Abilene Point is Anywhere: How Texas Conquered Death - SOUTHLAND TALES (2006)

As part of the Richard Kelly blogathon on Exodus 8.2 I'm revising and re-posting my initial fractured skewed take on SOUTHLAND TALES which is heavily influenced by Steven Shaviro's highly recommended book, Post Cinematic Affect

"It is the business of the future to be dangerous." 

----Alfred N. Whitehead (1925)

"Scientists are saying the future is going to be far more 

futuristic than they originally predicted."

--- Krista Now (Sara Michell Gellar), Southland Tales

"Pull ze string!" 

-- Bela Lugosi (Glen or Glenda)

After the cult explosion around Kelly's big debut, DONNIE DARKO, it was inevitable his next film would be too 'difficult' for the masses, but with a bit of post-modern affect discussion under your belt, or on a double feature with BOARDING GATE (also covered in Shaviro's book), it might make more sense. There is an annoying buzz of self-indulgent confidence at work in the film, with its ceaseless frisson and funky breaks that are meant to dazzle fans of a certain age, but might not because there's so little else at work - it's a film made up of dead hypertext links and little text.

Kelly's presumption is seemingly that we're going to watch SOUTHLAND over and over and compare obscure references and symbolic meaning on the internet with each other, and the meaning will arise from there, but that seems unwise in an age where an infinite amount of films and TV are available at every moment and we can barely sit still for a film once, let alone again and again. Do you want to know why DONNIE DARKO was such a hit, and screened at midnight showings for years in my old East Village neighborhood? Because chicks loved the doomed, moody romance and Jake G's stoner stare; his battles with schizophrenia mirrored their own issues with existential expressions like cutting, anorexia, drugs, grudge sex, and the like (at least based on the girls I knew, at the time). It was a hand into their darkness, a friend who knew the score. And it was lyrical and poetic without being close to corny, you could go to the midnight show in your pajamas and no one would bat an eye, or a ball, very far.

SOUTHLAND has nothing much for the midnight lonesome girls to hold onto, except maybe the Darko-ish sex appeal of Justin Timberlake as Boxer, the lone gunner at the pier at the end of time, but he's just one (or rather two) of a big cast, and while I admire the abstract crossword puzzle association to films like A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (Boxer passes and pockets a blinking plastic orange while Ludwig Van's 9th plays in the background), MADAME SATAN (crazy Zeppelin party), THE BIG LIEBOWSKI (dancers in the skee-ball lanes) and MULHOLLAND DR. (Rebekah "Llorando" Del Rio, singing the Star Spangled Banner, clashing against droning John Cale strings), and I love that Moby does the rest of the music and it's a perfect fit for Kelly's mood, and I love that it's the end of the world and everybody's fine with that, working to stop the apocalypse in only in the most perfunctory of ways, I'm a dude, who's seen a lot of dude films, over and over that girls may not like since they ain't got no romance, or angst - and girls are generally a bit wiser when it comes to picking obsessions. My girl can't look at SOUTHLAND for more than a handful of minutes without getting restless. If you're a Lou Reed fan, for example, you have to have Metal Machine Music, even if you'll never listen to it for more than a few minutes. It's the collector mentality... run amok, and out, until nothing's left but the fact that you're in your room, alone, trying to hear some pattern in Lou Reed's amphetamine 70s angst.

"Quantum teleportation, teen horniness, and war."

DARKO was about the apocalypse of self-immolation, the sacrifice of the individual, while SOUTHLAND presumes there is no individual. It becomes the world's sacrifice, so that media itself may live. I'd contend here that boys--so disenfranchised and glum---may be more pro-apocalypse than girls. The nonstop parade of documentaries about 2012, Nostradamus, and the Ice Age on Discovery and the History Channel proves what Kelly's SOUTHLAND TALES hints at: some of us, self included, are excited for the apocalypse. It's a chance to stop receiving paper bank statements in a whole new way. I'd even argue our whole culture is apocalypse-dependent. Without the fantasy of a global reset button, we'd be stuck with the guilt, hangover, and debt of seven generations. Aren't you always tempted to just blow up the house rather than have to clean up your messes?

But what I can't understand is why Nostradamus and--apparently--every ancient civilization with star savvy was so anxious to encode everything on earth with the date that is now rapidly approaching - 2012. In the new century, if we heard the world was gonna end 'exactly' five hundred years from now, would we care? Seven generations is a crap in the bucket when you're thinking about Egyptians and Mayans... who themselves were wiped out long before getting close to within seven generations of 2012. So why did they inscribe our date with destiny in secret code all around their architecture? Why did they care about us more than we care about ourselves?!!! What about the fast food and the banks and power plants that might fall a mere 7,000 years from now!? What about all those innocent lives Hank Quinlan put in the death house? Save your tears for them!

Even the bad guys who monitor everything from afar in SOUTHLAND are secretly enthralled by the notion of the end, and are all rebelling from one program or another to ensure that end arrives. Good guys and bad all want the same thing in an age when amnesia is inducible via an easily acquired drug. Anyone can be abducted and turned loose without being able to identify one's abductees. The Rock (Boxer Santeros), starts the film with amnesia and the first thing his wife (Mandy Moore) notes when seeing him--with some disgust--is that he has amnesia. He's worthless to her now. She notes it with the repulsion one might notice the reek of stale booze and cigarettes or stale perfume on his collar. He denies his amnesia on instinct as if its something to be ashamed of. The game of it all becomes what the Buddha calls "joyful participation in the sorrows of the world. When the world finally adapts that marvelous strategy, owning up to amnesia is the same as pressing the button because even Def-Con 5 needs love.

What Kelly also understands is the nature of drugs and the weird habit alcoholics and drug addicts have of watching the same movie over and over again because... I forget why. They're too wasted to change the channel? Or dredge up another DVD? Or for that matter endless repeat seasons of reality TV shows, where our knowledge of what is going to happen, who will win, who will die, is granted us like benign rulers, or our own inner Pilot Abilenes. Revelation 6.8 and behold a pale horse and the name that sat on it was repeat business; if you've ever edited footage on Final Cut until it loses all meaning... or if you've ever conducted experiments on soldiers, or called him Ronald Taverner, or sniffed paint fumes from a spray can, or had amnesia, forgetting you're Ronald Taverner...then you know what I mean, and if you're happy and you know it, hit the squib, and act shocked when you die, act scared nigh to death, so the Dead End Kids won't want to start no trouble in the rubble that your sorry ass generation left them to build on. Just leave them a DVD of SOUTHLAND TALES, and they'll think you were one muthufuggin' lost-ass generation.