Have a Nice Apocalypse with Southland Tales

It seems for as long as human society has existed, those of us participating have speculated on how it might end. Robert Frost waxed poetic on fire and ice, Nostradamus gained nostoriety for his shots in the dark, and even some little publication called the Bible contains an end-days handbook known as Revelation. However, all these works have a major problem: they aren't stupid enough. Enter Southland Tales.

Conceived near the same time of his eventual cult classic Donnie Darko’s release, director Richard Kelly’s sophomore project began life “making fun of Hollywood;” a Los Angeles comedy involving a pornstar, blackmail, and cops. This idea would never quite see the light of day—when the Twin Towers fell, Kelly’s concept mutated into something warped, sprawling, and more political; Southland Tales as we know it was born. In his own words, it became a film about “an important problem,” namely “civil liberties and homeland security,” along with the growing relation between celebrity and politics. An infamous passion project, the film was just one part of a much larger story which involved a graphic novel prequel and a planned sequel—this second film would never see the light of day, as Southland Tales grossed only $374,743 on a $17 million budget.

With full honesty, it's not hard to see why. Southland Tales is an unwieldy, nearly unapproachable object which is almost impossible to conceive as something released in theaters to a paying public. Running nearly two-and-a-half hours (after studio cuts!), the film gnarls up an overstimulating Gordian Knot of dumb-genius black comedy and anti-American sentiment which would be difficult to package and sell even on the best of days. In recent years, fans have come to love these quirks as features, not bugs; but even then Southland Tales remains difficult to pitch or succinctly describe. Here, I'll try.

In the right-wing dystopian future of 2008, the city of Los Angeles and American society stand on the brink of collapse. A group of characters intertwine at this turmoil's fulcrum: Boxer Santaros (Dwayne Johnson), an amnesiac star-turned-figurehead of the Republican political set; Roland Taverner (Seann William Scott), a cop embroiled in a plot to blackmail Santaros; and Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar), Santaros’ girlfriend and porn star/subversive political operative. Moving through a series of vignettes not unlike the associative structure of other Los Angeles favorite Mulholland Drive, these three characters interact with a seemingly endless parade of character actors and subplots, marching ever forward to an evening of revolution and America’s rebirth. Don't expect the somber tone of a funeral though—what sets Southland Tales apart is an eminently dumb, cackle-inducing sense of humor.

More in line with Miracle Mile or Dr. Strangelove than Threads or Melancholia, Southland Tales’ enduring appeal lies in a stubborn refusal to take itself—or the death of America—entirely seriously. One of Kelly’s major insights is that, hey, even though things are awful and just generally shitty, you can take a few steps back and behold, with that special blend of comedy and tragedy, how willingly cruel the people and decisions which create these conditions are, and how often ill-equipped those on the ground find themselves to combat them. One of the film’s standout scenes comes when Santaros and Taverner arrive at the scene of a faked domestic dispute intended to implicate Santaros in a staged police-sanctioned murder of two innocents—but the whole thing goes wrong when a real cop commandeers the situation and the two performers wind up dead for real. It's uncomfortable, tragic, and honestly hilarious; an appropriate coda for the film's push-pull of tones at large.

Pretty much every Southland Tales cast member is either a comedian or adjacent to one: Jon Lovitz as the aforementioned corrupt cop, Wallace Shawn as a pre-Elon tech boy with mommy issues, Amy Poehler as a revolutionary beat poet, Mandy Moore as Boxer Santaros’ estranged wife; and on and on and on. What results is a tapestry of America’s downfall as a very weird, very goofy thing; which feels appropriate for a country as weird and goofy and stupid as it is awful and ruinous. It's the sort of black comedy which almost dares you to laugh at the rockheadedness of its jokes—consider Krysta Now’s new album “Teen Horniness Is Not A Crime,” the absurdity of trying to buy revolutionary munitions with a check, a blackmailer named “Deep Throat II,” etc. Maybe it's this humor which causes such strong love-hate reactions to Southland Tales, but it's also this injection of comedy which has granted the film a weird prescience to our current culture not found in more buttoned-up offerings.

It’s as though Richard Kelly looked at the silliest parts of America circa 2002 to 2006 and cranked them all the way up, and society just saw fit to follow suit. The hand-in-hand between celebrities and government has only grown larger, Saturday Night Live has become some strange political machine, Republican figureheads have only grown stupider and meaner, society is made measurably worse by an alternative energy car-hocking manchild out of California, the surveillance state is still in full swing, an entire culture has been built around 24/7 streaming, cops are still being caught on viral videos, hopelessly online internet leftists are still quoting Karl Marx, and crucially, the Supreme Court are still a bunch of supreme assholes. Step aside, Nostradamus.

To call Southland Tales a prophetic masterpiece is a statement which requires a whole bevy of qualifiers, but what it is is an interesting, wholly singular work by a director who torpedoed his career to recognize this very odd, very heartfelt vision. Always willing to give points for passion, especially when that passion entails an eye-popping Justin Timberlake Busby Berkeley musical routine, unforgivably nerdy needle drops, and the sort of absurd quotables which rattle around in your head days after the fact. Although there’s much to be said on the film’s humor, it bears mentioning that at its heart Southland Tales is a deeply felt, very dorky, and occasionally beautiful work about forging human connection in the face of apocalypse. Just try to have a little fun with it—after all, the end of the world is probably going to be really, really silly.