In defence of South­land Tales – Richard Kelly’s futur­is­tic folly

It’s Novem­ber 2016, and Richard Kel­ly is sat in a Los Ange­les restau­rant din­ing with a news­pa­per jour­nal­ist. They talk a lit­tle about the cult con­sen­sus sur­round­ing the reis­sue of his 2001 debut, Don­nie Darko, but the main top­ic on the table is Kelly’s reemer­gence fol­low­ing a long peri­od of inac­tiv­i­ty. Both writer and sub­ject are eager to dis­cuss the director’s ill-fat­ed sec­ond fea­ture, South­land Tales, which cel­e­brates its tenth anniver­sary this year.

Endeav­our­ing to reap­praise the film, the jour­nal­ist would lat­er dub it ​“a pre-game show for the next decade of glob­al mis­ery” when he final­ly put pen to paper. Revis­it­ing South­land Tales in 2017, how­ev­er, it’s not only the spec­u­la­tive pow­ers of the film that sing. What also res­onates is the qui­et con­flict between com­mer­cial and con­tex­tu­al prov­i­dence when we’re try­ing to read pop­u­lar cin­e­ma, to hold it up against the world.

Kelly’s play­book, defined as it is by hypo­thet­i­cal dis­or­der, frames an asso­cia­tive reser­voir of con­tem­po­rary sym­bol­isms in which crit­ics will swim. Search­ing for a sense of the inher­ent val­ue of South­land Tales, some look for its hid­den depths; oth­ers, the flat veneer of its sur­face. But the absence of con­sen­sus around the film feels entire­ly appropriate.

Tak­ing the news­feed as a styl­is­tic turn, South­land Tales weaves togeth­er var­i­ous sub­plots, dead-ends, and vignettes in the form of a rolling news­cast. Set against the back­drop of nuclear war in Amer­i­ca – the bomb hav­ing land­ed in Abi­lene, Texas – we find a coun­try in melt­down. State bor­ders are closed, and exten­sions of the Patri­ot Act have allowed intel­li­gence ser­vices to func­tion unmon­i­tored. On the west coast, a neo-Marx­ist rev­o­lu­tion is falling into chaot­ic fail­ure around Venice Beach, and an actor named Box­er San­taros (Dwayne John­son) – hav­ing mar­ried the débu­tante of some Repub­li­can house of cards – has lost his mem­o­ry. Now hid­ing out in Los Ange­les, he runs with Krys­ta Now (Sarah Michelle Gel­lar), an ambi­tious and entre­pre­neur­ial ex-porn star.

Togeth­er, Gel­lar and John­son are pen­ning a screen­play, a cop movie enti­tled ​‘The Pow­er’. But amid its atten­tion to the trap­pings of genre, the script holds some answers to a spir­i­tu­al fore­bod­ing prompt­ed by an impend­ing ener­gy cri­sis stayed, only, by the numi­nous capa­bil­i­ties of a sci­en­tist (Wal­lace Shawn). A fig­ure shroud­ed in a fog of incense, mys­tic vagaries and influ­ence owing to the finan­cial back­ing of a mys­te­ri­ous Ger­man multinational.

Seann William Scott stars as two police offi­cers who are not allowed to meet, should they rup­ture a tem­po­ral con­tin­u­um, and the film is ambi­ent­ly scored by hotel lob­by-era Moby. Justin Tim­ber­lake, play­ing a mis­an­throp­ic Iraq War vet­er­an, estab­lish­es the dynam­ics of the film’s dénoue­ment. Rather than place or time, Tim­ber­lake instead reads us a bas­tardi­s­a­tion of the Book of Rev­e­la­tion fused, through­out, with mis­quotes from high-mod­ernist poet­ry. Repeat­ed­ly, he tells us that ​“this is the way the world ends.”

South­land Tales is a time cap­sule flirt­ing with end-of-his­to­ry ide­o­logues. It is a joke on the very idea of the run­ning order of recent his­to­ry. Self-iden­ti­fy­ing as a para­ble play­ing on a cul­tur­al implo­sion of oper­at­ic pro­por­tions, it runs as a look-book of ear­ly 21^st cen­tu­ry anx­i­eties. It’s a spec­u­la­tive three-act riff on the cat­a­stroph­ic fail­ings of the last 10 years, a fever dream in two hours and twen­ty-five min­utes. Kelly’s film is a car­rion call for a new cul­ture of pri­vate con­sump­tion. Its char­ac­ters can do lit­tle but watch one anoth­er, and the film milks its igno­ble exam­i­na­tion of mass con­sumerism through depic­tion of a dystopi­an real­i­ty defined by trag­ic inevitabil­i­ty and heavy self-con­scious­ness. ​“I feel like some­times things just need time to mar­i­nate,” Kel­ly has said; he always want­ed us to read the film forwards.

This is a murky film, no ques­tion, but Kel­ly has sug­gest­ed that key to under­stand­ing its mean­ing is the intel­lec­tu­al scope of its cen­tre­piece scene: a three-minute dance rou­tine. Around the halfway mark, a doped-out Tim­ber­lake slips into an opi­ate induced coma. In a fan­ta­sy sequence – blood down his shirt, Bud­weis­er in hand – he dances through a thor­ough­ly 20^th cen­tu­ry panora­ma, a pin­ball arcade, flanked by a cho­rus of dancers all legs and vinyl. He looks straight down the cam­era, lip-sync­ing his way through The Killer’s ​‘All These Things That I’ve Done’, whose anthemic dri­ve is matched only by the emp­ty opac­i­ty of its lyrics. ​“All these things that I’ve done” – the song is about mean­ing read back­wards, the own­er­ship of expe­ri­ence, an inver­sion of the spec­u­la­tion show­cased through­out South­land Tales. The engage­ment of its terms here feels like a play on use-val­ue; it’s a psalm for our pri­vate habits as viewers.

If watch­ing rather than know­ing is our active-verb in South­land Tales, then the song proves vital. Mean­ing­less in its aim for uni­ver­sal­ism, a pop song only res­onates in the right room, when played in the right con­text, and recall­ing it – per­son­al­is­ing its terms – becomes a state­ment of val­ue. That’s a per­fect pic­ture of the vital­i­ty of South­land Tales – a vig­or­ous piece of pulp for the 21^st cen­tu­ry, it courts that very idea. It wants to be used; the film wants to mount a con­sid­er­a­tion of the cumu­la­tive char­ac­ter of mean­ing, how pop­u­lar cin­e­ma is always con­tin­gent on pop­u­lar feeling.

At first, what we have seems like a mess of ideas. But give it time, let those ideas mar­i­nate, and we’re left with some­thing more. Kelly’s joke, still intact 10 years lat­er, is that there will always be a soli­tary ​‘I’ as far as con­sump­tion is con­cerned. In 2007, South­land Tales was sim­ply out of step, wait­ing for new plat­forms for per­son­al enter­tain­ment, for the semi­otic car­ry-on insti­gat­ed by stream­ing cul­tures. It’s a film honed for the minute when cin­e­ma would feel more like a pri­vate habit than a pub­lic spectacle.