". . . an act of violence in an American film has, through repetition and desensitization, lost the ability to refer to anything but itself." David Foster Wallace on David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino from A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
Between its premiere at Cannes and its US release last week into theaters (it opens in the UK on Friday), Nicolas Winding Refn's latest film
Only God Forgives has been met with everything from disappointment to disgust by the viewing public. Being a fan of his previous films, this was sad to hear. I went into my viewing with as open a mind as I could muster but I was still fearing the worst. It makes sense that Winding Refn would eventually make a colossal flop: he toes the line between ecstasy and brutality like few directors ever have. It's easy to see how a few wrong turns in
Bronson or
Valhalla Rising could have resulted in disastrous final products, and
Only God Forgives is supposedly where he finally went off the rails. All that said, I enjoyed this film as much as any of his since
Bronson. That's not say it isn't a grisly, difficult film that will test the boundaries of how much an audience can really enjoy highly stylized cinematic violence without much else (and make no mistake about it, this is an exercise in style more than anything else). Winding Refn is, above all, a technician. His films don't waste any time or space, and shots and dialogue aggressively push his films forward, usually toward an ecstatic closing sequence. The ostensible problem with his latest film is that it's intellectually and morally bankrupt. Ryan Gosling, billed as the star of the film, doesn't say a word until about twenty minutes in, and I'm sure that if you were to record all of his lines it wouldn't run more than about five minutes (the movie itself is unusually short, coming in at seventy-nine minutes). The lack of dialogue strips away much of the buffer against the disturbing violence and muddled (at best) moral codes that characterize Winding Refn's previous films. Here we have somewhere between Charles Bronson without his charisma and
Drive without Bryan Cranston, Albert Brooks, or the rest of the ensemble (and plot). It certainly makes for a jarring and at times frustrating viewing experience. The frustrations people have had with violence in this film brings us to David Foster Wallace's quote about violence in cinema. His diagnosis of the way violence had come to function in American cinema was especially prescient considering he was writing before the
Saw phenomenon and the genre it more or less started had taken root. Consider the
Die Hard franchise: the first film is as high stakes and suspenseful as the subsequent installments, but violence plays a small part in the film. By the time
A Good Day to Die Hard rolled around, the franchise had devolved into urban destruction porn, complete with tanks and mid-air collisions between helicopters and cars. In other words, the problem Foster Wallace identified in 1997 has become worse over the past sixteen years. To call carnage in contemporary American cinema spectacle wouldn't do it justice because how unique are any of the destruction sequences in contemporary big budget blockbusters? For God's sake there are
three Transformers films. Winding Refn had found a way out of this exhausting trend with his previous films: the violence was smaller scale, more intense, more physical, and meshed with his films seamlessly.
He abandons this paradigm in this film. Importantly, Foster Wallace points out (concerning Lynch) that
Wild at Heart is, in most ways, a more gruesome, violent film than
Blue Velvet, but
Blue Velvet lives on as Lynch's most disturbing film. The key difference between the two, in his mind, is that
Velvet spent more time developing characters, and from the viewer's/Jeffrey Beaumont's vantage point, the violence is intensified because we have come by some measure to care and fear for Beaumont. The problems people seem to have with this film are contorted, at least according to this line of reasoning: there is no character development, we don't have any reason to care about any of the main figures in the film, yet the violence is
too intense and suffocating, and the violence in his previous films, while probably just as fierce, is somehow more acceptable because we care
more about the characters who are visiting violence upon people. This could be because, unlike
Blue Velvet, none of Winding Refn's films feature a relatively innocent bystander thrust into danger. He structures his films from Frank Booth's perspective: Charles Bronson and Gosling's Driver are criminals (Bronson unremittingly so, the Driver eventually more sympathetically so, but a criminal nonetheless).
Bronson and
Drive submerge the audience so far into these characters' worlds that if the characters don't become sympathetic, they're so compelling that we forget we are viewing a criminal world from the outside. This is really the genius of Winding Refn's filmmaking and is a testament to the synthesis he draws out of the visual and auditory aspects of his films.
Only God Forgives keeps the audience at arm's length, forcing us to view the illicit underworlds he has always been able to expertly craft as ourselves, not as one of his characters. Essentially, Winding Refn has pulled the perspectival rug out from under the audience: he has finally made a film that doesn't allow entry into its world and vehemently refuses to fulfill the hope some held throughout his previous films: that there would be a redemptive moment (
Drive), or an ecstatic moment so powerful that the character in question manages to escape our judgement (
Bronson). Or, to put all of that succinctly, Winding Refn always found a way to incorporate violence into his films that escaped what Foster Wallace feared about American films, until now.
In
Bronson in particular, fight scenes serve as an auxiliary, physical dialogue that allow us deeper into Bronson's mind. With
Only God Forgives, Winding Refn hasn't made a violent film or a film about violence, but a film about cinematic violence and how we, as an audience, experience films about seedy underworlds when we are given access to them and when we are forced to remain ourselves. That, given the state of mainstream cinema, is a valuable--if frustrating--thing. The senseless violence in this film overtly refers only to itself, a parody of the way violence has developed in mainstream cinema so expertly done that it actually managed to disgust people more than most action films. In other words, the violence presented here is so concerned with itself that it actually manages to escape self-reference as Refn's other films did, but in a different way. It escapes itself not to further a story or serve as physical dialogue, but rather to open up cinematic violence for examination. It's hard not to watch this film within the context of his other films and the slate of summer blockbusters it was sandwiched between, and from that angle, this is more a meditation on what we love about action films than anything else. On the one hand, we have expertly crafted thrillers that exist a few intellectual rungs above most of the genre, and on the other we have unrepentant, empty-headed destruction porn action films.
Only God Forgives is an uncomfortable blend of the two, with all the craft we have come to expect from Winding Refn and all of the vacuousness we have come to expect from big budget thrillers (that last bit may be a bit unfair considering the film is more of a fill-in-the-blanks operation than it is vacuous, but even then the structure we're given is pretty uninspiring, so the point remains).
That's not to say this film doesn't have flaws, because it does. It comes dangerously close to seeming like it was written by a sophomore in college who just finished his first Freud seminar and is packing up to leave for a semester abroad in Bangkok. Luckily, Kristin Scott Thomas' turn as Gosling's drug-queen, foulmouthed mother is jarring enough to justify the film's opaque pseudo-Freudianism (though, prepare yourselves for some gross words to come out of Kristin Scott Thomas' mouth). We're used to seeing long, silent takes in muted, emotional, intimate films, not films about vengeance and Old Testament style law enforcement, and, interesting though it may be, I'm not sure even Winding Refn could make it work here. Imagine Antonioni going on a month long bender in Bangkok with Oedipus and befriending a mute Muay Thai expert, then deciding to make a movie about it. It's simultaneously exciting and disappointing to see Winding Refn break with the general formula that has made his movies so enjoyable. Some directors can make the same formula work in different settings (looking at you, Wes Anderson), but if there's one thing we can know about Winding Refn after this film it's that he's not a static director, and I fully expect his next film to be even more insane and even more tightly crafted than this one. Maybe most importantly, though, we know it'll be different.