness from his role in Spielberg’s Munich. Gaol has hardened him. He talks little, stares out the world. He goes to find Billy to see if he’s like him. He memorably interacts with Charlotte “I am a monster” Rampling, parrying, sexing, thieving.

There is a striking image of a saturated Puerto Rican (read Floridan) villa complex garden, in a sharp deep focus, which alights upon a smudged figure. This figure slowly resolves into perceptibility across its repetition. It’s Timmy, the objet petit a of the paedophile’s visage, the Child of the Real, the obdurate stain that binds the world to his perception of it. Bill admits that the therapy and the drugs don’t help. Back in the day he promised Billy he’d jerk off to avoid doing what he’d really want to do to him; he doesn’t know Timmy as his son, it’s been a long time between tuna sandwiches. Solondz doesn’t directly explore this, perhaps accounting for this particular progression of image.

The wartime stuff? Meh: Bush is bad, the terrorists are like us, are paedophiles terrorists? being buried in Israel, can we “forgive and forget”? None of this matters, for as one of the new characters (“I’ve accepted that no-one finds my work interesting and I’m happy to live a subsistence life with low overheads”) says, China will soon rule the world.

Screen memories: paedophile’s objet petit a, Reubens cursing, not seeing Keanu, Rampling looking like an Afghan hound

You have to watch this: