RV!: Southland Tales (2006) Dir: Richard Kelly Date Released: November 2007 Date Seen: April 24th, 2009 Rating: 4.25/5
This is the third time I've seen this film and the first I feel truly confident in saying that I think it's a very misunderstood film. No, it's not a political commentary but rather a jarring social critique about the deluge of information. That sounds like a cop-out excuse for Kelly's spastic excesses but third times around, I saw more and more signs of how Kelly's protesting the popular opinion that Big Brother is in control. Instead, he insists that the information deluge that is the internet itself has, at the end, revealed its own intelligence and that in the age of "new media," a new dawn of loud, ahistorical hysteria is upon us. I tend to agree and I remain fascinated by the film. See my final paper for Hoberman's class. Fuck the haters, as they say.
That was my first time this last Friday, and what struck me was how persistent Kelly was in unscrewing the temporal & spatial joints between sequences, which transformed the whole experience into what you rightly describe as a comment on the informational deluge. It is precisely the loosening of cause-and-effect dynamic that the information era does to our minds, and it's funny one of the movies to comment on it recently is the rather mediocre STATE OF PLAY.
ReplyDeleteI haven't seen it since one time in the theaters, but I loved every messy crazy second of it. It's a true media age film, both a product of and a commentary on its times.
ReplyDeleteOh, I got the information-deluge thing in the first few minutes. Then I was left with the rest of the film. Sorry, man, but I'm a proud hater here.
ReplyDeleteFlow my tears, Steve C. My vagina will not be a denied.
ReplyDeleteWhich is code for: I understand why people would be turned off by the film. I just don't think that the rancor it's inspired is A) fair B) warranted.
The information deluge becomes very important by film's end because by then, the angle of "the government has taken over the internet" has subsided and we realize, in the zeppelin, that the images of KISS ME DEADLY and the weird disembodied voice wishing us "a nice apocalypse" are bits of data without a human master. I could go on but I'm saving it for me paper.