"Blockbusters have become the laugh track to our national experiment. The very vacuousness of these films is reassuring, for they ratify for the viewer the presence of a repressive mechanism and offer momentary reprieve from anxiety with this thought: 'Enough money spent can cure anything. You are a member of a country, a part of a system capable of wasting two hundred million dollars on an hour and a half of garbage. You must be somebody.' " – David Mamet
"And it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against his brother Abel and slew him." - Genesis, 4:8
"Shotgun Stories" was the debut of director Jeff Nichols. The film merges Greek Tragedy (specifically King Lear) with the Southern Gothic genre, but is most interesting for the way it knowingly opposes or subverts traditional Hollywood action-movie mechanics.
The plot? A feud erupts between Son, Boy and Kid (those are their names in the film - the plot functions on a purely stripped down, archetypal level) and their four half-brothers. Why they're fighting is not important. Nichols is more interested in chartering both the irrational escalation of violence between the two groups of men, and his audience's predisposition to expecting or desiring violence as a form of conflict resolution.
Like a tale torn from the pages of the Old Testament, the film makes references to serpents, blind men, Cain and Abel, divided bloodlines, warring sons, kins, familial bonds and masculine heartache. There's therefore an almost Biblical portentousness to the film. It stars Michael Shannon as Son, the tragic, moral centre of the picture. Shannon's body, riddled with shotgun wounds, suggests learnt rationality and an almost preternatural wisdom borne of past pain. But though he possesses an intelligence and foresight which allows him to see where the film's cycle of violence will end, he is ultimately unable to escape the film's bloody vortex.
"An eye for an eye leaves us all blind" and "violence begets violence" are common sentiments found in "revenge movies" (and westerns, which the film resembles), but Nichols goes several steps further. He shows the film's violence to be self-perpetuating, short circuits his audience's expectations by constantly cutting away from cathartic violence, forces his audience to question its own programmed behaviour and constructs his tale such that both audience and cast must "outgrow" their basest instincts if they are to "mature". Bizarrely, while Nichols constantly undermines audience expectations, "Shotgun" feels more violent than your typical action movie.
Interesting scenes abound: one brother comments that their ghost town feels like it belongs to them whilst another points out that if he owned it, he would "sell this worthless place". The brother's are at once kings and rats, royalty and the forgotten. But the emotional and psychological heft that Nichols injects into these supposedly "smaller moments" is remarkable. From grabbing cards to dismantling a tent, the film's narrative gradually tightens. Rather than build toward violence, though, Nichols structures the film as a series of increasingly contemplative scenes. What you respond to, what you're shocked by, is the sheer weight of each violent contemplation.
As in classic Greek tragedy, a Jester or Fool character exists to relate information to the principals. Here the film's unwitting provocateur is a one eyed guy called Shampoo, through whom the film's events spiral out of control, catastrophe literally organically sprouting from a kind of blindness or myopia.
Films typically highlight acts of violence whilst underplaying the consequences of violence. Nichols inverts this. Just as it appears as though a character is about to suffer a traumatic injury, Nichols deprives the viewer of the actual image, the certain act. In one climactic moment, just as the viewer has been offered enough visual information to ascertain precisely what is about to occur, Nichols sagely cuts to black. Of course revenge and action tales (even films which purport to be "anti violence", "Unforgiven" for example, a late western) secretly relish violence. Such violence is always treated as an antidote, purgative, underlined and served up as a form of catharsis. But Nichols seems repulsed by the concept of violence being cinematically fetishized, preferring instead to linger on the toll with a sad heart.
Truffaut once said that no film which featured war could ever be considered truly antiwar. Cinema has a way of making everything about life, particularly violence, exhilaratingly delirious (even sexual; violence and sex occupy the same space). But time and time again, Nichols denies his audience the catharsis that his on screen characters actively seek. In other words, what the audience is denied and called to meditate upon is precisely which the characters are unable to deny and objectively meditate upon. What we are denied is the very cause of the film's violence.
Beyond this, the film is almost sublime in the way it conveys an air of total waste and senselessness. Conversely, it seems as though the prospect of violence is all that can lift these perpetually morose and spiritually exhausted characters out of their squalor and/or apathy. Watch too how Nichol's writes his female characters. They exist firmly outside of the boy's story - in another genre and another world itself - unable to fathom the roiling testosterone. And of course you can extrapolate much more. One can look, for example, at one of the son's actions, his desire to fight, as an attempt to escape the futility of his abysmal life by choosing a pathway to glorified suicide. Likewise, the film's inter-familial war is akin to certain recent global conflicts, unrepairable damage always escalating from a certain point which, when viewed in hindsight, is usually very petty.
Incidentally, the film was produced by David Gordon Green, a friend of Nichols. Green is heavily inspired by Terrance Malick, who would produce one of Green's own films. All three directors started off in the Southern Gothic genre.
9/10 - Worth two viewings.
"And it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against his brother Abel and slew him." - Genesis, 4:8
"Shotgun Stories" was the debut of director Jeff Nichols. The film merges Greek Tragedy (specifically King Lear) with the Southern Gothic genre, but is most interesting for the way it knowingly opposes or subverts traditional Hollywood action-movie mechanics.
The plot? A feud erupts between Son, Boy and Kid (those are their names in the film - the plot functions on a purely stripped down, archetypal level) and their four half-brothers. Why they're fighting is not important. Nichols is more interested in chartering both the irrational escalation of violence between the two groups of men, and his audience's predisposition to expecting or desiring violence as a form of conflict resolution.
Like a tale torn from the pages of the Old Testament, the film makes references to serpents, blind men, Cain and Abel, divided bloodlines, warring sons, kins, familial bonds and masculine heartache. There's therefore an almost Biblical portentousness to the film. It stars Michael Shannon as Son, the tragic, moral centre of the picture. Shannon's body, riddled with shotgun wounds, suggests learnt rationality and an almost preternatural wisdom borne of past pain. But though he possesses an intelligence and foresight which allows him to see where the film's cycle of violence will end, he is ultimately unable to escape the film's bloody vortex.
"An eye for an eye leaves us all blind" and "violence begets violence" are common sentiments found in "revenge movies" (and westerns, which the film resembles), but Nichols goes several steps further. He shows the film's violence to be self-perpetuating, short circuits his audience's expectations by constantly cutting away from cathartic violence, forces his audience to question its own programmed behaviour and constructs his tale such that both audience and cast must "outgrow" their basest instincts if they are to "mature". Bizarrely, while Nichols constantly undermines audience expectations, "Shotgun" feels more violent than your typical action movie.
Interesting scenes abound: one brother comments that their ghost town feels like it belongs to them whilst another points out that if he owned it, he would "sell this worthless place". The brother's are at once kings and rats, royalty and the forgotten. But the emotional and psychological heft that Nichols injects into these supposedly "smaller moments" is remarkable. From grabbing cards to dismantling a tent, the film's narrative gradually tightens. Rather than build toward violence, though, Nichols structures the film as a series of increasingly contemplative scenes. What you respond to, what you're shocked by, is the sheer weight of each violent contemplation.
As in classic Greek tragedy, a Jester or Fool character exists to relate information to the principals. Here the film's unwitting provocateur is a one eyed guy called Shampoo, through whom the film's events spiral out of control, catastrophe literally organically sprouting from a kind of blindness or myopia.
Films typically highlight acts of violence whilst underplaying the consequences of violence. Nichols inverts this. Just as it appears as though a character is about to suffer a traumatic injury, Nichols deprives the viewer of the actual image, the certain act. In one climactic moment, just as the viewer has been offered enough visual information to ascertain precisely what is about to occur, Nichols sagely cuts to black. Of course revenge and action tales (even films which purport to be "anti violence", "Unforgiven" for example, a late western) secretly relish violence. Such violence is always treated as an antidote, purgative, underlined and served up as a form of catharsis. But Nichols seems repulsed by the concept of violence being cinematically fetishized, preferring instead to linger on the toll with a sad heart.
Truffaut once said that no film which featured war could ever be considered truly antiwar. Cinema has a way of making everything about life, particularly violence, exhilaratingly delirious (even sexual; violence and sex occupy the same space). But time and time again, Nichols denies his audience the catharsis that his on screen characters actively seek. In other words, what the audience is denied and called to meditate upon is precisely which the characters are unable to deny and objectively meditate upon. What we are denied is the very cause of the film's violence.
Beyond this, the film is almost sublime in the way it conveys an air of total waste and senselessness. Conversely, it seems as though the prospect of violence is all that can lift these perpetually morose and spiritually exhausted characters out of their squalor and/or apathy. Watch too how Nichol's writes his female characters. They exist firmly outside of the boy's story - in another genre and another world itself - unable to fathom the roiling testosterone. And of course you can extrapolate much more. One can look, for example, at one of the son's actions, his desire to fight, as an attempt to escape the futility of his abysmal life by choosing a pathway to glorified suicide. Likewise, the film's inter-familial war is akin to certain recent global conflicts, unrepairable damage always escalating from a certain point which, when viewed in hindsight, is usually very petty.
Incidentally, the film was produced by David Gordon Green, a friend of Nichols. Green is heavily inspired by Terrance Malick, who would produce one of Green's own films. All three directors started off in the Southern Gothic genre.
9/10 - Worth two viewings.