Drive (2011)

“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. 

The driver is one of us, too, but he has his map, he has his road, and he knows his exit when he sees it.  

And the hope of the 80s glitz begins again. 

Edward Montgomery is a writer. He can be found here.

Blue Valentine (2010)

YOU AND ME

by Chad Per,am

Essentially, we’re hard-wired to root for love. We want relationships to work out, onscreen and off. We want to believe couples make it, because we want to make it, too.

We want to meet cute. We want to fall, head over heels. We want to write songs and have songs written about us.

We want things to work out. We want to love and be loved. We want happily ever after, or at least to believe that it exists.

Which is why a film like Blue Valentine is so tough to watch.  Hollywood, long complicit in the fueling of many millions of happily-ever-after dreams, here slaps us in our collective face: it gives us the whole story. The beginning and the end (and all the highs and lows in between).  It’s draining.  It’s painful. It’s one of the finest relationship movies I’ve ever seen. Not because relationships are awful - some are, some aren’t - but rather because they are such hard work.  And so rarely do we get to see all that hard work - the truly messy and complicated rollercoaster of a living, breathing relationship - onscreen.

The toll that a life takes. Together or alone. The way the years add up to a point where some days they outnumber the reasons to stay. The way keeping a family together takes everything you’ve got, but how you still have to find a way to somehow give even more. The way cute becomes cloying, lust wears itself out, and spontaneity gives way to endless routine. And that silly, stubborn part of you that refuses to let go.

It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we’re talking about when we talk about love. - Raymond Carver

It’s like some old Carver short story writ large on the silver screen: well-intentioned people accidentally imprisoning one another, a worn-down relationship coming apart at its seams, an innocent child caught in the midst of two colliding parental orbits. Lost souls drinking a bit too much, caring for each other, but never quite seeming to get it right.

Blue Valentine traces the flow of a particular relationship, showing you it’s bright flickering beginnings and it’s sad, hollowed-out, gut-punch ending.  It follows Dean and Cindy’s courtship and conclusion in non-linear fashion - sublime scenes of the honeymoon-lit first moments of a new relationship, alternating with the burdensome and claustrophobically sad scenes from that same relationship’s final days - and by doing so highlights the painful inevitability of so many of these relationship dances we all do with the partners that, in the end, are just not quite right for us, no matter how close to right they manage to be for a time, no matter how promising the relationship’s beginning. It’s a seduction and a warning all at once, doing for love what Trainspotting did for heroin: how magical and soaring that first high, how crashing and destructive the end result.

We are all trying to recapture that magic in some way.  It’s a magic that moves mountains, creates art, and starts wars, a magic that allows us to go on, both (literally) helping to create new life and also making it something worth living. At its best, it’s a feeling of everything finally working out. An integration. A completion.

And to lose that - to have it and know it and then to lose it - that takes something awful out of us.  We are never quite the same.  We recover, we go on, we heal, but we remember. We beat ourselves up with what-ifs and should-haves, trying to pin down the moment where it all went wrong, as if such a singular moment existed. We regret being so vulnerable, putting ourselves out there, and we wonder if it’s ever worth risking ourselves, our hearts, again.  (It is.)   

It wears us out, love.  It wears us out.

Chad Perman is a writer living in Seattle and the editor-in-chief of this site.

Reader’s Request Week: Lars and the Real Girl (2007)

AN ISLAND NEVER CRIES

by Chad Perman

“The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.”  - Thomas Wolfe

Lars is a lonely man, as so many of us are. He avoids life as much as humanly possible, avoids interactions and emotions, activities and relationships. He chooses to live a (mostly) solitary life, with days that are neat, predictable, and manageable.  He rarely speaks with even his own brother, who lives but a few feet away, despite the valiant attempts of his brother’s wife, Karin (Emily Mortimer), to draw him out of his self-imposed bubble of isolation.  From the outside looking in, it’s a sad life, but to Lars, it’s comfortable: he prefers things at a distance, and has constructed a life for himself that allows just such a distance from most every one and every thing. 

And then Bianca comes into his life and things begins to change.  There’s a hitch, though - she isn’t real.

No, Bianca is actually a life-size doll, the blow-up sex toy kind most often used for quite unsavory purposes.  It’s certainly not surprising that Lars, lonely as he is, orders one of these sex toys over the internet late one night.  What is surprising, though, is his intention in doing so: he wants someone to take care of, somebody safe to love.

But when he brings her next door to his brother and Karin’s house for a dinner “date” one night soon after her arrival - and introduces her as his wheelchair-bound Brazilian missionary girlfriend named Bianca - we finally begin to see that Lars is not merely a shy, lonely person with a great deal of social anxiety, but rather a delusional, troubled soul trapped in a deep state of arrested development.

The brilliant thing about Lars and the Real Girl, though, is what it chooses to do (and not to do) with this set-up.  Writer Nancy Oliver (Six Feet Under, True Blood) and director Jim Gillepsie - to their great credit - were not interested in shaping a manic Jim Carrey or Farrelly Brothers-type movie from this raw material, but rather concerned themselves with the business of good old-fashioned, character-driven storytelling instead.  That one of the lead characters is an inanimate object becomes, in Oliver’s hands, not a barrier but a tightrope; she leaves herself precious little room for error in the handling of it, but somehow manages to pull off an almost magical balancing act. And what’s more, she does so without entirely erasing the humor from it, mining humor from pain, character, and quirk, rather than the more obvious (and less interesting) slapsticky potentials inherent in a ‘man-in-love-with-doll’ situation.  In other words: it’s a surprisingly mature, moving film.

You see, rather than laughing at or ridiculing Lars, the people around him choose to enable his delusion. They care so deeply for him - and worry so much for the various wounds he has suffered over the years - that they quickly come to accept Bianca and her presence in their lives.  They talk to her, take care of her, drive her to church, let her spend the night, find her a “job”, and, in general, do the very best they can to make this inanimate object an actual living part of their tight-knit community.

Still, these people are not naive, and they understand something is deeply wrong with Lars.  So, in time, they persuade him to see Dagmar (Patricia Clarkson), the local doctor who also works as a psychologist - “She has to, out this far north” - under the guise of providing medical care for Bianca.  Dagmar soon becomes the dry, wise, compassionate heart behind the film, allowing Lars the time and space he needs to come to terms with his own guilt-ridden, traumatic past.  Her therapy is calm and curious, warm and accepting, a gentle hand placed on his back, propelling him forward.  She is the therapist everyone wishes they had (more than a good deal of which is no doubt due to Clarkson’s brilliant, lived-in performance). Through his meetings with Dagmar, eventually, the various walls of detachment Lars has worked so diligently towards constructing over the years begin to crumble, and life slowly seeps in.

Of course, none of this - not a single second - works without Ryan Gosling’s pitch-perfect performance in the title role.  Gosling’s Lars is a thing of beauty, made up of a hundred small gestures that slowly clue us in rather than any kind of grand, swooping actorly performance that loudly announces to us at every moment what is going on. There might certainly be a place for all that, but it’s not here, not in this film, and Gosling is smart enough to recognize that.  It’s often tempting to snicker at Lars’ situation, but Gosling doesn’t let you - and that’s no small feat.  Instead, he creates bridges for the audience which allow us to identify with Lars.  Sure, not a whole lot of us have blow-up dolls as girlfriends.  But have we felt alone in our lives?  Struggled with isolation, anxiety, sadness, trauma?  Sure.  Gosling gets that, and lets us get it, and by doing so, allows the ridiculousness of the situation to become slightly less ridiculous, and a lot more tragic.  A lot more human.  It’s a masterful performance.

Lars and the Real Girl is not a film you’ve seen before (and just try finding even a handful of films you can say that about these days).  There is no real immediate frame of reference.  It doesn’t give you a shorthand with which to enter into its world and provides no ironic wink-wink distance once you get there and find out its quirky narrative rules.  This is not an entirely comfortable place for an audience to be - we usually like to know where we stand and how we’re supposed to react to something, whether we’ll admit it or not - and watching a film like this with even a small group of people quickly illustrates this point (go ahead, try it).  But like a good many things that require some effort, some hanging-in-there, it does become worth the trouble, many times over.  It might not be a perfect film, but it is a surprisingly beautiful one.

Chad Perman is a writer living in Seattle.  He is also the editor-in-chief of this site.