Wither the Verve Pipe Coke-Cross? THE CANYONS (2013)

Deep in the liason dangereuse-drenched Canyons dwells the only reason we'd want to see it (unless we were Paul Schrader devotees), Lohan's voluptuous, bruised body --on full display, and marvelously curvy, yet never teetering over the edge into zaftig. In between shots of her or other pretty youths on their cell phones and/or in underwear, Schrader cuts to abandoned west coast cinemas to remind us we're not seeing this movie there, but on our iPads or TVs. At one point a character even takes a long Van Sant-like (i.e. back-of-the-head Steadicam) stroll through Amoeba Video to remind us it still exists. Still, it's odd: who goes there in the age of streaming? Only the ghosts, haunting places they once loved to linger... but can barely remember why.

Meanwhile a nonstarter slasher film role is coveted by a hunky rent boy looking to 'make a dolla in dis business' before he blows it all for the love of the evil producer's swing partner (Lohan). But that film never materializes and if there's a meaning to the media echo chamber it doesn't track. Only Lindsay's coming-and-going older girl curves, her various minor hard living bruises, remain when this dull meta-business melts away. It is the last thing standing, or lying, in a field of vision that's slowly being sucked into a tiny glowing square. In a film about vanishing media, only Lohan's spectacular 'real' body has the clout to stay un-airbrushed.

Which means I care enough to spend $4.99 on Lindsay Lohan, to do my small part in resuscitating her career from its woozy downward spiral, approving with my 'vote' her plan of launching herself off the bottom of the vice pool back up to the A-list surface. And what bottom could be baser than a coked-up sin parade led by Paul Schrader and Bret Easton Ellis? It's a time-honored Hollywood fallen young person tradition, the way Robert Downey Jr. launched off similarly debauched-and-guilty-about-it James Toback's Two Girls and a Guy in 1997. It's a chance for mutual symbiosis: two established-but-exiled old chroniclers of artsy and druggie youth find backing via their casting of a genuine drug-addled youth, recently shook off her A-list perch. Whether or not their collaborative effort makes a lasting dent in the popular consciousness is immaterial. It already achieved its goal of media attention. 

Though long since fallen from the front room coke tray pecking order, Schrader's more on his game  today than most of his old Raging Bull buddies, his lacerating spirituality perhaps coming to his emotional rescue. When the others forget even what they were using sex, drugs, and intrigue to escape from, Schrader remembers. He never managed to succeed in self-deprogramming from his crushing Calvinist guilt, but never stopped trying, and now that persistence pays off. When lesser mortals OD, get sober, or move to television, Schrader holds God's hand, descends into the crevasse and climbs out the other side. Maybe Jesus is down there, or a dropped Xanax bottle, or a viable self-distribution pipeline for self-made digital movies. Or at least a cool dark coffin to rest until Netflix reruns night. Either way, he'll still ply his smut and denounce it too. My god isn't life sexier to when you lack a moral compass? And depressing?  

Old man Schrader's been subjecting us to this post-Calvinist morality slip-and-sliding for a long time: Taxi Driver (1974), Hardcore (1978), American Gigolo (1980) and Auto Focus (2002) were each in their own way about the evil lure of pornography: runaway daughters being sucked into the trade; Cybil Shepherd losing her cool at a screening of Sometimes Sweet Susan; Bob Crane's molasses slip from beloved TV star to amateur pornographer; a preening narcissist who sells his body to rich older ladies in American Gigolo -he judges them all, pumps up the surface arousal factor, as in his remake of Cat People, gives lust a sparagmostic flaying. Coke whore novelist Bret Easton Ellis wrote American Psycho, Rules of Attraction, and Less than Zero, which collectively chronicle 80-90s preppie drug addict made sociopathic as a side-effect of cocaine and meth addiction, awash in casual sex, trust fund, nepotism-fueled fast track success, suicide, murder, and scopophilia. Together with the scarlet letter-branded Lohan these two old reprobates span three generations of LA elitist degeneracy. As Schrader said in a Salon interview:

My generation — we thought we could make a difference and make the world better. Bret’s generation thought they could make money. I don’t think that this current generation has any real aspirations. They’re making money, but I don’t think they’re that crazy about money. The characters make movies and they don’t like movies that much. They’re hooking up and they don’t like that much. The difference is, my parents and I always believed life would be better for the next generation. The current generation believes life is going to be worse for the next generation. It’s such a change for the future of humanity — the future is not something, now, that guarantees a better life."

That's pertinent of course, but might also be prurient, like the old pastor who works himself up into a sexual froth ranting about the devil as he ogles some girl's halter top; or using disaffection as a back door justification for having sex with every jaded hottie who bums a key bump.

I remember a film very similar to The Canyons, by Bernardo Bertolucci, The Dreamers (2003), wherein you had to wonder who old Bernardo thought he was fooling by having these gorgeous naked young entwined beings haunting the la Cinémathèque Française and pretending to understand Cahiers du Cinema so he could feel he was getting away with something naughty, stapling art film posters on the naked poles, so to speak. As in Canyons, Bernardo gave equal shrift to shirtless boys; as befits the semi-invisible hand of boymonger film geniuses like Gus Van Sant (who appears in The Canyons as a therapist) and Larry Clark (Kids) who have both made some great films about their boy obsessions because they have bothered to plumb the depths, such as they are, of the skater, drug, and homeless kid cultures the way most rent-boy-cruising Sebastian Venable auteurs do not. I have to say though, in a way, I admire Schrader and Ellis more for not plumbing in this instance. Why should we do their heavy lifting for them? Let them fail on their own. It's the only way they'll earn.

Lohan is only 27 at the time this film was made, but the constant hounding of the paparazzi furies have left her as scarred as a hot bitch Orestes. Even so, Lindsay, by 27 your character should be beyond letting yourself get sucked into menage-a-quatres just to flatter the closeted vanity of your rich cretin of a boyfriend. If Lohan likes that scene she should let us know, instead of moping through apathetic drugged ennui in search of a new bon-bon to distract her from all the strewn, messy wrappers. Such lurid behavior should either be a turn-on or turn-off (Two Girls and a Guy, for example, was both) or far enough over the line of sexual additction to be either profound or traumatic (Two Girls was neither, but it did achieve the same function). Instead Canyons strives for meta resonance with those empty cinema shot connectors. One presumes them to be comments about how nobody goes to see movies in the theater anymore ("premieres don't count" - LL says), and the subterfuge clogged airways when characters are so busy arranging intrigues on the cell phones they don't see the car right in front of them. They even watch their own messages on "Text TV." Do they even intend to watch their own film? I can imagine the crew and cast all at the screening room, barely looking up from the cell phones except when they're onscreen, to make sure their hair looks right.

James Deen, and a portrait of... Herbert Marshall?

The lead rich kid douche opposite LL is a porn star named James Deen, and he does a grand job of playing an insecure shit --of course you can't really do a bad job of acting badly 'on purpose.' The film's best scenes are strained bouts of he and Lindsay lying about where they've each been, as we're meant to muse on how sharing each other with strangers is okay but actually falling in love with someone else is unforgivable, and lying about it is grounds for psychotic tantrums. I guess that's understandable for porn stars, as any long term relationship they have must come with a complete lack of sexual possessiveness, naturally overcompensating on the emotional 'love.'  But this is nothing new, insightful, or particularly traumatic. It was a similar weakness that brought Valmont/Sebastian played by Ryan Phillipe down in Cruel Intentions, but here there's not even a cathartic Verve Pipe-scored coke-cross bust!

I remember partying with these sorts of pretty-stylish-vacant people in the 90s; I could feign a strained pose of Adonis disaffect with the best of them--my every pithy comment a dying faux-carefree butterfly, my clothes always signature shabby-chic--but just because you can capture that misery doesn't mean you're inventing it. Meanwhile even Lindsay is too old to know if kids are still putting out for bracelets, or ever did. Everyone's hiding something, even in this film. Did LL's court order ensure we only see one little coke bump snorted over the course of the whole film? Take it from me, orgies are impossible without either coke or ecstasy. Did I already mention the thing about the coke thing maybeyouknowherewecangetsomeIknowI knowcallthisnumberokayokaythisisgoing
tobegood butweshareitonlywiththoseofuswhoputin, okay?

I was always too uptight to ever fall into orgiastic abandon, no matter how much I tried. No matter how drunk I got or how much coke or ecstasy I did, I was invariably a gallant gentlemen; my body would just run away no matter how much I wanted to stay and get group naked. And I don't miss stepping over the myriad entwined forms on my loft floor on my way to the bathroom at four in the morning during the days I was detoxing, trying to sleep to the incessant thud of terrible electroclash or 'jungle' from my roommate's in-house turntables at his 'back to mine' chill-out orgies. Coming down out of my bedroom loft to plead for mercy--the sun mere minutes from coming up to signal the dawn--and seeing only his coke-black shark eyes looking back at me without a shred of empathic connection explaining that this was "fun", OK? As if fun precluded such thing as politeness or compassion. It was, I'm sure, fun, and still is, for him. But unless you have a tolerance and money for coke, as well as a loose sensual disposition, a tactile calm born of being good on guitar and appealing to men or women or whatever you're into, then you're just a bystander. Even when deep in the orgy, just a bystander.

I don't miss it, and so I feel sorry for everyone involved, even as I applaud their freedom and cheer them over the edge. Luckily the music in Canyons is amazing, full-on retrolectro-tryptahol courtesy Broken Social Scene's Brendan Canning, moodily pretending like the 00s never happened.

I don't miss the 00s, or 90s orgies, but I do miss places like Amoeba and Kim's Video and the time when theaters had no bedbugs or blue square texting-addicts. But since I tended to go to music and video stores when I was lonesome and agitated, I associate them now with the depression that Effexor took away for good back in '03, and now I have Amazon Prime, and cinemas these days give off an unsettling feeling of a shared dream with deformed fellow earthlings who have lives and bodies and gastrointestinal problems which they now carelessly reveal to their fellow audience members, accentuating how we here in the trenches of Manhattan are vastly different from the gods and goddesses out in LA, especially in The Canyons. And there's the issue of bedbugs.

Luckily there are still a few demographics who go to the movies: packs of single ladies at a chick flick on Friday night (+ one or two spooked straight guys on dates), and kids who can drive and who consider any hour spent not in school or at home to be pure bliss. So, as you sit down as a family to rent The Canyons, be glad you don't have to live without access to every movie ever made. There is no other solution to the emptiness. Theaters have become a reminder of what we're trying to escape from, our sad aging husks, our burdensome bathroom-bound humanity. our inability to pause and rewind.

So though the perfect goddess we once sold our soul for still works on new films every damn day, no amount of Vaseline on the lens can save her from growing old and cheap and sad. Johnnnyyy Johnnnny come back to me she says as her once firm and upright fan club dissolves into million nonstop texting blue lighted wrinkles and blemishes, all scattered in the upholstered rows like a blanket of frumpy stars. She once helped us escape from the hell of life --even if only for two hours at a crack. We swallowed her whole then, with no regrets, but she had a hook deep in her feathery bustier. When we tried to leave, we tore a hole in the screen. And it's never been mended. She can be as frumpy as nature dictates now, we're hooked. 

Well, there's no need to struggle on the line, little fishy. You've already evolved as far as you could go in such shallow surf. Time to belly up, or else go deep.