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 14th 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
