| The Globe and Mail’s Johanna Schneller is often infuriatingly simpleminded about movies, but never more so than in her year-end review column, where she dismisses both Gus Van Sant’s Elephant and all admirers of it by writing that "people saw things in (it)… that were not there."
Yet, while it is disappointing to see Schneller’s ongoing aversion to art in cinema in the nation’s paper of record, one also has to begrudgingly admit that in this case she’s partly correct. Thinking people indubitably see things in Elephant that are not there because, as Van Sant himself has noted, it is a film that the audience must complete. This means that viewers must bring their personal thoughts, ideas and experiences to the experience of watching the film and be willing to invest at least a portion of the intellectual effort that Van Sant invested in the making of it. To me, this respect for the audience is one sign of an artist at the height of his powers, but unfortunately middlebrow hacks like Schneller don’t want to think too hard (at all?) when they go to the movies.
One wonders whether she was similarly unable to see any merit in Gerry (U.S., 2002), the film Van Sant directed just prior to Elephant that is now available on home video. Gerry begins as an absurdist comedy about two young men lost in the desert only to become a harrowing existential journey into the nature of survival and the meaning (or meaninglessness) of life. At least, that’s what I see there.
If you’re struggling with the film, that’s the point – as much as there can be one. Gerry, like Elephant, is almost esthetically perfect, a mesmeric, hallucinatory work of cinematic art that will be discussed for decades. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to understand, and I’m not trying to mystify the experience by saying that the film has no meaning. It’s just that the film demands the audience consider that Gerry is about much deeper questions than it appears on the surface.
At first glance, Gerry seems to be constructed of the most minimal elements. The film opens with a plain, disjunctive blue screen, followed by long tracking shots of a car driving through the desert. There is no dialogue for the first several minutes, and very little direct sound – just the music of composer Arvo Pärt and images of the car. Eventually, the car stops and two men emerge – this is the entire cast, Matt Damon and Casey Affleck, who both collaborated on the screenplay with Van Sant.
Much of the early part of the film sets up the two men, who call each other "Gerry," as hipsters with little knowledge of the extreme landscape they’ve more or less stumbled into. In many ways, the Gerrys are not too different from many other urban twentysomethings. Pop culture junkies, they ironically discuss game shows (Wheel of Fortune) and computer role-playing games. They’re witty, granted, but as they venture off the beaten path into the desert with no water, no compass and very little preparation, they also reveal both their naiveté and their arrogant ignorance of their own insignificance.
Human insignificance in the face of natural phenomena is one of the central themes of the film. The vast open spaces and high mountains of the desert are photographed by Harris Savides as beautiful landscapes, but the placement of the characters in these landscapes also show it to be an essentially dangerous and indomitable environment. As in Elephant, Van Sant is asking us to ponder the way that landscape shapes our consciousness, and as the Gerrys remain in the desert for days on end we witness the alteration of their mental states.
On a literal level, the film asks us to consider how we would behave in similar circumstances. But a more metaphorical interpretation sees the Gerrys as divergent manifestations of a singular consciousness, dualistic characters like those in a play by Samuel Beckett. They’re linked in countless ways – shot in profile, walking in lock step as their footfalls become the only audible sound on the soundtrack, they mimic and mirror each other. They even call each other the same name, although "Gerry" is also the epithet they use for any disagreeable element of their relationship or decision-making process (e.g., "you Gerried the rendezvous").
If this dualistic interpretation is acceptable, then Gerry can be seen as an existentialist survival film – a battle between fair-haired and fair-complexioned Damon and dark-haired, dark-complexioned Affleck for dominance of a conflicted personality. Moreover, the film may be showing us that it is sometimes necessary for us to destroy a part of ourselves in order to survive extreme circumstances. I don’t pretend to have any better idea of what the film is about than anyone else does, but these are some of the things I thought about both times I watched it.
Yet, one of the staff at the video store where I rented Gerry told me that most others who had rented it said it was the most boring film they had ever seen. My initial response to their boredom is to wonder, "Who are these people, what the fuck is wrong with them and what do they want from movies? Are they sleepwalking through life with completely vacant minds? Gerry couldn't possibly be boring unless the person watching it is an unthinking, unfeeling automaton."
But then my stubborn idealism wins out and I remember that film criticism is better off without this kind of elitism. I remember that my job is not to dismiss people outright, and not merely to opine, but to convey my enthusiasm about a work of art when I see one. I remember that Gerry is not necessarily intended for a specialized audience, as so many of its proponents have said, but can be understood by anyone willing to ponder questions about our place in the universe.
If I can lead just one person to see something similar in Gerry to what I see there, I will be satisfied. It's a pity that Schneller can't find it in her to remember the same things. |
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