Gus Van Sant, 2007
“It doesn’t mean anything…um, it’s just random, y’know?”
In 1971, existentialist/genius Monte Hellman exploded the boundings of ‘the road movie’ with his masterpiece Two-Lane Blacktop; its inversing of the quasi-genre’s analogical framework (the road itself the only thing of meaning to be found on the otherwise meaningless journey) an epiphany, and its emphasis on movement rather than topography is the landmark in the genre’s own road from the episodic structures of classic epic narrative to the transcendental movement of Bela Tarr’s intensely physical/metaphysical films and, subsequently – Hellman’s work here most definitely continued - Gus Van Sant’s recent works of inner paths and their external sisters.
Van Sant’s much vaunted ‘Death’ trilogy (Gerry, Elephant, Last Days) began as the wayward auteur’s stylistic return from the studio efforts that now, with a decade since the commercial success of the extraordinarily underrated Good Will Hunting set him on a course for nadir, seem like a lifetime ago. After the fascinating and truly esoteric experiment Psycho and the impersonal vacuum Finding Forrester both died in the wild, it seemed as unlikely as it did likely that his next work would be the apex of his career thus far, but Gerry is very very much that. A work of the purest cinema, of pure narrative even, its astonishing simplicity and endless complexity announced Van Sant’s triumphant return, and though Gerry itself would go largely unnoticed by the filmgoing public Van Sant’s subsequent Elephant would not, its topicality and Cannes-award-winning ways the stuff of arthouse smash. Last Days, his cryptic statement on Kurt Cobain and the most literal and yet at times the most abstract of the series, was the very continuation of this abstraction, and now, here, his latest effort Paranoid Park finds this trilogy now a little cramped for space, perhaps.
The body being generated here is both a thematic and a stylistic one, and a unified code it is with this new work, too: the anti-narrative approach to protagonist Alex’s inner quandary ultimately serving its die-alone no-acts worldview, and its existentialist leanings similarly finding a warm homely cave in Alex’s hermetic and passive perspective. However, for all its similarities, the major narrative departure here – the employment of an unreliable narrator’s diary-entry/confession voiceover – is rather the large deal, and combined with Van Sant’s decision to pair Alex’s movements with a schizophrenic iPod-shuffle playlist, it actually begins to veer from the established modes of the preceding trilogy; it seemingly acknowledging the language of those three and building on it, even away from it at times, with some degree of success: while it takes the transcendental skateboarding imagery to such a purely symbolic and harmonious plane that it eclipses the complexities of the preceeding works – with the attendant stasis of movement amidst the infinite movement housing the entirety of the film’s true visual analogy - it also renders its metaphysics a little singular, less road movie and more the more personal ‘a man on a road’; it less a comment on the journey, rather, than Alex’s journey from teenage clichés into the world’s sticky grey tones.
Of course, some of the complaints that plague Van Sant are again given fuel here: his somewhat lusty gaze and the ongoing near-surreal prioritisation of sexuality are again held up for all to judge, and one wonders whether he is motivated in this more by inner directive or genuine thematic concern. But in dramatising an act’s myriad repercussions via an inner stream-of-guilty-consciousness Van Sant achieves, for the first time, a seamless melt of the personal and the temporal; his Death-In-America series lifting its head out of its immersive right-now and up into a meaningful chronology.
