I don’t think I’m out of line by saying Gus Van Sant has had a really interesting career. Starting out making somewhat controversial films that involved drug addiction, homosexuality, and prostitution, he settled into a pattern for the remainder of the 90s of increasingly mainstream fare—which is to say nothing of their quality, as I don’t think anyone would say Good Will Hunting is a bad movie!
Following the disastrous, masturbatory shot-for-shot remake
of Psycho in 1998, Van Sant quickly delivered the above average Finding
Forrester, which is mainly known for inspiring the meme-tastic series of
websites, YTMND, based on a cheesy line of dialogue shown in trailers that
seemed to be everywhere on TV during its release window. The next thing we all
knew, he returned in 2002 with Gerry, a film that stands in stark
contrast to even his most experimental/unconventional work from the past.
Of course, anyone who had been paying attention to his
career outside of movies would not have been as shocked. Starting in the 80s he
worked on a few spoken word projects with William S. Burroughs (who had a minor
role in Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy in 1989). 1997 saw him release the
novel Pink, which is widely considered to be his reflections on River
Phoenix’s death. The same year saw the release of his self-titled debut album,
which I haven’t heard and know nothing about, and a year later, 18 Songs
About Golf, which I haven’t heard but possibly know something about,
assuming its title is literal.
Soon Van Sant would returned to films exclusively for the
remainder of his career, beginning with the “Death Trilogy” of Gerry, Elephant,
and Last Days. Though there is in fact a linear story that progresses in
each of these movies, the non-narrative label hangs on them like a proud badge.
We are not being shown the true beginning or ending of these stories, and often
some likely crucial moments are left out completely—Gerry shows us the
two titular leads talking about everyday topics like Wheel Of Fortune
rather than the reality of their own predicament. But in not talking
about their perilous situation, they actually are if you dig below the
surface and see the subsoil, err, subtext. Like the contestant they seem to be
mocking for their poor choices/playing of the game show, the two leads have
similarly done stupid, arrogant things and gotten themselves in
life-threatening trouble. But to acknowledge out loud that this is happening
would make it real, instead of ignorable, and therein is the rub I suppose.
I would argue of all 3 of these movies, Last Days has
the least going on if you don’t know what it’s inspired by. In fact if memory
serves I’m not sure this movie would be anything other than pretty dull if you
went in somehow unaware of Kurt Cobain and his suicide (or I suppose his final
days?). Meanwhile, though inspired by a true story, Gerry has more of a
definite conclusion yet somehow is less narrative. Imagine if Quentin Tarantino
directed Castaway and that’s the odd vibe this movie generates: let’s have
loose, improvisational conversations and not “take seriously” the survival
situation we’re in.
Gerry was probably one of the first artsy fartsy
movies I ever saw, during the fateful era of my late college years to my mid
20s, when I basically watched through every movie my local library had. I
remember thinking afterwards that I should have hated the movie, since I spent
so much of it thinking to myself, “well, this has to go somewhere, right? There
has to be some kind of payoff for any of this?”
You can bluntly label the “Death Trilogy” as mercy killing,
murders, and suicide (Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days,
respectively) but in some ways you could argue the 3 films mix these. After
all, in Gerry, shortly after ‘mercy killing’ his companion, the sole
survivor soon is rescued and we’re left with ambiguous feelings based on the
look on his face. Did he intentionally kill his companion and use the “lost in
the desert” as a cover story? Is everything we saw really as it happened?
Likely, the movie is not trying to get us to ask these questions, but they
occurred to me, and that’s the beauty of a non-narrative film: you can fill in
the blanks yourself just as readily as you can sit down with those blanks and
be comfortable with them. Elephant never seems to ask or answer why the
school shooting is happening, and perhaps in its case, that’s not the point,
just as Last Days doesn’t ask or answer why the Cobain-doppelganger
commits suicide.
As a side note, in the real case that Gerry was
loosely inspired by, the surviving person alleged that they had made a
death-pact with the companion they “mercy killed” but that they were too weak
to kill themselves. Now, there’s other details to the real case that make the
mercy killing aspect more questionable, but I’m not sure that’s pertinent to Gerry.
Anyway, in some sense suicide as an option hangs over Gerry just as it
does Elephant, a film obviously based on the Columbine Massacre, which
famously concluded with a murder-suicide on the part of the shooters. Of course
Last Days is about the main character committing suicide, though like Elephant
this is implied and not shown. But I digress.
Let’s pivot into another discussion while my mind is
wandering. Actually, wandering is a good concept to pick up on here, since most
of Gerry is two characters wandering. At times there’s shots that evoke
the mysterious and decimated landscapes of The Zone in Stalker (the
movie, not the game, just to be clear) and here we arrive at the point I want
to pick apart: the distinction between art film and non-narrative film. As
there’s a huge amount of overlap between the two, let’s focus on what—in my
mind, at least—sets them apart. Art films don’t strictly have to be
non-narrative, though they often are, or at least obfuscate their narrative; or
even negate it by not offering even the hint of one. Meanwhile, non-narrative
films are almost always art films, but not always.
Let’s use two examples to illustrate the difference.
Memento is very much in my mind an art film. It
doesn’t offer easy answers to the viewer, and as you experience it for the
first time, I strongly suspect most people arrive at the conclusion that it’s
actually going backwards chronologically, or anyway, the main layer of the
narrative is (people often forget there’s another narrative in black and white
exclusively that is in chronological order). Now, you can probably find a fan
edit of the film that presents the main narrative in ‘real’ chronological order,
but all this does is clarify what the actual order of events is. For the first
20-30 minutes, for some I’m guessing Memento feels like a non-narrative
film that soon reveals itself as simply an art film. Though also presented in
non-chronological order, Pulp Fiction by contrast is neither an art film
nor a non-narrative film. Puzzling out its story order is not essential to
understanding and appreciating Pulp Fiction, whereas the revelation is
essential to Memento. It’s almost as if at first viewing Memento
was edited using the cut-up technique of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. It
is so baked into the very structure and framework of the film as a successful
art film so that if you take away this non-narrative structure, it becomes a
very different work. Indeed I have to assume if viewed with no narrative puzzle
to unlock it would become a mere revenge film with a pretty good twist toward
the end. So it would be a M. Night Shyamalan movie, basically.
Meanwhile, Gerry itself can be used to qualify it as
a non-narrative film instead of an art film, because it straddles the line of a
non-narrative film. By which I mean, the plot isn’t really the point of the
movie, though there is in some sense a linear story being told. It’s almost
like a hybrid of a dialogue heavy hangout movie, ala Clerks or Dazed
and Confused, and a pseudo-real time survival movie ala 127 Hours. Just
because a film has a simple narrative does not mean it can’t be non-narrative,
or have non-narrative elements. Take something like The Mirror:
absolutely an art film, absolutely non-narrative. Yet it does present vignettes
of life and memories, which in some sense are story elements of the narrator’s
life. What, then, eliminates Gerry from art film status? Well, to me
there’s nothing going on beneath the surface. There’s no subtext, there’s no
dreamlike imagery or ideas to unpack, there’s no abstraction, there’s no visual
symbolism or metaphor, and there’s not truly an open-endedness to the film in
terms of the beginning or the ending. Mulholland Drive seems to have a
definite beginning, middle, and ending, until you arrive at the actual final
moments and it feels like a dream/nightmare that could just keep repeating, a
recursive story or Mobius Strip.
Now, all of that said, this is no scientific field, so you’re
free to view Gerry as anything if it makes sense to you.
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