A mere 23 minutes later, I was astounded to see that this happened:More than anything, I wanna interview @JRichardKelly about SOUTHLAND TALES. For like three hours. I'd do it for free.
— Abraham Riesman (@abrahamjoseph) March 27, 2013
We followed up via email within the hour. He was serious. I was serious.@abrahamjoseph I would happily talk to you about it.
— Richard Kelly (@JRichardKelly) March 27, 2013
I recently forced three friends to watch the movie for the first time and, a few minutes after it ended, asked them individually to summarize what they'd just seen. From their descriptions, it seemed like we were watching different movies.One said it was "an LA narcissist's take on what would happen if you put an all-comedic cast and then B-list actors who can't really act into a social commentary on consumption and oil policy." Another said it was a collection of "Buñuelian surrealist symbols and weird things thrown in for no apparent reason," clearly not intended to make any sense. The third said it was all obviously a hallucination Taverner was having about Abilene, with Boxer, Krysta, and Boxer's wife (Mandy Moore) as a representation of the Holy Trinity. (I definitely hadn't thought of that before.)The film is a visual pastiche of guns, graffiti, muscle-beach bodies, walls of chattering TV screens, and colorful psychedelia.
- There's the phrase, "I'm a pimp, and pimps don't commit suicide," spoken in one variation or another three times over the course of the film -- and never explained.
- There's the scene where Cheri Oteri's character haggles with an arms dealer played by Christopher Lambert (you know, Raiden from Mortal Kombat), who operates out of the aforementioned ice cream truck. She tries to pay him with a personal check and he memorably snarls, "Get the fuck out of my ice cream truck, you Cro-Magnon bitch."
- There's the beachside music video for Krysta Now's self-released single, "Teen Horniness is Not a Crime" ("An overcrowded nation / leads to sex frustration / all your legislation / can't stop teens' masturbation").
- There's the part where Amy Poehler performs a poem while wearing a prosthetic nose and a wedding dress, and is subsequently shot by a corrupt cop named Bart Bookman (Jon Lovitz -- he's in this movie, too).
- And there's the dreamlike sequence in which Justin Timberlake performs a lip-synced song-and-dance number set to The Killers' "All These Things That I've Done." (The scene has gone slightly viral: as of this writing, its various YouTube rips have a total of 927,130 views -- nearly three times the amount of dollars in the movie's total worldwide gross.)
"I was barely 30. 29. And that's still too young to be directing a film," Kelly said with a laugh. "I'm not sure if anyone under the age of 30 should be allowed to direct a film. That sounds horribly hypocritical, but…"
It took more than a year, and the finished product -- still unusually long, at 144 minutes -- was only picked up at 63 theaters. Critics derided it, leaving it with a 36% rating on Rotten Tomatoes (though a lonely few championed it, such as The Village Voice's J. Hoberman and The New York Times' Manohla Dargis). In just a few weeks, it was out of theaters."Everyone's your best friend when you get into competition at Cannes, but then, the movie is widely ridiculed, and all of a sudden, your phone stops ringing," Kelly said. Nowadays, its stars rarely talk about it, and when they do, they might quickly toss it under the bus ("I still don't know what that movie is about," Timberlake said in an interview in 2011).Kelly's career hasn't been ruined, but it's definitely slowed down significantly. He's only made one movie since Southland Tales: 2009's sci-fi thriller The Box, which received warm reviews and turned a profit. He told me he's been writing screenplays nearly non-stop since then, though none have made it to the screen yet (one's called Corpus Christi and might get made by Eli Roth; another's called Amicus, it's about a First Amendment trial, and he's optimistic that it'll get the green light soon).Ultimately, the Southland Tales graphic novels -- and the expansive, trippy vision they represented -- became potent symbols of Kelly's lowered expectations for his magnum opus."Everyone's your best friend when you get into competition at Cannes, but then, the movie is widely ridiculed, and all of a sudden, your phone stops ringing."
One step closer to USIDENT: http://t.co/coU7a4DA
— Richard Kelly (@JRichardKelly) April 27, 2012
Even the "website" section of his Twitter profile doesn't even go to the URL of his production company, Darko Entertainment -- it goes to " Fuck Yeah, Southland Tales," the Internet's most trafficked Southland Tales fan site. Kelly, of course, gave me the Twitter handle of the blog's proprietor, Nova Bennett. She was just as surprised as everyone else to have been noticed by one of her favorite directors.Still, she and every other fan I contacted wrote back with effusive and detailed praise of the movie in question. They weren't stereotypical cult-movie fans, either: not a single person thought of it as "so bad it's good," nor was anyone under the illusion that it's a perfect movie. They simply revel in it, flaws and all.SPRING BREAKERS: 4 of Britney's early schizoid personalities rescued by Federline. Bi-polar rebirth in Krysta Now Lamborghini. #LovedIt
— Richard Kelly (@JRichardKelly) March 15, 2013
"I first saw the film during its theatrical release in 2007 at a very empty weeknight show at the Village East in New York and loved it instantly," C. Mason Wells, a 29-year-old fanboy, wrote to me. (He recently coordinated a midnight Southland Tales screening at the IFC Center.) "In its narrative complexity and breadth and depth of references (high and low, from T.S. Eliot to porn), Southland feels more of its time (and ahead of its time) than any other 21st century American movie; it's pure sensory overload.""Everything there has a point, has a reason," he told me at the cafe. "Even the orbs, the glowing orbs."
It was that simple, I guess.Part of me feels like I've been robbed of something very precious. I've come to realize Southland Tales was so meaningful to me because I thought of it as something otherworldly. An uncanny collection of images and words, powerfully circulating without a single purpose. A movie that deliberately eschews narrative, that is primarily designed to lead the viewer into introspection or spectacle in a way that Hollywood movies are never designed to do.But according to the man who created it, that is not what he meant at all. That is not it at all.The line first originated from Boxer's denial of his doppelganger's suicide out in the desert. He knows that it is fundamentally against his nature, and then he figures out the truth. Serpentine blew up the SUV after it went through the time rift. […] The line also became a metaphor for America. We were the pimp nation committing moral and financial suicide by invading Iraq.
It wasn't the first time Southland Tales had helped me get through a particularly dystopian news story. When NRA chief Wayne LaPierre earnestly proposed fighting guns violence by placing armed guards in every school, it was just absurd and violent enough to make me think I was living in Kelly's alternate universe. When the White House recently alluded to the possibility of U.S. intervention in Syria, my head spun back to the movie (Syria is one of the U.S.'s WW3 battlefields in Southland Tales).And then, as I discovered later while transcribing my interview, Kelly and I had had a revealing exchange -- one I'd missed when we'd first spoken it:"The whole film was my long-simmering response to 9/11 and response to the anxiety of terror and the terrorist threat and trying to make a big piece of satire that would be comfort food in light of the terrorist threat. That's what the film is intended to be for people."
KELLY: The whole film was my long-simmering response to 9/11 and response to the anxiety of terror and the terrorist threat and trying to make a big piece of satire that would be comfort food in light of the terrorist threat. That's what the film is intended to be for people.
ME: Comfort food?
KELLY: Yeah, in a way. I tried to make something you could disappear into and get lost inside of it. And in the transmedia angle with the graphic novels, try to expand it into an expanded world that you could disappear into. I might be the only person who would see it as comfort food, but yeah.