On the movie Drive and the fragmentation of Self
Guess
what? Facebook might be bad for you. I’m not here to reveal a new dimension of
truth to you. This is not The Matrix. There is no pill. I am here to remind you
that lived reality in the twenty first century, which is to say, a lot of
mediated reality, is complex. It involves decisions like whether a man having
his head stomped in an elevator while the camera lingers over the evisceration
of his neck, is an act of artistic representation, a shout out to Tarantino and
noir, a mythopeic retelling of the western hero, or a really messed up scene of
violence that’s only acceptable because we’re a morally bankrupt society. These
are the sorts of questions that a sane person should be asking themselves as
they watch the incredibly “cool” movie Drive.
If you
haven’t yet seen the movie, Drive, you should. Although, to play devil’s
advocate, you shouldn’t. The first part of the movie involves lengthy overhead
shots of a brightly lit western city, one with long dark freeways and wide
arterials presented with the soundtrack of what sounds an awful lot like a bad
ass eighties song playing. The dialogue is minimal. We meet a driver, played by
“Hey Girl’s” Ryan Gosling, who helps navigate those wide and dark streets as a
getaway driver for criminals. After we’ve established that Gosling’s character
is quiet and cool, via a getaway car chase, that, to its credit, does not
involve jumping over a single bridge, the movie settles down so as to develop a
love triangle between Gosling, “the Kid” and the woman who lives in the next
apartment, a seemingly single mom played by Carey Mulligan. The audience is to
intuit, rather than experience their love as the love triangle develops through
long gazes and small bits of conversation. A neat, if failed attempt at
breaking the traditional movie mold.
The
plot turns when the budding romance is interrupted by the return of Mulligan’s previously
jailed husband, Bentio. Some small adjustments occur, where Gosling’s
characters relationship with Mulligan and her son is redefined, but the real
turn comes when Benito tells Gosling that he needs to pay off debts incurred in
prison or he’ll be killed. Gosling offers his services as the getaway driver,
and helps him to rob a pawn shop. However, Benito is killed while trying to
escape, and the “the kid,” like all western heroes, goes from a man seeking
peace and quiet, in this case playing trains with his neighbor’s little boy, to
a ruthless killer. That pretty much sums the movie up.
We’ve
become, or maybe always have been, a visual culture, and movies are our
greatest celebration of that dominant sense. Whether it’s redefining our
relationship to sexuality due to the wide availability of pornography, or the
reimagining or Pearl Harbor, or the death camps in Nazi Germany, we don’t go in
much for listening anymore. This, in and of itself, is not problematic.
However, as visually dominant creatures, it seems relevant to ask, as
individuals
what
our consumption of violence, crudity, and Nicholas Sparksesque movies like “The
Vow” means. Is there any relationship to the crudity and short shrift most
meaningful relationships are given in rom com, or lack of identifiable
characteristics in action movies, to the dearth of nuance in a lot of American
political discourse? In short, does it matter how we choose to entertain
ourselves? I don’t think I have a right answer, but I’m concerned with anyone
who is not at least asking themselves that question.
Drive really takes off at high speed during the second half
of the movie. If Benito’s death is the car starting, it is the death of
Christina Hendricks’, she of Mad Men fame that is the foot on the gas. A short
range blast from a shotgun turns her head into a watermelon, splattering the driver,
the room, and nearly everything in sight.
The movie escalates in violence from there, including a dramatic fork to
the eye stabbing, a boot stomping in an elevator, a forced drowning, a cutting
of an artery with a shiv, each recorded by the camera in glorious, loving
detail. When the violence concludes, the
audience, or at least this audience member, is forced to reconstruct the final
forty five minutes of the movie to find something meaningful.
And
this is where the fragmentation of the modern self begins to worm its way in.
There are a variety of different ways to interpret this movie. I believe it
entirely plausible that an audience member would witness the scope and breadth
of the violence and declare the movie meretricious. And, if that seems too fine
a point to put on it, let’s go with, deeply messed up. It is difficult to
imagine the presence of art in the face of so much reckless violence. The only
relatable popular film, in terms of violence, that I can remember seeing was
“Pan’s Labyrinth,” where the violence was indicative of the fascist regime’s
insanity. There is an admittedly large part of me, framed by a Christian
upbringing that finds it almost stunning that an “enlightened” society of
twenty-first century human beings, wholly aware of our barbaric past, could
find images of abject violence entertaining. It’s truly Romanesque. And if I
allow that part of my brain to drive, I fear that this is how our society will
be remembered, like the Romans forever linked to the gladiators. We’ll be
remembered as a society that spent an increasing amount of time indulging our
lower sensibilities, anaesthetizing ourselves from real world atrocities. I’d
argue that it’s very possible to watch the movie, Drive, and be appalled. In
fact, I’d go as far as to say that I’d be concerned if a person wasn’t in the
least disturbed.
The point is moralistic, I know,
and we’re an American society where morality is often linked to the Christian
right and endlessly retrograde culture wars, but what is gained through
watching the movie Drive? That is, unless a person is planning to embark on a
career of stunt driving and brutal violence, to which, enjoy. Studies have
shown that children are able to differentiate, rather easily, between a game of
Call of Duty and real life, but it’s probably reasonable to ask if they gain
anything by appealing to our base, rather than our angelic natures. What hope
is there in this of reifying the callowness and brutality of man?
I realize that I’m stepping over a
certain line here, that we understand that movies are intended, in general, to
entertain rather than edify us, and that all the movie “Drive” is really asking
of us is to be loved. And how can we not love something so stylish? The city is
so bright, the streets so wide, the music playing in such a way that we feel as
if we are driving through our own city at night, the warm wind blowing in the
window. The casual violence allows us to indulge some small part of the deep
rage that comes with a daily commute, a thankless job, an unfulfilled life, in
short, being us.
It’s also possible to watch Drive
and run a grad school analysis on it, identifying the Ryan Gosling character as
the anti-hero. It is possible to note that he is a drifter, possessed of a
strange yet exacting morality, with no past and no future. In this way,
Gosling, is playing the hero of the American West: a hero, whose roots aren’t
only found in John Wayne’s movies, but in the seminal work of western
literature, The Bible. Gosling is a hero ripped from the pages of Judges,
bringing a vicious justice to people because their own wickedness demands it.
The city where drive takes place is
definitively western. It is Los Angeles, a city made for driving; a city that
always looks good, the burning image of an authentic west. The main character
is alternatively called, “the kid” or nothing at all, for the majority of the
movie. This particular nameless quality brings to mind Cormac McCarthy’s
brilliant depiction of the sordid history of the west in Blood Meridian, a book
who’s titular signifier is not misplaced.
Drive mimics the format of
McCarthy’s book, upending the popular image of a lonely gunslinger wandering
into town and straightening things up with a few puffs of smoke. The violence
in Drive is stomach turning. The villains bleed. They suffer. They are the
monstrous grooms of violence, dressed in black suits and so their death is
wedded to it. In this way “Drive” achieves a certain authenticity that most
western movies lack. Its truth is hard, like Judges. It warns that a life
steeped in violence will lead to a stiff retribution. And when the hero drives,
or rides off into the sunset, it is not with an unmarked soul, but with one
made unclean by blood.
In this iteration of interpretation,
the movie offers us a subtle kind of hope: the hope that we might learn, or
reinterpret our troubled past. This movie could stand as a signpost to the
rewriting of history, an attempt to understand violence rather than pass over
it in silence. The reality of Hiroshima and Nagasaki looms ominously in my
thoughts. We routinely watch movies that depict the specter of nuclear war,
though perhaps it is a hopeful one that the specter is always greeted with such
fear. I hope that we have not lost our institutional memory of the lived and
painful realities of that choice. Perhaps we need a brave film maker to remind
us in the way that “Schindler’s List” or “Life is Beautiful” did that our
depravity knows no bounds.
Viewed through this spectrum, Drive, is an excellent movie,
though it involves a viewer providing their own rigid critique, remaining an
active rather than a passive participant. This part of me, very different from
the moralistic first, received a graduate degree in creative writing, and can’t
watch a movie or read a book without trying to sift through the box of letters
to find hidden meanings, subtexts, a story within a story.
The third, and admittedly the way in which I’m least
trained, way in which to watch Drive is as a film student. It is possible to
identify the director, Nicolas Refn, as arising from the same vein as
Taranatino, an art house auteur bringing his own style to this western horror.
It is possible to note the homage to Eastwood and McQueen, the subtle nod of
the bomber’s jacket that Gosling wears throughout the movie, even after it’s
spattered in blood. It is possible to appreciate the subtlety and innocence of
the unconsummated love between Gosling and Mulligan, and also appreciate the
juxtaposition of his almost effete treatment of her with the stunning violence
once he’s unleashed. Drive, in many ways, appears to be Refn’s own homage to
the eighties, to the movies he loved.
It is this artistic side that is able to watch Drive and
note the artistic elements without questioning the nihilistic centerpiece that
is signified by the brutal violence. The violence, when viewed through this
lens, is not real, but a connection to the past. It is artistic rather than
moral. The main character could be cast as an Everyman, merely a human being
reacting to a cruel and bizarre world.
And herein lies the problem of the modern self. How do I
watch the movie? Is it as an aspiring
writer, interested viewer, a caretaker of Judeo-Christian ethics, that has, at
least in the New Testament, a rejection of the nihilism the movie espouses? The
eyes are the window to the soul.
Ultimately I’d propose that I’m troubled by anyone who does
not watch the movie “Drive” and feel doubt. Doubt in the Greek sense, as in,
the type Peter felt as he betrayed Christ, a literal pulling in two directions.
If the film doesn’t trouble you in the slightest, if the violence seems canned,
or part of a great filmic tradition, than perhaps you should evaluate how you
watch movies, what point there is in it, because religious or secular you are spending
precious minutes of an ever dwindling life doing it. And, if the movie merely
appears to be cool, or appeals to a certain aesthetic, I’d examine exactly what
that aesthetic is, and peel away at the layers to discover what lies beneath,
it might be fruit for more thought, or it might be rotten.
And, if you watch the movie as a pure moral tale and are
disgusted, I’d be troubled as well. It seems clear that there are interesting
elements, including the antihero, and an existentialist thread of strangeness
reminiscent of Eastwood or Camus. You needn’t come around to liking the film,
but it would be a disservice to see it dismissed without granting its
complexities. It seems a tragedy to float through life on a sea of certainty
when we live in a universe of such unexplained complexity.
It seems a shame to have spent so much time on a movie that
is, for all intents and purposes, not as good as number of other films released
in 2011. But it is this fragmentation of the modern self that the movie evokes,
accidentally mostly, that makes it interesting. I’d encourage anyone who has
already seen the film to reconsider what they’ve seen, try to dig beneath the
stylish exterior and slipshod descriptions of in vogue neo-noir films to see if
anything else exists beyond mere entertainment, or, if viewed through the
opposite lens of being appalled, to think of the movie again as an attempt at
truth, about the taming of our rugged country and of the unquiet soul. And, if
you haven’t seen it, approach the movie with your eyes open, in wonder and in
fear, as we should approach more things in this endearingly complex world of
ours.
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