Posted in: Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh, Movies | Tagged: adi tantimedh, film, the canyons

Exploring The Hellish Depths Of The Canyons – And Liking It: Adi Tantimedh's Look! It Moves!

Published Mon, 05 Aug 2013 10:30:52 -0500

Last updated Mon, 05 Aug 2013 17:10:24 -0500

Adi Tantimedh writes;

I was originally thinking about writing about how the news of the next Doctor Who has become a worldwide pop culture event, but instead got sidetracked when I watched The Canyons.

Here's the surprise: I think it's a good movie. Well worth seeing…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Y7ct7mdmOM[/youtube]

We've talked about The Canyons before: it was the first high-profile Kickstarter movie. It boasted an original screenplay by Bret Easton Ellis, author of Less Than Zero and American Psycho, and had as director Paul Schrader, legendary writer of Taxi Driver, American Gigolo (which he also directed), Blue Collar and Hardcore. They asked for a fairly low budget for a movie while putting up some of their own to cover the rest. Then it was announced that they cast Lindsay Lohan and porn actor James Deen to play the leads, which set tongues wagging and cries of doom and disaster. That New York Times article that reported the chaotic set seemed to prime the media to assume the movie would be a train-wreck, and though the production sounded stressful and unpleasant, personally I thought it sounded a lot less chaotic than a lot of other film sets, including a few I've been on myself. I didn't put money in the Kickstarter, but I followed the progress of the movie out of morbid fascination.

I take back all the snark I cracked about the movie. It's a proper film with things to say. It's about Christian (Deen), a trust fund guy who, at the behest of his girlfriend Tara (Lohan) has agreed to cast Ryan (Nolan Gerard Funk), a desperate young actor, in a low-budget horror film he's financing. Ryan is the current boyfriend of his assistant Gina (Amanda Brooks), but neither she nor Christian are aware that he's also Tara's ex. Ryan is still in love with Tara, and when the two of them start behaving suspiciously, Christian's need for control causes him to plot and plan against them and things spiral out of control.

The Canyons is a story about damaged people who use each other for sex and power and control, another movie about the Hollywood fringes, a "Los Angeles as a state of mind" movie and here that state of mind is an existential hell. It deals with the spiritual emptiness and desperation of people struggling in Hollywood to leave their mark and make something of their lives. It's about Control and the use of Sex or Power or Money to gain control over people. It's about a dying relationship being kept barely alive through kinky sex with strangers and voyeurism. Typical of many Hollywood stories, it's about how people's lives are toyed with, exploited, chewed up and spat out for sport. J.G. Ballard would probably have loved it.

The Canyons is like a dramatisation of several of the most nightmarish calls you might hear on the agony radio show Loveline, its stories of controlling boyfriends, abusive lovers who lie and stalk, but with added literary and spiritual subtexts. If you're familiar with the books of Brett Easton Ellis and Paul Schrader's previous movies, you'll know that they're both preoccupied with the spiritual emptiness of people in a corrupt, desolate landscape, in this case Los Angeles and the fringes of the movie industry. The characters are all lost souls, but one of them is more monstrous than the others.

There are other subtexts at play: there's a lament for the Death of Cinema and its ability to convey emotional experiences in a collective venue as the internet takes over. The characters are constantly looking at their smartphones when they're supposed to be talking to someone face-to-face, signaling their alienation and how cut off they are from humanity. There's a lament that Hollywood no longer has faith in its own movies to present stories that matter anymore. The reported ambivalence, even disgust Lohan felt about acting with a porn actor feeds well into the sense of disintegration in Christian and Tara's relationship. The desperation and sadness in Lohan's performance feels so raw it might come from her real fear of the potential, perhaps impending, tragedy of her life and career.

Much has been said of Deen's lack of training as an actor, but he knows how to hold the camera with his stillness and his movement. He delivers his lines to sound the way a real person speaks instead of a trained actor who might introduce layers of nuance and subtext, even artifice, and his untrained naturalism works very well for this movie. His character is a perfect variation of the types found in Ellis' novels. He plays a cold-eyed, self-amused sociopath perhaps too well. Christian might be a West Coast cousin of American Psycho's Patrick Bateman. If you're a fan of Ellis' novels (which I'm not), you will feel at home with The Canyons and Deen's character. I suppose it shouldn't really be a surprise that Ellis and Schrader's worldviews and styles would mesh so seamlessly together to revitalise the latter as a director. I'm now convinced that Ellis would have written a brilliant screenplay adaptation of the loathesome Fifty Shades of Grey if only they had let him and Deen would be perfect for the lead.

The Canyons is dominated by Lohan and Deen's faces: hers increasingly ravaged, desolate and desperate, his cold, smooth and impenetrable.

The Canyons looks like a proper movie. Its edgy, restless camerawork around real locations in Los Angeles keeps the frame busy and shows a world alive with dread and existential horror. I admit it shows many places I've been to, and manages to capture an authentic sense of the Now that very few movies or TV shows do.

It feels to me that the negative reviews the movie has gotten are from critics who were bringing their own prejudices and bias and agendas to it rather than viewing it in its own contexts. They had knives out for Lindsay Lohan and the notion of a male porn star as the lead in a mainstream indie film. This suggests a puritanism and prurience and hypocrisy that they won't ever admit to. Gawker has been gleeful in slamming the film without any indication of actually seeing it, instead chortling at Lohan's nude scenes while happily posting screenshots on their site to get more hits. The mainstream media wasn't going to take this movie on its own terms. They didn't give a shit that this movie is written and directed by people who actually had something to say rather than sell toys and comic book merchandise. The media only wanted to sneer. They wanted to insult Lindsay Lohan in the way that celebrities are built up, then degraded and torn down in that endless cycle like a kind of ritualistic sacrifice. This is our Culture of Trolls and Haters. It was around long before the internet, the latter only granting punters the opportunity to join in the public mudslinging and normalising it. It's as if they want to punish Lohan and Schrader for daring to make a movie that cost less than a few million dollars.

In a way, the reaction of the media has become part of The Canyons' subtext: that Hollywood and the media have lost faith in the movies' ability to deliver stories and emotions that matter and everything is just snark and glibness and insincerity and lies now. Ellis and Schrader are actually telling a story of a tragedy with moral sadness at its core. Ordinary people have not lost faith in movies and stories. That's why we keep watching, even the bad ones. The Canyons, far from a cynical, calculating media event, is an attempt to identify the disease and offer a vaccine.

At its core, The Canyons is about a girl who tried to do her former boyfriend a good turn, and that one act of kindness leads to tragedy. It's a tragedy about lost, desperate people who don't know how to love, and men who mistake control for love. It's a tragedy set in a land of lies where Love becomes a kind of Hell, and one woman becomes its prisoner. It's not a great movie, but it has genuine depth and substance.

Dreaming of lost Hollywoodat lookitmoves@gmail.com

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