Panem et circenses

Rating: 3/10 (5 April 2007)

All fetishism and insincerity, Robert Rodriguez / Quentin Tarantino's new "double feature" Grindhouse recalls Jean Baudrillard's essay War Porn all to well.
Grindhouse is not so much about the experience of those dangerous unrestricted public spaces (and subversive exchanges of power and ideas of yore), but the meaningless spectacle of fresh flesh slaughtered. It's the most base abstraction of a fertile field of abjection.
In Grindhouse, Rodriguez and Tarantino miss the remark-ability of grindhouse cinema. They offer a pornography of arousal through bloodshed, rather than the hermetic, deep -- or deeply imagined -- fantasies exploiting the socially unacceptable desires of the audience while offering them, via the theater's very building, a safe haven from the "just" world outside, where those rules -- the rules of the grindhouse, the rule of the outsider, i.e. the rules of movie heroes -- do not apply.
But for Rodriguez and Tarantino to make a movie with the mores of nearly half a century ago seems careless if not remiss. To copy those 70s postures without using them for a greater end is the work of underdeveloped sexual identity seeking to escape in to a pre-sexualized world where sex is but a metaphor for violence.
By far the better movie maker, Rodriguez understands cinema and its textures. He understands that movies are a psychological medium predicated by desire and punctuated by the cut, fed by the repressed and interjections of the uncanny. Definitively Freudian in its grammar thanks to Germany's mass Expressionist immigration to Gothic Hollywood at the dawn of sound; cinema has today passed the point of construction because we the viewer understand how-we-watch-as-we-watch, but do not understand how-we-consume-as-we- watch because modern spectatorship isn't active. Active spectatorship examines the viewer's complaisancy in purchase -- the anthisisis of corporate media's end goals. Would Grindhouse have the irony and wit of Café Flesh rather than comic book ethos of Creepshow!
America is the DVDs they buy. And what a DVD Grindhouse will make! Dramatic catharsis has moved from the climax of a movie to the orgasm of purchase attained in buying the ticket or the DVD. Alas more than anything else, Rodriguez and Tarantino's new Grindhouse is a packaged prefab entity perpetually ripe for repackaging and reconsumption. Only symbolic, modern art can have no definitive form because audience construction is the narrative.
Rodriguez's stylistic "defacing" of image as represented in Grindhouse by faux splices, burnouts, and "missing reels" is as breathtaking and fresh as Lars von Trier's Dogma DV revolution.
In a recent interview Rodriguez remarked: "But it's used to dramatic effect, too. It's not really just aging for the sake of aging. What's cool is I got to use those as tools. . . . Usually your film grammar includes the fade, or the cross-fade, or the jump-cut, and that's about it. Now, you've got the splice-cut, you've got the film-burn, you've got the missing reel, you've got a lot of things to help accent the film dramatically."
Here is the path to groundbreaking modern film-making where the language of story and exposition is subverted for pure image and essay-like supporting details of content. Media is now so advanced that successful propaganda can be presented as infotainment on any subject -- all contexts are created after all -- and therefore it is meaningless to try anything but a deconstructive approach to creating new art. Rodriguez makes us aware of his (de) constructions and therefore produces work that is visceral and honest.
If Andy Warhol presented a more polished (if primitive) fission of Jack Smith, Ron Rice and Andy Milligan, and explored the "negative space" of the cinematic canvas with "strobe cuts" and the one-time-only event of ****, then it goes to figure that Rodriguez understands America's I-am-what-I-own culture and done it one better introducing the "splice-cut" and "missing-reel-cut" to the mainstream via his and Tarantino's orgy of immature sadism.
The Rodriguez / Tarantino universe is amoral and inaccessible in any meaningful way because violence, because character, because gender is meaningless there. Less than the sum of its parts, it's all just meat for the grinder -- the titillation of "meat shots." America is hungry for violence and vengeance because it informs character, nationally confused with purpose, in a nation of shoppers no longer able to divorce themselves from the products they consume.
But perhaps Grindhouse is showing the populace the bodycount that corporate controlled "news" will not... Perhaps for Rodriguez whose segment flirts with the political, doubtful for Tarantino whose segment only flirts with himself...
Tarantino, illy resembling a present day Hugh Heffner in his on screen appearances in Grindhouse, delivers his installment as DOA, leaden and tedious as the dullest Doris Wishman quickie. It's a dubious fidelity to the genre that is better glossed with Rodriguez's stylistic fidelity but flip 2008 pacing and tempo.
The most successful moments of Grindhouse are the faux trailers, promising more than could ever be deliver by one movie, thusly delivering the very real dirty possibilities of ideas and imagination that are implacably real and the stuff of dreams.
(April 6, 2007)