World’s end and the hapless auteur

There’s something about apocalyptic sci-fi that can amp up the pleasures of genre. Even pea-brained exercises like Reign of Fire (dragons ride again!), Doomsday (’80s b-movies ride again!), and Le Dernier Combat (Luc Besson’s only good movie!) have an infectious energy, and when directors syncopate the thrumming backbeat of social commentary (in Romero’s zombieworlds and the recent 28 reiterations, George Miller’s Max-world, or the delirious The Bed-Sitting Room) . . . it’s sheer delight.

But give a director with some recently-earned auteurial cred a chance to find his or her deeply-satirical vision of the world to come, and you get thudding shite like Zardoz, Quintet, and now Southland Tales.

Manohla Dargis was quite generous in her praise, and I suppose rightly pointed to Richard Kelly’s ambition, the overstuffed thoughtfulness of his film. But, as with the the Boorman and Altman films I referenced, ambition and thinking aren’t new to the auteurist apocalpyse. Neither, alas, are:

–uneasy mash-ups of tone and style, whether Sean Connery in loincloth leering at futuristic ‘smart’ babes or the poor Rock raising (yet again) that overworked eyebrow with a line about pimps and suicide at Southland‘s explosive conclusion. ST is actually nothing but uneasy tonal collisions, which does give it some energy, whether watching straight-faced bleach-blonded Jon Lovitz play a dirty cop or Seann William Scott being doubly serious (as two characters, one forced to stare sincerely and imploringly at the camera–oh the humanity–with really crap-fx eye-shot-out makeup), etc.

–stultifying dialogue. This is true even apocalyptic sci-fi I like; apparently, come the end of the world, we will lose our capacity for the easy rhythms of speech, and instead will grunt (perhaps in well-rehearsed one-liners, perhaps just actual guttural snorts and yells), will like so many Yodas twist into portent our syntax (or twist with portent, like Yodas many, our syntax will we). (Luc Besson solved this problem by having everyone after his apocalypse lose the capacity for speech. Smart move.)

–the loss of anything remotely approaching scientific verisimilitude. Genre apocalypses do this well: you jimmy up some kind of silly serious-sounding razzmatazz to allow your plot to proceed (see, e.g., dragons returning, or the dead rising), but the auteurist apocalypse is so very unfortunately invested in science as a kind of mysticism. Both Zardoz and Southland spend lots of time with silly serious-sounding razzmatazz which is meant to be seriously silly. See, e.g., ST‘s use of poor Wallace Shawn, wearing kohl around his eyes, with a rictus of a smile, a strange tuft of Hitlerian hair brushed carefully over the side of his face, hanging on Bai Ling and hanging out with the little scary-voiced woman from Poltergeist… see, Shawn’s character has created a new technology that… ah, forget it.

I didn’t hate Southland; I didn’t actually hate Zardoz or Quintet. They’re all stunningly bad, and there’s something interesting about being stunned, rather than bored or pandered to or serious-ed into submission (all these films thankfully avoid the serious purposiveness of the Hollywood message apocalypse).

But hoo boy. It’s a mess. The main reason to watch is to relish the unshackled and harebrained and hamfisted fervor of such ambitious films.