Needless
to say, whenever I watch a Gus Van Sant movie, I am reminded of what attracted
me to the subtle idiosyncrasies of his storytelling in the first place: Drugstore Cowboy (1989). William S.
Burroughs’s unlikely cameo endures hindrances threatening to obscure the
crystal-clear message delivered by the character he plays. Tom (William S.
Burroughs) is talking to Bob (Matt Dillon) when the latter joins a twenty-one
day methadone program, having realized that the drugstore rampage came to a
close and his pirate ship turned into wreckage. Tom is a priest. He is also a
former junky, now on a methadone recovery program. His loquency is imbued with divine
toxicity climaxing in a prophecy of a kind. He claims that
drug hysteria will be used by right wingers as a means of establishing an
omnipresent mechanism of oppressive social control. It can be inferred that
such a policy would aim to transfigure the world into a place where unfreedom
reigns. Bob’s endlessly charming response is a complementary remark about Tom’s
actual vocation being a philosopher. Bob might be right and Tom might not be a
prophet in the narrowest sense of the word. As much as he was predicting the
future of medicalizing entrepreneurship, so was he an attentive observer of contemporaneous
cultural realities and able to articulate his reflections with stunning clarity
and ease. Contrary to the perplexities of the social vocabulary.
The
viewer, however, is slightly confused--verging on disbelief--within the
encounter with Gus Van Sant’s Promised
Land (2012). The lingering overtone of the viewing experience is the voice
of Mark Renton, a character of Irvine Welsh’s novel Trainspotting (1993), who finds himself utterly puzzled when he is
supposed to present a simple fact, i.e., not to lie. The reason for this
troublesome feeling is that, being a junky, he is so used to telling lies, that
laying a simple, undecorated claim feels
eerily alien—false. His thoughts color the viewer’s meditations upon the essentially
medievalist political plot disguised behind the modern day cultural context in
Van Sant’s movie. McKenzie Wark: “In its thirst for labor
that would make land actually productive, and yield a surplus, no indignity is
too great, no corner of the world exempt from the claims of property and the
uprooting of its custodians” (A Hacker Manifesto [102]).
[1]
The
story in Promised Land centers around
Steve Butler (Matt Damon) who works for the company Global whose business
focuses on extracting natural gas from the earth deploying the fracking
technique: drilling and injecting fluid in order to fracture shale rocks and
release gas. Butler
and his partner Sue Thomason (Frances McDormand) come to an impoverished rural
town in Pennsylvania with an intent to restore its economy by buying from land
owners property and carrying out their gas business. However, for this they
need the natives’ permission and collaboration. The local science
schoolteacher, Frank Yates, (Hal Holbrook)
is the main opponent of the anti-environmentalist industry whose modest
embodiment, Global, is firmly determined to conquer the land of the suburban
empire. The green activist, Dustin Noble, (John Krasinski) is strongly
supporting this subversive endeavor. And
yet, after a series of obstructions and conflicts, it turns out that Noble, in
fact, works for Global. This is not spectacularly surprising. One cannot but watch
a movie such as that of Van Sant’s partly through the lens of David
Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999): environmentalists are the new
realists, the new entrepreneurs.
What
is, however, the moment of utter
astonishment is Butler’s disclosing the fact about Noble in front of the townsmen.
Not only is Butler’s approach unbelievingly to the point, but it more than
obviously jeopardizes his (Butler’s, i.e.!) position with Global. For that
reason, a contemporary viewer is prone to penetrate the scene with a fierce
look infused with a sense of the Antenna/PilgrImage--eXistenZ/transCendenZ oscillations. Moreover, like Renton, who
cannot believe himself when he doesn’t lie, the viewer suspects that Butler might,
perhaps, be working for a company that is simply trying to squeeze out the
competition. That’s the mind of a denizen suspicious beyond belief. And yet,
the conspiracy attack lasts only for a split second, after which one is
disarmed by Butler’s downright honesty and the simplicity
of the fact standing in sharp contrast to the overcritical reading.
The crux of the insight is the shift from reading
for the plot solely onto the scrutiny of the character. More precisely, recasting
on the inspection of the mutually conditioning relationship between the plot
and characterization/acting creates an aspect of viewing/reading that
illuminates an intricate nexus between complexity and simplicity. The ways in
which the plot is informed and supported by characterization / acting, and vice
versa, casts light on the relationship between the public and private.
Reshifting the reading onto the level of the character enables demythologizing
a misconception about social roles and provides a hint for recuperating the
notion of agency.
Butler is a salesman who from the very beginning
exudes an aura that foreshadows his being ill-matched for the inhumane,
unscrupulous corporate system. Dustin, on the other hand, never wins the
viewer’s trust—he can by no means be dedicated to grassroots ideals. His lousy
scheme “against” Global is shameful, but does not seriously endanger his
career. He does not lose his job. Unlike Butler, who does: he no longer works
for Global. But he doesn’t care. Because there are things more important than mere
survival in the corporate arena.
It is small wonder that the moments of excessive
suspicion within the viewing/reading experience happen. One needs not be an
Einstein to know what Dennis Cooper knows: “A blue light suffused the sky. The
grass was painted green. The world is faked, head to toe” (Wrong 159).
In an age when a cultural amalgamation is a blurred
version of the image of the human face, one still seeks the ways to sharpen
that picture. To soothe the rough edges of the ruthless post-industrial world
wandering around myriad hinges to globality, one welcomes every opportunity to
be proven wrong when those poignant mechanisms of intense distrust are set in
motion. One is relieved by the simplicity, evocative of the flow of Sherman
Alexie’s prose, revealing the fact that the world can be a friendly place,
which it sometimes is. Gus Van Sant’s subtle idiolect is certainly an immense
inspiration for sustaining such a conviction and to time and again rediscover
the poetics of the remix.
[1]Wark portrays the historical
development and perpetuation of proprietary relations (“legal fictions”[101])
and the emergences of new classes with a new form of property. He depicts a
“progression” from pastoralists who dispossess farmers from land, via capitalists who hack land and
transform it into a new, abstract, form of property--capital that turns farmers
into the working class, to vectoralists who hack capital into its abstract
form—intellectual property--subsequently hacked from them by the hacker class,
should they become one.
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