Southland Tales: The Grotesque, Beautiful Fascination with Disaster

This screening was part of the Alamo Drafthouse’s Weird Wednesday series. For upcoming shows, click here.

Clouds drew forth another torrential pouring of mist and despair to this beloved city a week after another previous, uncertain wet Fourth of July weekend. A full week later brings me to a packed night in the Southland, a place riddled with the sunshine we so desperately crave in the summer months, shone at full force by a colorful cast of characters at the sharp direction of Richard Kelly, director of the cult classic Donnie Darko in his sophomoric exploration into the obsessive control the media holds on the viewer. Misunderstood upon release, now revered for its complexity; that its messiness is what gives it such a voice, and the obsession with spectacle and unpredictability in modern times, Southland Tales follows suit, displaying the grotesque, beautiful fascination with disaster.

Richard Kelly’s vision for his expansive epic started with the release of three graphic novels and a connecting interactive website known as Southland Tales: The Prequel Saga, thus making the film Southland Tales itself the final chapters released. Kelly presented a world whose inhabitants are keenly focused on being number-one no matter the cost, with the likes of SNL alums Cheri Oteri as a Neo-Marxist, Jon Lovitz as her crooked cop love-interest, and Justin Timberlake as our looming, disgraced soldier-narrator Private Pilot, the audience can’t help but feel as exposed as the actions that take place - the ultimate goal being whom will come out on top in the eventual end of World War III. 

Pilot’s opening narration sets the story by weaving a previously existing storyline from Kelly’s prequel material to present a familiar setting: gritty Venice Beach in the near-future that is overrun by different gangs and populations who want to lay claim to the world themselves. The country is at war: major cities have been destroyed and laid to waste by the axis of powers, still prevalent in the near future. Texas is a wasteland having sent the United States into defense, enabling the very real PATRIOT Act as a means of protecting the land that remains through modified surveillance and government control over police response and new community guidelines that demand everyone give their identities and privacy to fight for the cause.

Our hero is Boxer (played by Dwayne Johnson, the first film in his filmography to drop The Rock moniker), an amnesiac action star who wrote a fictional screenplay in which he must save the world from disaster– coinciding with the world’s actual events at hand, thus creating the perfect blueprint to control the fate of the future and save humanity. Boxer must challenge the government’s attempts at world control, helmed by character actor veterans Wallace Shawn as Baron von Westphalen, and Miranda Richardson as Nana Mae Frost, mother-in-law to Boxer and antagonistic ruler at self-control. The government’s melding of powers causes great strain on economics and resources for the Southland, making survival more of a fantasy than reality.

The knowledge of the screenplay’s existence sends the higher powers into a frenzy, their ultimate goal to own the elements around the world and bend the oceans to their will through a generator with gravitational control, a fictional power in Boxer’s screenplay, thus becoming an actual step in world domination.

Joining Boxer is ex-porn star turned reality host Krysta (played by Sarah Michelle Gellar in another against-type role) who makes the terrors of America the latest spectacle in nasty entertainment, visualizing a “reality” TV that is a spectacle in itself. Kelly met with these actors and created a presentation of typecasting in an attempt to pluck familiar faces and names, place them up and down the Venice boardwalk, and comment on the growing need for surveillance in the present day and the irony of an invasion of privacy being the answer to survival.

Rounding out the cast is Seann William Scott in a dual twin brother role as Private Roland and Officer Ronald Taverner, where he must take his backlog of corruption and present it as method acting for Boxer, joining him in his taskforce for the fictionalized role he created for himself in the screenplay. Witnessing the government plot unfold through accidentally recorded bodycam footage, Boxer and Officer Ronald dive deep into Southland’s dark underworld to uncover the mystery of Private Roland’s disappearance, his connection to Private Pilot, and his knowledge of what really happened in Texas to initiate the terror. However, this means certain disaster for the brothers, as it would cause ultimate destruction to the world. Neither brother is aware of their capabilities and that the generator’s power would actually shift all of creation if they were to meet, all created in Boxer’s screenplay to expel time travel as a means for control.

What makes Southland Tales so uniquely misunderstood is its presentation of growth in the age of supervision, observation, and caution as it becomes a spectacle in itself, no longer a means for a fabled reminder, but instead something to be gawked at and enjoyed purposefully. TALES was not without controversy: screened at Cannes Film Festival in 2006 in competition for the Palme d’Or, one of the festival’s highest honors, it was instead met with ghastly reaction as it was submitted incompletely; the version the organizers eagerly accepted did not have any final visual effects. With Kelly realizing his passion project and long-awaited epic was going to take more trial and error to be accepted by the masses, the rejection of Southland Tales was a “very painful experience” but he ultimately felt that it “was better off” because of this, Kelly said in a 2007 interview with Paste Magazine.

Ever timely, Kelly considers Tales to be his misunderstood child, the black sheep in a roster of films about the American dream and the spectacle it becomes when trying to achieve it. Altogether, the more disastrous the “play” reality is, the more it successfully detracts from the actual horrors at hand. Ultimately, Southland Tales is a study in the pleasures derived from media engagement and the outcomes brought upon by those who consume it. 

The movie theatre is my home away from home, and the safety and comfort I am thankful to feel weekly housed in its seating and sounds gives me life to that type of spectacle. The privilege of getting the chance to enjoy a film (or anything, really) that has such a history of dividing crowds and bringing them together is what this life is all about. The rain is still careful to wash away all the debris. The sun still shines, children still play.

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