Among the sex-drenched sights and retro-slick sounds of the The Canyons are, Lohan's voluptuous, bruised body aside, interiors and exteriors of closed, water-damaged cinemas and a stroll through a near-empty Amoeba video section, and lots of talk about how roles in nonstarter slasher films are coveted by two bit rent boys looking to make a dollar other than through d-list beefcake centerfold shoots. When two poor people fall in love in this environment, look out, because their current partners--sugar daddies, girlfriends with cushy PR jobs, and rich trustfund Ellisian psycho studs in glass houses--won't be too happy, and they're just the types to do much about it.
But we're not renting this film off cable pay-per-view for any of that, only for Lindsay Lohan, resuscitating her career from its woozy downward spiral, which means she's launching herself off the bottom of the pool via short zero budget shoot off the backs of establishedly disreputable names like Paul Schrader and Bret Easton Ellis, the way Robert Downey Jr. launched off similarly debauched-and-guilty-about-it James Toback's no budget Two Girls and a Guy back in 1997.
The sleaze element is a carryover, because Lohan was all geared up to there for her nonstarter Inferno (see my analyses where I compared her to Downey back in 2011, here). Kudos to her for the ease with which she sets about displaying her now somewhat sex-and-drunkenly-falling-down-a-lot bruised and fleshy body, which seems to oscillate in weight over the course of what is supposed to be a few days; bruises come and go, and her arm hair shines in the sun like a twirly halo, but her hair looks great (except when she has it all pinned up in a gross bun in the beginning, which I found to be the most obscene thing in the film and is unpictured in this post). It's a daring display, a reminder reel that erratic behavior on set has nothing to do with final results. Wilder hated working with Monroe for the same reasons Lohan gets such a bad rap these days, but he worked with her more than once, because in the end the final product is the only measurement.
But the film itself adds up to little. Director Paul Schrader's been subjecting us to post-Calvinist morality slippage since the 70s, this being the man who gave us Taxi Driver (1974), Hardcore (1978), American Gigolo (1980) and Auto Focus (2002), each in their own way about the evil lure of pornography, daughter-stealing, taking Cybil Shepherd to 'the movies,' and a beloved TV WW2 sitcom star's slow fall from amateur pornographer to a messy murder victim in a Hawaii hotel room (a result of a Hawaiian Brady Bunch-style curse?). Ellis has of course given us the source novels for American Psycho, Rules of Attraction, and Less than Zero; they are the right choices for a film that claims to be all up in on the disaffect of youth, but which generation's youth is that? As Scharder said in a Salon interview:
My generation — we thought we could make a difference and make the world better. Bret’s generation thought they could make money. I don’t think that this current generation has any real aspirations. They’re making money, but I don’t think they’re that crazy about money. The characters make movies and they don’t like movies that much. They’re hooking up and they don’t like that much. The difference is, my parents and I always believed life would be better for the next generation. The current generation believes life is going to be worse for the next generation. It’s such a change for the future of humanity — the future is not something, now, that guarantees a better life."That's pertinent of course, but you run the risk of being made to seem, what is the word, prurient? I like that word because it encompasses both desire and condemnation, like the old pastor who works himself up into a sexual froth ranting about some girl's halter top. Or there was that film by Bernardo Bertolucci, The Dreamers (2003), wherein you wonder who old Bernardo thinks he's fooling by having these gorgeous naked young entwined beings haunting the la Cinémathèque Française and pretending they can understand Cahiers du Cinema circa May '68 and otherwise justifying (in his mind) the big budget version of Auto Focus-style leering. At least the guys are just as exploited here as the women here, as befits the semi-invisible hand of boymongers like Gus Van Sant (who appears as a therapist) and Larry Clark (Kids) who, regardless of what you may think of them as dirty old people, have made some great films about their boy toy obsessions and seem to have bothered to plum the depths, such as they are, of the skater and homeless kid cultures the way most do not, including Schrader and Ellis.
There's no May 68 to defend the actions here, of course, and Lohan isn't a young thing so much no more - she's only 27 or so but the constant hounding of the paparazzi furies have left her as scarred as a hot bitch Orestes. Even so, by 27 you should be beyond letting yourself get sucked into menage-a-quatres to flatter the closeted vanity of your rich loser boyfriend, for whom obsession means thinking you're inventing sexual mind games by acting like a character from a pre-revolutionary Paris novel. And having Lohan just be one of an ensemble of cretins trapped in their downward spirals of apathetic oversexed and drugged ennui should do either one of two things: be a turn-on or turn-off (Two Girls was both) or far enough over the line to be either profound or traumatic or both (Two Girls was that, too), i.e. really good, bad or ugly (Two Girls was at least the last two), and this film is none of the above. It strives for meta resonance with the empty cinema shots as comments about how nobody goes to see movies in the theater anymore ("premieres don't count") and showing the subterfuge that arises when all the characters can't stop arranging intrigues on the cell phones long enough to even realize where they are. Now that they even watch their own messages on "Text TV" why even watch the film they're in?
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| James Deen, and a portrait of... Herbert Marshall? |
I remember partying with these sorts of people in the 90s. I could feign strained poses of Adonis-like disaffect with the best of them, but now I can finally admit how miserable I was, my every pithy comment a dying flutter of faux-carefree flirty abandon. Just because you can capture that misery in a film about the younger generations doesn't mean you're inventing it. And especially with the excellent retro-electro tripahol score by Broken Social Scene lynchpin Brendan Canning moodily pretending like the 00s never happened, we have to take some old people's word for it that kids are still putting out for bracelets, so to speak. (and was it LL's court orders that ensured we only see one little coke bump snorted over the course of the whole film? Take it from me, orgies are impossible without coke, or "e" as the kids call it now.
I don't miss stepping over the myriad entwined forms on my loft floor on my way to the bathroom at four in the morning during the days I was getting sober while my roommate was getting into coke, trying to sleep to the incessant thud of terrible Euroclash from his in-house turntables, but I do miss places like Amoeba music and good theaters with no bedbugs or texting-addicts. But those plastic things they couch the DVDs in to stop you stealing them always left my sad fingers grubby, and since I tended to go there when I was lonesome and needed to get out of the house I associate them now with the depression that Effexor took away for good back in '04, and I have Amazon Prime, and cinemas now have that unsettling feeling you're not in a 'theater' so much as a giant bed, dreaming a shared dream with deformed fellow earthlings who have lives and bodies and gastrointestinal problems all their own, which they now carelessly reveal to their fellow audience members, accentuating how we here in the trenches are vastly different from the gods and goddesses out in LA, especially in The Canyons. These kids look like they all smell divinely.
The references to no one seeing movies anymore, Schrader's own quote that kids today are making movies but don't like them, and the closed cinema cutaways all allegedly add up to something in Canyons, but if you saw this at one of its festival screenings these things would make no sense. Luckily you can probably go on your TV right now and rent it off the box for $5.99 and then watch it on your computer while trolling through online dating sites, and then groove the meta; but then you're still going to want to get out of the house, walk around the block and then come home, just to feel you've done something. My girl and I were going to go see The Conjuring up the street at the Pavilion, but we rented this instead, by a click of a button, for 1/4 the price, and no smells or blue screen peripheral annoyance or itchy feeling causing you to burn your clothes and take a second shower afterwards. This is the future of cinema, where the cell phone is the weapon of choice as well as the entertainment, which is to say, distraction... but from what? When you forget even what you're using sex, drugs, and intrigue to escape from, you're in real trouble. In case you're not aware of that, Paul Schrader is here to help. Fucking Calvinists!
Luckily there are still a few demographics who go to the movies to keep them in business - kids who still live with their parents and need to get the hell away from them as often as possible. As you sit down as a family to rent The Canyons be glad you don't have to live alone, hustling from one easy mark to the other, adrift in your world of decadent luxury and meaningless sex. Even working on a movie, it seems, is no escape from the inescapable pull... of rehab. Stay with your parents, forever, so at least you have something clear cut to escape from.