Gerrymandering
John Perreault
Some films are intended as movies and others are intended as art. Clear cinema categories come to mind: experimental films, art films (once synonymous or overlapping with foreign films), midnight films, underground films, cult films and mass-market movies. Art may occur in any of these categories. The divisions are more about market segments and venues than about money versus art, or even entertainment versus aesthetics.
Now, of course, we have films shown in museums, and not only in little jewel-box screening rooms but right on the walls. Some of the films may even have plots of sorts, and acting. Artist Matthew Barney was able to show his films at the Film Forum. It’s hard to know who’s who and what’s what. One thing I like about Gus Van Sant’s newly released Gerry is that it further messes things up.
Van Sant is, after all, a movie director of some credibility. His 1991 My Own Private Idaho and 1995 To Die For are on my personal list of favorites. But are they enough to allow us to forgive the studio kitsch of Good Will Hunting (1997) and Finding Forrester (2000)? No, but his Psycho of 1998, a frame-by-frame remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho ,most likely does. Van Sant’s Psycho is just about as conceptual as a movie can get, unless you want to project Hitchcock’s movie on a gallery wall at a really, really slow speed, as did one artist a few years ago. Come to think of it, Van Sant’s Psycho is even more avant-garde; it had the same mass-market distribution as a normal movie. Where we put Gerry may depend upon who, if anyone, pays to see it. Maybe we’ll know in ten years.
In point of fact, once film got beyond the penny arcade, art and movies were never far apart. My guess is that certain directors knew they were making art: D. W. Griffith, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock. And they were, in my view, later proven right. Because Shakespeare wrote for a broad audience, Dostoyevsky churned out his novels in serial formats for magazines, and Dickens always had the masses in mind has never made them lesser artists. It would be very difficult to prove Luis Bunuel’s L’Age d’or is better than his Viridiana simply because the former was for an elite audience. Ditto for Jean Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet, as opposed to his Beauty and the Beast. Nor nowadays would anyone seriously maintain that Viridiana and Beauty and the Beast were not art because they were popular.
I do not think movie directors are any more self-conscious now than they ever were, or that studios are more conscious of anything but commerce. But audiences are. If it looks like art, they still don’t want it.
None of this really explains Van Sant’s dual track. But why shouldn’t a director, like any number of actors, accept crowd-pleasing commercial work in order to finance more arcane pursuits? Gerry, his latest film, forces the issue. Or is Gerry just another examination of unrequited male love like Mala Noche and My Own Private Idaho?
On the surface–and maybe surface is all there is–Gerry is about two guys who get lost in the desert. One of the guys is played by movie star Matt Damon (who I thought was eerily and properly sociopathic as Ripley in Anthony Minghella’s slightly questionable The Talented Mr. Ripley, different from Alain Delon’s Ripley in Rene Clement’s version of the Patricia Highsmith classic, but in a way that made the character as creepy as any sociopath you may happen to know). In Gerry, Damon is chunkier and more attractive than usual–less pretty-boy.
The other guy is Casey Affleck, apparently Damon’s real-life friend (and Ben Affleck’s brother), with seventeen film acting credits of his own. They call each other "Gerry," using this name as a synonym for "meathead" or "fuck-up," or perhaps less noxiously as an impersonal rubric like "Bud" or "Babe" or "Vern." The latter, I am told by members of the San Francisco artist collective of that name, is what surfers call one another when a real name is too cumbersome, personal, or taxing. In effect, the characters played by Damon and Affleck have no names. They might as well call each other Dude.
The writing credits are shared by Van Sant and the two actors and it certainly sounds like most of the dialogue was improvised, but with a slacker blur and a cryptic edge. When Affleck starts talking about having conquered Thebes you wonder if he has gone totally off his rocker because of the disorientation and the heat or if he is just referring to a video game or a play he might have acted in. How much of this is real? Do Damon and Affleck call each other Gerry in real life?
Dillon’s Gerry is played as the dominant friend. Affleck whines. But is convincingly the more sensitive of the pair. They never reach "the thing" that’s at the end of the roadside nature trail. Let’s just say "the thing" is not even the Hitchcock MacGuffin, but is instead the anti-MacGuffin. Although we never know what it is–weird rock, canyon, earthwork?–it survives rather than drives the plot.
Here I have to be careful, because the leanness of the narrative, the sparseness of the dialogue (more banter than conversation), and the drawn-out "timing" of the takes forces you to read your own narrative into the film, like one of those old-fashioned psychology tests that present family figures in a room and you have to make up the captions below. How you interpret the relationships of the figures is a clue to what is going on in your subconscious. However, no matter what you imagine, you are led back by the nose to the opaqueness that is the strongest quality of the film. It is as if you are watching two people through long-range binoculars.
Are they just two spoiled jerks who get totally lost in the desert? Is the film about their lives? Their lies? Their mounting irritation with each other? Is it about loosing one’s sense of direction? Is it about communicating through silences, private codes, body language and male-male bickering? Is it about death?… Or is it just about two idiots who get lost?
I myself once got lost as a kid somewhere along the edges of the Jersey Pine Barrens. I could hear my father calling for me, but I couldn’t tell what direction he was hollering from. One wild-blueberry bush looked like another. The smell of blueberries still gives me a mild panic.
Being lost is like entering another dimension. As an adult I remember getting lost within the city limits of Aspen, Colorado, with the sculptor Ann Sperry. There was just time to go for a little hike before I had to catch my plane. Ann said she knew the trail very well. Well, not well enough. The winter snow-slides had changed the boulders and therefore changed the trail. We had to wade across a sub-zero stream so we could continue bushwhacking to the ever-elusive parking lot, sometimes in sight but with the bad habit of disappearing every time we thought we were close.
Jet-lagging, I once got lost for four hours on an elite, suburban Honolulu beach, with no watch, no flip-flops, no identification, no money, and no idea of my host’s actual street address or even his telephone number, which, in any case, I already knew was unlisted. Just over the two-mile long roll of sand, all of the houses looked alike. When I scoped out terraces and backyards and peered into living rooms looking for something I could remember, I fancied I could see servants phoning for the police.
I have to confess, however, that deserts are my favorite places and not just because I like the ending of Von Stroheim’s Greed. Once, because of a guest professorship, I lived in the nearly but not quite suburbanized high-plains desert of Tucson. A giant saguaro outside my window actually bloomed, and I had to fight off the lizards–and even a giant tarantula–that came into my bedroom through the sliding door to the terrace. My partner Jeff and I drove a Beetle across the Baja Peninsula (40-degree drops in temperature, vanishing road, and, yes, a sandstorm); my all-time favorite vacation was a week we spent in Death Valley. What I like most about the desert (and its mirror image, the beach) is that you can usually see whatever creatures are coming at you.
Gerry has lots of desert, beautifully photographed; locations include Argentina, Death Valley, and the Utah Salt Flats. If you have not been to any of these places, would you know that the two Gerrys are wandering around a composite? You could even get lost in your own backyard if suddenly it was made up of three unrelated backyards.
I kept recognizing bits of Death Valley and thinking: you morons, the highway is right behind you, just turn around. But this actually increased the already hallucinatory tone of the film. Is this desert hell? Yes.
There is one great, Beckett-like scene. Affleck is on top of a giant boulder and can’t get down. He is too frightened to jump. He and Damon, back together after a confusing separation, go on and on, like slacker/"Marty" versions of Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot. Until Affleck finally… well, never mind; there’s so little plot I don’t want to spoil it for you, nor will I tell you the ending of the movie. The movie ends but the film goes on.
You may not get to the ending. This is not an easy film. Van Sant is experimenting with very long takes and seemingly endless pans. He goes in and out of real time. This actually is what is potentially most important about Gerry. It is anti-montage, anti-MTV. Van Sant admires the long takes (slow pans, tracking shots and cool zooms) of the Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr. Of course, I immediately ran out and rented the first of the four tapes of Tarr’s eight-hour Satantango from Kim’s Video (the film-buff’s treasure chest). All four cassette boxes are decorated with charmingly hand lettered, round, green stickers: "Rare! $400 if lost or broken."
Tarr’s slow pans, I can report, are not as pompous as Andrei Tarkovsky’s long takes or as insouciant as Andy Warhol’s hands-off, frozen-camera approach. In fact, they are gorgeous and lift the pathos and black humor of this six-steps-forward, five-steps-backward tale of a degenerate group of Hungarian farmers (!) into, yes, the ecstatic.
Then there is Aleksandr Sokuorov’s new digital monster Russian Ark, one continuous, suffocating 96 minute tracking shot in the form of a fey walk through Russian history via the St. Petersburg Palace. This is the film that has reminded me that film editing controls breathing.
Film is like prosody, like poetry. Van Sant’s Gerry confirms this. Very short and very long takes leave you breathless. The rhythm of the shots controls the rhythm of the viewer’s breathing (or, at least, "mental" breathing) and thus one’s mental states. Does Sergei Eisenstein talk about this in his theoretical writings? I can’t remember. But surely I am not the first to note it. One might rewrite film history as a struggle between real time and montage, with the present looking more favorably on real time. Whether a pan, tracking shot, or zoom is real time, we’ll leave for another time. They "feel" like real time.
Van Sant is re-opening the vocabulary of filmic breath. Long, deep breaths give you time to look, to listen, and to think.
