disorientations.com

Sometimes, it rather surprises me how stupid Europeans can be in their generalizing interpretations of American art and culture. It doesn’t really surprise me to hear that Gus van Sant’s latest film, Paranoid Park, was a big hit in France. The French love cliché representations of Americans - from Baudrillard on down - which they nearly always confuse with authenticity. After all, the more readily reducible to a crude cultural stereotype one is, the easier we all are to caricaturize. In Paranoid Park, we get it all - the eternal teenager (adults are hardly present throughout, and when they are, they’re always in the background or out of focus), inarticulate, naïve, emotionally insecure, bumbling around in a world that he barely comprehends and only vaguely aware that there is a larger world out there with slightly larger problems, like, uh, war and stuff. When he is feeling really down, he goes to the shopping mall to wander around. When he wants to feel his superficial notion of freedom, he jumps on his skateboard, which of course, is meant to replace the motorcycle of Easy Rider and the horse of countless westerns - the red-white-and-blue fluttering on the open range.

Or perhaps it was just the “beautiful” cinematography, presumably the scenes of skateboarders shot in slow motion, that so bowled over the French. Unlike that closeted pederast Larry Clark, ol’ Gus - a real live gay homosexual - doesn’t have to flinch in showing us these adolescent beauties; it’s all part of his lisping aesthetic, which, in order not to be homophobic, we must confound with real art.

The problem is that anyone who has studied van Sant’s trajectory from the early days can’t fully buy into it. His career has been too unsteady, his work too uneven for us to subscribe to the idea that he really deserves the renegade status so many of his admirers attribute to him. These discussions nearly always begin with his two indisputable masterpieces - Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho - both of which I am fully willing to endorse as two of the better American films of the last twenty years. It’s everything he’s done since then that’s been a problem. Even the most hardcore van Sant defenders have to squirm when the atrocious shot-by-shot remake of Psycho comes up in conversation. A friend of mine once heard the director excuse this embarrassing atrocity as a “failed experiment.” This makes it sound as though van Sant’s replication, and subsequent destruction, of Hitchcock’s masterpiece was all done in the name of avant-gardist pure intentions, but I don’t buy it; considering the feel-good sell-out schlock it’s surrounded by chronologically in this pseudo-master’s oeuvre, it seems that ego-tripping is more likely to be the dirt that gave rise to that blemish.

Van Sant has never had to account for making Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester, those sentimental butterballs for the multiplex set. In a short attention span culture, such atrocities are easily forgotten; or perhaps it’s just that such execrable motion pictures weren’t destined to remain in anyone’s memory for very long.

Then, suddenly, van Sant decided to go back to his “roots” as an “independent filmmaker.” The problem is, by this point, van Sant had already run out of things to say. What to do? Well, who needs a script anyway when you’re such a genius!

Rather than the folksy, personal vision of home and loss he made his name with in Drugstore and Idaho, van Sant’s next trick was to pass himself off as a high stylist, a master auteur in the European tradition. This meant filming Matt Damon and Casey Affleck walking around in the desert talking about TV game shows. Compelling as Gerry sounds, I opted out of watching that one. I wasn’t so lucky when it came to his next two films, Elephant and Last Days. Both represented van Sant’s efforts at tackling “big subjects” - school shootings in the case of the former, the death of Kurt Cobain in the latter. As with Paranoid Park, the formula seems to be: no script; long, seemingly endless shots of banal occurrences; adolescent male beauty; not-so-subtle inferences of homosexuality clunkily thrown in to give the overall film a “signature” touch. What we have is an Americanized version of Tarkovsky and Tarr with the voyeuristic Sokurovian pederasty amplified. Okay, so it sounds a lot more interesting in writing than it actually is on screen.

My guess is that what van Sant is banking on is that his audience will mistake his lack of a style for a style. Judging by the elation that Paranoid Park has thus far been greeted with in Europe, it seems that it’s working. This is sad, because it infers that people have either forgotten or are unaware of what van Sant was once capable of.

I wouldn’t call van Sant an intellectual filmmaker. Rather, he is guilty of intellectualism. It’s one thing for an artist to intensely study the highest achievements in his chosen medium; it’s quite another for him to attempt to replicate them instead of finding his own style. Traces of van Sant’s earlier style are hinted at in Paranoid Park, namely the beautifully shot skateboarding segments, slowed-down and layered with a haunting sonic collage that evokes a sense of lost memory. Similar techniques were employed in My Own Private Idaho and Drugstore Cowboy. The difference is, in those films, they actually referred to something in the characters’ lives, and thus added some psychological depth to the narrative. As with van Sant’s previous two films, it is impossible to really care much about the protagonist of Paranoid Park, because he has no real psychological depth. Then again, you get the feeling that van Sant is so caught up in the boy’s beauty that he doesn’t much care. The kid is indeed cute, but that doesn’t make Paranoid Park a good film; it is merely a watchable one.