British model-turned-capable actress Suki Waterhouse has become indie cinema's de-facto Mad-Max-on-a-budget psychedelic-sampling wasteland wanderer, all thanks to two very similar post-apocalyptic desert-set films from this and last year, each with a hip pedigree and each with a lot of interesting touches that seem to stem from some writer's mind-blowing trip to Burning Man (back when it was the rad, cooler cousin to the Rainbow Gathering), wherein a certain someone took some great quality LSD and found themselves by losing themselves, envisioning in their enhanced dehydration a whole movie based on the freaks and the metal around them and the way, sooner or later, it all devolves back down to sex, drugs and 90s trip-hop.
Both films have a pretty majorly drugged-out rave interlude, where Suki Waterhouse and/or some other stalwart soul looks slowly around in slow motion to some really low end fuzzy bass, man--whew all deep deep deep down in the spinning world void man--lots of hair billowing in slow motion and colored lights flashing and a sense of unity with the night or the groove. Dig it. Max would never be able to stay Mad with all that weird kinetic abandon in the wind. On the other hand, without it these apocalyptic worlds can seem more Fyre Festival than Burning Man, albeit after the richer kids have finagled a ride out and only the scrabble survivors are left, rummaging through abandoned boxes of booze and Fyre T-shirts looking for any remaining stashes of booze, having long resorted to violence, so that only the druggie chemists have any remaining power.
Along the way each film offers low tracking shots of doped-out hipsters nodding off on busted outdoor couches, filth-encrusted wanderers stopping to either accept or offer single flowers to urchins, and zonked cult leaders doing their emcee trip, either DJ-ing or coordinating fights to the death in an empty pool. The hardscrabble civilization around them eventually ends up very dirty, and reduced to a Dead show parking lot barter system, with whomever holds the water rights being the band.
Both of these films were filmed at least partially along the Salton Sea, a notoriously depressed area of California once a makeshift beach town but since the sea dried up, turned to a last-ditch meth squat. That burned out spirit infects the films, but with the club pedigree and hot Suki gamboling around the vibe then becomes what?
In FUTURE WORLD (2018) the ever-weird James Franco serves as co-director and producer/star, giving himself the dirt bag bad guy villain role of "Warlord" (he wears godawful yellow-brown teeth). He gets a hold of the remote control for Ash (Waterhouse), a foxy, high-fashion killer android mix of Angelina Jolie in Cyborg 2, Pris in Blade Runner, Eva in The Machine, and SIRI (Warlord gives her commands by speaking into his remote). Once killer Ash is up and running, and dressed (in perfectly-fitted and stressed haute couture fatigues), Warlord shows Ash off by ordering her to, first snog with, then strangle, one of his drooling gang. It's kind of self-defeating (a warrior chief needs warriors - he doesn't exactly have an army), but Suki's contented focus as she chokes the life out of a snickering misogynist type is, of course, satisfying to all concerned.
While Warlord and his gang roam the wasteland on filthy dirt bikes, killing and bullying and throwing kids against girders, all without anyone even close to defending themselves very successfully against them (how his victims made it this far surpasseth understanding), far away at a desert oasis, all is a sunny paradise, just waiting to be despoiled. But like a gender-inverted fisher king, the dying queen (Lucy Liu) needs a far off grail-like drug, and her dangerously naive son, "the prince" (Jeffrey Wahlberg - Mark and Donnie's nephew) decides to ride his dirt bike off into the wasteland seeking "Drug World", a stop that's supposed to have a cure for mom's affliction, a place also called 'Paradise'. Once he ill-advisedly stops off at the Snoop Dogg-operated, shock-collar sex worker-staffed 'Love World' to ask directions (the writer clearly has remote-controlled women on his mind). The naive Prince is easily betrayed, tricked, suckered, beaten up by Ash, stretched over and over by the neck until he finally gives Warlord directions back to that cushy Oasis. Some prince he is! His first trip out and he seals the whole place's doom (in this reality, no well-organized outpost can stand up to six dirty dudes on motorbikes). Luckily for the story, Ash's mainframe wakes up her emotions. During pretty cool ride through the desert, Suki actually on a real bike, the camera keeping perfect time as the gang race through the wasteland, she switches sides, then the real action begins.
Like a lot of the film, it skips over the how and why involved. This is a film that assumes you've seen 'the canon' of both AI and post-apocalyptic sci-fi.
The scene stealer of the film is Milla Jovovich as the queen of 'Drug World'. She does the manic speed freak psycho nutter trip better than most I've seen and her big slap-down with Franco once Warlord and his boys catch up to Ash and Prince is pretty unforgettable. On the other hand, Milla's 'World' (above) seems to be blown-out old resort that probably once stood at the edge of the Salton Sea and is now just a concrete foundation with an empty pool, some window frames (most glass long gone) and some "rooms," operating as a kind of meth/heroin/MDMA lab (?) with all sorts of cures and remedies somehow churned out of a few test tubes in a lab so bare it would shame Ed Wood. There's an under-directed and lifeless cage match (in an empty pool) wherein a few denizens of the place stand silently around, forgetting they're supposed to be cheering or banging on pots. Hey Franco, I know y'all have seen Escape from New York and Beyond Thunderdome so don't even...
Needless to say, at times I was ready to write this FUTURE off as a waste of talent with a few shine-through performances and moments, but then, Ash finds love, not with the Prince but SPOILER - with another girl, Lei (Margarita Levieva) the lonely cool lesbian who patches her up after she's shot during her escape. Their love is the future worth fighting for. They even stop by Love World on their way back through 'town' to separate Snoop from his remote so the girls can kick the shit out of him (so be sure and watch to the end of the credits).
If the cliches and the ugliness of Franco's teeth are to be overcome it's going to be through these surprise couplings and the idea the robot and the prince can have a platonic pair-bond where sex doesn't enter into it (i.e. he's not sulky or heartbroken he doesn't score with Ash). The straight girl / gay boy soulmate friendship in cinema is by now so lionized and holy it is beyond reproach, but the straight boy / lesbian robot version? Finally, Sigrid, our time has come. (END SPOILER)
SUPER SUKI MOMENT: Near the 1 hour 18 min 30 sec mark, during the climactic chase, Suki dismounts a dirtbike as it spins to a halt in the sand, kind of corkscrewing herself into a vertical position via a reverse twirl. She does so with such ease of serpentine hip movements, keeping her neck and back fluid and long the whole way, it's like she's strutting the catwalk the whole way from the start of her skid on through to walking forward towards her quarry. In that moment I knew: this girl is so cool and graceful the camera barely knows how to capture it. Did the director even notice how damned cool she was? Or was he too busy trying to tell a 'story' as old as time, told a thousand times, and better? If he did, he'd have slow-mo-ed that dismount and threw some deep bass grind underneath it.
FORMATIVE BURNING MAN CONVEYANCE: Zipping around the outskirts on a noisy dirt bike, high on mushrooms, imagining being a marauding viking from the future coming in to pillage (shrooms also acting to short-circuit socially conditioned empathy and increase a sense of moral freedom)
The other Suki of the wasteland opus is a follow-up from Anna Lily Amirpour after the cult success of her A Girl Walks Home Alone (2014): THE BAD BATCH (2017) evokes its own suite of post-societal sci-fi, a hybrid of Escape from NY and Mad Max 2. Returning one again to all the things that made Girl Walks Home Alone so unique, there are: genuinely trippy rave scenes; fingers in mouths (Amirpour's choice form of erotic contact); skateboards (her choice mode of transport); the way falling in love means sticking by someone even when they eat pieces of your body (Batch) or kill and drink your father's blood (Girl); and judiciously placed songs by the 80s band White Lines (here over the end credits). Suki Waterhouse is Arlen, a southern-accented girl in smiley face yellow shorts who finds herself exiled to a vast and semi-hostile desert that serves as a hybrid of Manhattan in Escape from New York (or LA) and Mexico in the era of Trump. Here, bad seeds, illegal immigrants, crooks, radicals, hippies, i.e. America's 'bad batch,' its problem children, anyone not willing to get with the neo-con paradigm, are kicked out. The desert seems to have enough sources of water to keep things going, there are copious drugs and free acid for some reason, and cannibals and free-roaming marauders, all more interested in foxy Arlen as a source of food rather than sex. There's also kindness, as in the wandering hermit played by an invisible Jim Carrey, who finds dying souls in the flats and totes them to 'Comfort' an oasis that serves as junkyard skate park open air market by day, druggy rave and cult recruitment center by night. Arlen goes from being kept alive only as so much livestock, slowly dismembered for irregular meals by a loose cadre of taciturn desert families, to escaping while lying on back of her skateboard (one leg and one arm already gone), to kidnapper of one of the cannibal's children, to an incumbent sister wife to 'the Dream' (Keanu Reeves) in a mansion with AC, a pool, cocktails, and endless drugs. We never learn where she got the artificial leg, or how it just happened to fit her. But she seems to do all right for herself in Comfort.
Outside Comfort there may not be enough food to go around, and only cannibalism is free, but somehow the drugs flow plentiful everywhere (the cannibals even shoot Arlen up to ease the pain before cutting off her limbs). Aside from the impregnation presumed by 'the Dream' (Keanu Reeves), no one seems too interested in sex, that is, unless they're totally high, as when Arlen wanders out into the desert on LSD, bumping into one of her cannibal assailants, Miami Man (Momoa) who's looking for his daughter. Even though she abducted her and shot his wife, he either doesn't know or figures it's fair since his family ate half her limbs. It doesn't make any sense, but hey - Arlen likes those muscles, leading to an ending that's straight-up Morocco, if you get the thirsty drift.
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| Suki receives lysergic communion |
Speak of 'there,' the award for Deepest Cover clearly goes to Jim Carrey as the saintly old mute hermit, his skin blackened to leather by the sun, wearing cardboard slit glasses to reduce the glare, shuffling slowly from one lone piece of shade to the next, never seeming to die of dehydration. Reeves, one of those few sterling actors who seem cumulatively saintly nowadays, gives us a rare side of himself too: slightly soft around the edges, big black mustache and tinted shades and robe putting him somewhere between Jason Molina in Boogie Nights and Juan Marcos. And throughout, while totally beat down, the flea market art direction is sublime: the dwellings really do look like junk, the dumps look truly toxic. Amirpour nails the way language vanishes in the haze with people bargaining human captive meat supplies for gasoline cans. And, after all that suffering, just seeing Arlen with a cool blue drink in her hand and a face enraptured by drugs, almost brings tears to one's eyes.
It's these scenes that seem--if I may retro-engineer their idea germination--to have sprouted in someone's mind while at Burning Man or some similar desert held psychedelic festival (or vision quest). I say this since their white sand flat desert wasteland settings and neon-Day-Glo drenched drug rave set pieces evoke said festival, the kinds of spectacles I know I myself have hallucinated similar Sodoms while having bad trips at festivals. But we can also see the trends of European-style art school intellect at work in the Amirpour rubric: a critique of American consumer society and the divide between the rich and the poor, young and pretty, hungry and fed, showered and filthy, old and withered. In this, she's not unlike a less inhuman Michael Haenecke, but by now the cannibalism as capitalism metaphor is mighty weary.
But as with FUTURE WORLD's 'big' desert dance party, the highlight is the editor's intensive use of delay-trail imagery for drug trips. Between these two films and MANDY, the year of 2018 seems to have arrived at the place I used to dream of around the start of this site back in 2003, that one day psychedelics would be seamlessly integrated into film and therefore society, not demonized or glorified, but accepted as both a heightening of and escape from reality, a chance to unmoor from our stodgy structuralist signifier chains and see the world anew, all labels and reductivist shortcuts temporarily lifted, making us, in a sense, children (or schizophrenics) and all via emerging post-structuralist cinema. Alas, the devil's bargain of the poison path is that with the vision to change the world comes the torpor and derangement that keeps us from doing anything about it. The vision for a post-structuralist cinema becomes yet another psychedelic rave scene that goes nowhere but to the inevitable hangover and disorientation of the following day.
Even Armirpour's vivid depiction of rave-desert sky freedom is undercut in BATCH when Arlen is given a silly voiceover inner dialogue narration while wandering the starry desert high on a Comfort tab. "Wow, it's so big... is that what it always looks like?" Oy vey!
In fact, this creates in a way a kind of opposite reaction to any sense of proxy wonder in the viewer. Prior to it, we're kind of an Antonioni/Jess Franco amnesiac cinema headspace, signifiers are gone: when a drifter materializes out of the horizon heat shimmer, we don't know what they want, if they're friend or foe, going to eat Arlen, help her, or ignore her. As I discuss in Amnesiac Cinema, this taps into the European language gap (which helps make the 'Tower of Babel' style countries and environments more susceptible to emerging trends in art) but American viewers aren't used to it, unless they're cool, as in broad-minded, psychedelically 'experienced' or globally inclined. As in the best parts of Amirpour's previous film, a blessed unknowingness overtakes us. But with the acid voiceover, however, we're suddenly situated in language's prison.
Then again, Waterhouse really brings the knowing sway - when she finds herself gyrating against the heaving muscles of Somoa, it all starts to make sense, if you're a girl. We'd give it all up to follow Suki into the desert, even with the limbs half ate, even if--as with that voiceover--she's still labeling and quantifying, in other words trying to put the ocean into bottles, which would be fine if her monologue was incoherent, like when someone tripping is having a deep thought then tries to share it, to speak aloud, and it comes out all garbled as one is no longer thinking 'in English' or any language, but in a trans-symbolic immediacy that's beyond coherent speech, more like the rants of the Mad Hatter or other Alice in Wonderland characters (see "Reeling and Writhing") So "is this what the night always looks like?" would be more like "is thight allo lookike?" would be "whath nook ikelays ike" and that's far more Freudian/poetic profound! I wearer swiz!
SUPER SUKI MOMENT:
Holding a gun to the belly of one of the pregnant sister wives in order to rescue Miami Man's daughter, all without changing her deadpan expression.
FORMATIVE BURNING MAN CONVEYANCE: Zipping around a big DJ set-up on a golf cart while zonked on martinis and LSD, winding up getting lost in the desert at night, driving around in circles, looking up at the stars.
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In the end, what are we left with?? Perhaps just what we started with, what we wind up out on the desert flatlands under the wide awake stars, head full of acid, shrooms, MDMA, peyote, or ayahuasca with a slyly gorgeous Brit model. The first man and woman, the essentials - unmarred by sleazy raiders or cannibals. Though we may lose limbs to them, and even free will, there is no stopping the rush of being really high and/or gorgeous... at Burning Man, back when it still had the kind of Summerisle-ish cult edge that if you were tripping hard enough made you believe the man being burnt alive that night might well be you.
