An ICE STORM of constant cyber-bullying and vaporwave orgiastic trances, a John Cassavetes version of GOSSIP GIRL after he'd just seen SUSPIRIA and thought it was a video art installation by Matthew Barney, #HORROR chronicles the damage wrought at a winter slumber party worth of 'in-crowd' super-rich 12 year-olds (many played by the children of hip NYC artists and producers) engaged in an endless back and forth of narcissistic gossip and self-hating ridicule, driving each other (and critics apparently) quite mad. Laden with a whole Whitney Biennale of contemporary art pieces, all perched around the glass windows looking out into barren snowy woods of the Connecticut money belt (Greenwich even sounds like Midwich) and occurring in proper tick-tock momentum across one late afternoon into evening, it's got a real spontaneous, improvisational loose feeling.... most of the time. Each room the girls explore seems to be about to evoke some mood or other film, wearing all gray dresses they dance to an old hauntologic 30s song on an old victrola echoing Caretaker-style across the surface of the pool but before you can even think "Overlook" #HORROR's writer-director Tara Subkoff sends in the tidal blood surges, like she's haunted by the need to add one last finishing straw to the back of the camel.
I'm if rushing sorry to be seen art attempts all defiance criticism linearity, by which I mean #HORROR has a lot of good ideas and places it wants to go, and no time to let a moment land; is it an artsy experimental avant garde video art installation or a home movie Subkoff shot of her daughter's slumber's party, or they're all waiting around like Cassavetes or Jarmusch for the movie to write itself out of awkward pauses and sudden lurches of realness. At moments I was quite moved by the innocence and commitment with which these startling young actresses played mood-altered rich girls practicing their bitchy claw swipes (if they survive the night they could grow up to be Norma Shearer and her posse in THE WOMEN). At other times--not unlike visiting all the downtown art galleries--I got that Emperor's New Clothes feeling. Subkoff's married to a famous Swiss sculptor, all the work on display is I'm sure by their friends, but that's no excuse for not using it to say anything relevant beyond some words about how the rich husband of Chloe uses the pieces as stocks, which I've always thought to, that these pieces are all just poker chips or bonds to these collectors; they just like buying and selling so they're constantly buying the same things from each other at higher and higher prices. All of which is much more interesting than the constant flashes to some kind of hit 'count video game the killer is playing, hashtags slashing the screen with loud ripping sounds, cartoon inserts, and meme captions under instant freeze frame photos blaring at each other makes one a tad irritable after awhile. The spell of the freeze frame from the killer camera angle was fine in the 60s, PEEPING TOM and BIRD WITH CRYSTAL PLUMAGE, but it was eerie largely because we didn't know the women. We were 'with' the killer instead, put in the outsider perspective so the very act of filming them seemed dirty and wrong. It's hard to capture that in the Age of the Selfie, especially with a pack of wild girls playing diva with mom's jewelry.
That all said it's still got some worthy things going in, and yet as if some extension of its characters' constant sniping and stabbing and constant deriving, #HORROR has earned hostile reviews, getting 3.6 on imdb and a 17% w/ audiences on Rotten Tomatoes. I mean good lord, it's not Argento but even Argento ain't Argento anymore; that's way too harsh for such an original, stunningly filmed, constantly fluid and relentlessly bizarre, beautifully scored piece of Harmony Korine meets Sophia Coppola experimental rich kid icicle disco ball psycho breakdown dreckitude. As I recall, critics and irate parents all charged against the electrified fences to decry KIDS when it came out. THIRTEEN drew the same ire, a kind of knee-jerk revulsion; their insistence kids didn't behave that way was more telling about the power of denial than about the film. After all, if the shoe fits, you must wear its golf spike puncture wounds in stoic grace or be labeled a boorish philistine.
The main umbrage I have with #HORROR is the same umber I have with 90% of contemporary 'conceptual' art: it may be well made and have some meaning or make some statements, but from an aesthetic point of view, it's bupkis. Who wants to look at it day after day? As I once famelessly said to Damien Hirst, contemporary 'conceptual' art wastes valuable wall space that could be better left blank, to contemplate the infinite (see also: Godard and the Urinal). I was adamantly refusing to go around to every bar in the city, collecting cigarette butts for 'his' latest sculpture, a gigantic ashtray. So apt. mid-90s Anecdote #2: My boss was showing art to another very rich collector/dealer in his apartment one afternoon, and the maid had left this giant vacuum cleaner sprawled in the middle of the floor. "Oh," said the other dealer kicking it lightly, "is this a real Jeff Koons?" mid-90s Anecdote #3: There was this super rich apartment I'd bring paintings to or take from - in the Trump tower, everything gold and glitz and gorgeous--you walk in there to the living room it looked like the Swiss Family Manson had been through there: the giant Basquiat looking just like a wall of graffiti, ugly cumbersome sculptures that looked like a deranged homeless man made them out of junk he found in the trash--which is probably close to the truth, this godawful serial killer mental institution worth of ugly ass disturbing art. While of course the actual child living there could have drawn a perfect Cubist masterpiece in crayon and his dad wouldn't even deign to put it on the fridge or if he so much as drew a mustache on the scribble piece of crap Dubuffet I brought over, that kid would have been whisked to boarding school for the rest of his life. You don't even want to know how much that Dubuffet went for. Decency forbids me showing it to you, or quoting a price.
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| Now your child's intense alienation itself belongs to the ages! |
As the lead 'final' girl --the relatively sweet if totally cracked Sadie Seelert--is so good, the camera always searching her out amidst the cacophony of girly malice, that you feel intensely for her (yet she was totally mean to her cool mom in the beginning, so what the fuck) and Subkoff's camera captures all sorts of odd moments of beauty, so it's sad that the farther along it goes, the more Subkoff's narrative style starts to fail her, as if she noticed how nihilistic her film was so she tacked on a commentary on the jadedness of the internet age. But there are so few nihilist deconstructions of human nature, the Lord of the Flies-style fundamental ambivalence humanity has about its own apathy towards its own ambivalence, the amorality of children cliques, that Subkoff would have been better off letting it alone to find its own abyss. She was doing okay with the whole 'pretty sixth graders dying as grand modern art spectacle in their glass house frames, that when she lobs it into the collective 'apathy' of the media punditry infield instead of trying to smack it out of the park into genuine dangerous territory, it elicits a shrug, like honey, you're rich and successful, part of the jet set world of successful working artists; why not try and say something about that, about what is art vs. photography, the parameters of human vision, pornographic art vs. Joycean aesthetic arrest, the way rich kids' lives are measured and devalued by the shitty art that surrounds them rather than just be one of the 'social media horror' stories being cranked out nonstop around the world. To say that our craving for gossip and diversion is now so instant and keyed into itself that the slightest aberration of behavior is irreversible, well - it's true, but is it art?
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| from top: Chloe w/ egg face (#Horror) 2015; bottom: Chloe w/ "Elevator Panel" (Kids) 20 years earlier |
A lot of foreshadowing strangeness with the art and the children promises a lot: a table full of eerie masks by the front door seems to invite a kind of junior varsity Illuminati masquerade that comes off only via a trippy dance scene; after they're ostracized bully Kat keeps sending them all mean-spirited texts, the girls all decide to lock up their cell phones in mom's safe, so they can talk freely without worrying their conversation is going to go viral from some poisonous betrayer of confidence's secret recording. BUT their conversation is going viral thanks to the black gloved Argento-esque killer prowling outside; s/he's got quite a microphone on that thing, and a talent for invisibility (how anyone can hide in the middle of the day in leafless woods and not be seen by everyone in the glass house is the least of Subkoff's problems). Then the night falls, so the film is harder to see, lacking beauty, and so the killings all occur near light, like from a heated indoor pool which glows at night through the blinds to create a very Eric Fischl-meets-Edward Hopper effect, or lighted enclosed tennis court; and the pool of abusees shrinks until all that's left is the fat girl stuffing cupcakes into her mouth in a tightening noose of self-loathing. Even without the phones and Kat's malice, the girls eventually start bullying one another, as if unable to stop. But when they find a cell phone under the couch and see how jammed it is with Vines of their missing friends being murdered, that's a good opportunity for suspense that's never really developed... cuz then the battery runs out - how convenient!
You might think I'm anti-rich kid counter-snob, but nothing, monsieur, could be from ze truth further--I'm fine with movies about rich kids made by rich kids about rich kid problems - those are universal. And approximately 80% of my friends are rich kids. I do object to the reverse - rich kids with self-important tears in their eyes filling us in on what the imagine it's like to be poor, or about that one time they volunteered at a soup kitchen and met an old woman who changed their life blah blah. We'd know if Tara Subkoff was trying to tell us about ourselves- the 'little' people -in say some Sullivan's Jet Set Travels neorealist sermon. But she's not, until the end, of course --this is about the kids of those kids in KIDS (1995), a hard-to-believe-it-was-20-years-ago.org burst of street-eye smashtercult that I personally watched over and over for months, amazed at its prescience in capturing clique dynamics in my own circle of (older) debauched libertines, right down to the same hang-out spots, but taking it one step beyond. And now... her character is a wearisome cuckolded wife dressing in godawful clothes so ugly they must be tres expensive, made up to look like one of the evil harpy wives from BRAZIL, but I still like her, because she's going to AA, which means she's trying. And from the angle we see her outside the AA meeting having a smoke, Chloe's cool sponsor looks just like my old lesbian sponsee, so that makes me a grand sponsor of Chloe Sevigny, which is very reassuring. Also reassuring: the way Chloe brushes off Hutton's maniacal attack, his spittle-flecked accusations. He may reduce a pack of girls to tearful hysterics but to Chloe his manic threats rate little more than a chuckle.
I guess this film as a whole is kind of the same - its overwrought 'artsy' kid-killing may drive the mainstream critics and audiences into unctuous rage (they watch movies like this to avoid having to listen to the vain prattling of their daughter's sleepover friends). These same critics wouldn't dare attack any art they saw at MOMA (where #HORROR premiered), they're too afraid of bucking critical consensus, of seeming boorish, but everyone's invited to throw stones at a horror movie--whole TV shows (like MST3K) make an art of it. I guess it's not profound anymore to note that the only difference between art and trash is the right signature, apparently (since that's all some of these artists do, show up at the end to sign it) but I support any film that tries to apply that same harmful arbitrariness to children. If I had to grow up bowing and scraping before some piece of incoherent scribble on the wall worth six figures that would rate an 'F' from my first grade art teacher, I'd be homicidal, too. All children are born sadistic megalomaniacs, we only grow out of it if there are ever negative consequences to our actions, that there is in fact, some order to the universe where it pays to be nice to others with dividends, sooner or later what goes around comes around, etc. The art world, tied as it is (in NY especially) to designer labels and cocaine, on the other hand, is the reverse. There is no scale of order or justice, no real merit, skill, vision, or craft measurable in what makes one white canvas worth a million five and one just like it worthless. The only way to make your name bankable is to inflict yourself like a wound into the world. Throw your enraged tweets at Tara Subkoff all you want. She's rich, hot, and full of the dickens, and she just inflicted.
