Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Thursday, January 05, 2006 The Pitch: It's like Crumb meets Northwestern! By a more-or-less accidental confluence of movie-watching, I ended up watching Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects this morning, sandwiched between the first and second halves of American Movie (last night and tonight).Huh. American Movie focuses on Mark Borchardt's year long struggles to get his 35 min short horror film made and released over a period of years. While I'm sure Rob Zombie had his problems as well, it's kind of hard to think what they could have been by the fourth time you see a close-up of his wife's perky ass flouncing around all the mutilated tortured corpses. He made Lion's Gate enough money with his notorious House of 1000 Corpses that he had 100% creative control this time around. Good for him and his Sheryl Crowesque wife, but for the viewer? Well... To be fair, The Devil's Rejects is a great looking film (some of those shots of Coven look pretty good as well)--oversaturated Super-16 film stock, some fine handheld camera work, and it's nice to see someone who loves the patented '70s freeze frame as I do. But Zombie spends so much time covering his murderous family of outsiders torturing and killing the innocent, it's a bit mystifying when his impressive setpiece ending (the family is gunned down in slow-mo to Skynard's "Freebird") is filmed as a tragedy. What's going on with this film? Did Zombie actually think he could take the ending of Bonnie & Clyde, swap out the main characters with Leatherface and family and actually expect the results to be the same? I'd read an interview from Zombie at the Onion A.V. Club where he talks about his love for '70s cinema and the difference in societal tone between then and now. ("It's a very P.C. world and this is a very un-P.C. movie.") If there's any way I can see The Devil's Rejects working as a film with something--anything--to say, it might be as a strange elegy to '70s culture. Certainly, the best moments of the movie are where Zombie teams some bizarre awfulness to a classic piece of '70s Southern Rock. I can maybe see how the '70s and the endemic fixation on the outlaw as a necessary and vital component of the culture is what is actually being examined and/or mourned by Zombie. You can watch CSI practically every night of the week on TV now, but does they dare to suggest to that the audience identify with the serial killers and stripper stranglers rather than the dutiful cops? (I don't actually watch the shows, but I'd guess not.) So what Zombie is mourning at the end of The Devil's Rejects isn't the death of his evil, sadistic crew of killers but rather the end of a time in which they might have been. If you remove the gradations, the potsmoking free thinker and the serial killer are both outlaws of the state, and now there's no more place for either. Or maybe Zombie is inept, and expects us to feel sorry for his clan after showing a few shots of them laughing and joking together, smiling and laughing out in the mountains, despite watching them do horrific acts of torture and violence. I'm still not really sure. But even if one gives Zombie the benefit of the doubt, there's at least one fatal flaw in such a conception. It's precisely that annhilation of gradation--the equating of the killer with the intellectual--that creates the repressive police state in the first place. If we're sitting in a P.C. world where subversion and artistic expression are smothered ("It's a very P.C. world..."), it'd be nice if Mr. Zombie could recognize and perhaps even acknowledge his role in it. And not even as some sort of independent artist/outlaw whose shocking works pushes the state to more restrictive behavior; but as a a numbskull whose lack of clarity on such matters makes such a state possible. posted by Jeff Lester | 9:36 PM | |
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