Drive (2011)

3 months ago

“THERE’S A HUNDRED THOUSAND STREETS IN THIS CITY.”

by Edward Montgomery

Step one for this essay is the communal recitation of our postmodernist plight:

“Nothing is simple these days. Little is whole. We are part technology, part broken-family, part digital, part unknowable, and incapable of belief in mystery. Our days are blurs: commutes forgotten over pixel-strings of texts sent describing nothing, days awash in emails containing famous quotes from books we will never read and authors whose names we will mispronounce, nights in dark houses with glowing screens that promise answers by bringing us closer to the cold light. We are cold-fusion in trial. We are convinced we know nothing about suffering while we suffer—we suffer because we know nothing.

This life is alone, this life is noise. There are patterns in the chaos. There is hope in the hazy future. Someday, we may believe in mysteries again. Until then, we’ll google, we’ll Google, and we’ll forget.”

The Music

The music is confusing only if you don’t understand the disconnect between art and reality in the 1980s. The over-produced, super-modulated sounds protected us from our burgeoning modernity; the world was speeding up, and we didn’t quite know how fast it was going to get, the fractal reality that would soon be ours. This personal split, the fracturing of the self from the external world, solipsism gone viral, came electronically produced: digital joy replaced the breathy shout of the 50s, the hard-fleshed strums of the 60s and 70s. Instruments gave way to the drum machine.

In our world now, we have gone so far down this track that these same machines, now a quarter of a century aged, are described as “warm” and “organic”. Questions quickly heat up to what kind of world exactly do we live in.

The music of Drive is the auditory formation of this question. It is a digital palimpsest, trying to tell us who the driver is.

One day we will forget our commute was anything more than the hallway to our home office. Many already have. Others have found public transportation and its symphony of human flinches, farts, shuffles and downcast eyes. But, for those still involved in the daily migration of the herd, the iPod brought back the hermetic freedom of a humming car: warm notes rising out of the speakers like the engine warming your feet on a frigid autumn day. We pick playlists to soundtrack our lives, our own choices echoing in our head like the fated weight of coincidence that the radio once carried. The driver says so little because he’s already spoken through the soundtrack. And we’ll listen, but we’re already waiting to put our own ear-buds back in. Mass culture becomes high culture. Culture simply is. Adorno sings.

In sequence: Kubrick’s 2001 and The Blue Danube Waltz. Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, the pounding percussion while the derrick burns. Cliff Martinez, DJ College, and the glossy-synth narrative of Drive.

The Violence

Wars these days are fought through precision. Digital screens that ache of Doom-related nostalgia drop bombs on people that might as well not be real, but serve the narrative of whomever has found their way to one of the few magic bullhorns in the world. The boots in the face which kick until bones crunch are delivered by shadowy men who sweat and slave for unknown glory during the agile years of their youth. The steps to war are made with cheap Styrofoam cups that sweat and leave board-room tables with caffeinated rings. Straight-forward discussions of what will and will not be done are made after a single phone call from the proper authority. Recaps will be written in all-caps.

While we shudder at Drive’s graphic violence, we are the same who demand the production of Saw nth. But the violence here has a distinct purpose, even in our removed times where boxing has died, where the parties have polarized between New Age retreats and Ultimate Fighting. This violence that is “already over” has so much buried understanding: people fight to save their own life, they fight to protect the ones they love, and they fight as sacrificial lambs for their chosen gods.

For all its panache, the violence is above all honest. Drive is not a cheap movie with endless rounds and quick-cut action scenes; it is gilded and laden with all the nausea that one can fit into an assorted box of polished knives. Every instrument is shown its horror: the razor, the car, the heel of the boot, and the shotgun blast of hope where the chaos of the world threatens to break into our flimsy rooms and drag us out by force. The violence in Drive is the personalization of our precision, even as it is dealt by a faceless rubber mask. The human face underneath is known by the hand that delivers. What the other sees, we can only guess.

The Man

It’s too easy to imagine a complicated life for our simple hero. As easy as reductive psychoanalysis, but as cheap. Film noir’s father, after all, was the western, which had its archetypes solidified with John Ford’s epic Stagecoach. But the driver is not the Ringo Kid—he is not some hero that has appeared from beyond the horizon to right the day. He may stand apart from the other characters in the film, but he stands on the same plane.

Ryan Gosling’s driver is the hero because he requires no words to dictate what he wants and how he will live.The simplicity of final lines of dialogue that settle the waters of our consciousness (“Do you know where it is?” “I’ll find it.”). They tell us nearly everything. Postmodern chaos reigns—he finds control. Threats from enemies come in terms of rational discourse. Promises of a lifetime of fear are made with honesty that is hard to find from a friend. Dreams fall, whether they are flashy icons raised in a garage where we slip and fade, or in a 15 second phone call dripping with regret.

Bernie is one of us: complicated by the desires of a life outside reheated power plays, lost in the emptiness of an isolated mansion as he sighs at the future. Shannon is one of us: eager for the easy givings of money, hope for a translucent life beyond a limp. Standard is one of us: just enough of a fuck-up to know that no friction awaits him on the next veering turn. Irene is one of us: giving quiet acceptance to her quiet life, desperate to forget the past, unable to move beyond it. And I am one of us: pretending I know what I want, knowing what I want but without moving, driving toward a goal without knowing. We search and we wander in this strange, shadowy world, all of us complicated beings lost in music and trance, knowledge and violence, shallow intellectualism and so little actual. We’re all aching for a sense of a mystery at the end of the city that never ends, in the woods and stream of a life that is beyond our own.