It used to be that if you wanted your movie to be perceived as so cool and mind-blowing that it had a shot at outsider-midnight movie status, you had to somehow shock the bejesus out of people. But now that, as John Waters says, what was once shocking has been fully co-opted by Hollywood, so that everything from Hostel to South Park is mainstream entertainment, the best way to go about it seems to be to confuse people. A few years ago, Salon, in its function as a daily manual for the intelligent cool-hunter, was so impressed by the head-scratching qualities exhibited by David Lynch's Mulholland Drive and Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko that it provided handy skeleton keys to help guide the baffled viewer through both movies. Now, writer Thomas Rogers has whipped up an explanatory gloss on Kelly's new film, Southland Tales. (It should perhaps be noted that, in keeping with the insular nature of the pursuit of the coolest movie in the world, Southland Tales explicitly references Mulholland Drive, along with Kiss Me Deadly, Philip K. Dick, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and God knows what else.)
As a large-scale directorial achievement, Southland Tales is impressive, and I can honestly say that, watching it, I was never bored. I also felt like I had less of a grasp on what it was supposed to mean when the closing credits rolled than I did when I walked into the theater. What's remarkable about Rogers's article is that now that I've read it, I feel more confused than ever. Besides the fact that some key scenes are filmed and edited in a way that makes them really difficult to follow, there's a phenomenal amount of complex back story to the characters, their world, and the events they're caught up in that the audience simply isn't made privy to in the course of watching the picture. Kelly, who extensively re-edited the picture after its premiere at Cannes, losing an entire subplot involving Janeane Garofalo and adding voice-over narration intended to meet the viewer halfway, has also written three so-called "graphic novels" (in my apartment, we read "comic books" and are proud of it) that have been collected as Southland Tales: The Prequel Saga; it seems that anyone who hopes to understand the movie better would be well advised to read them and, you know, I might just do that one of these days. Rogers makes it clear that anyone looking to better understand the movie would also be well advised to grab a copy of the New Testament and make a deep study of the Book of Revelations and, okay, I probably wouldn't do that even if it was guaranteed to help me better understand my ex-girlfriends. It comes down to the individual to decide whether just getting Kelly's alternate-universe apocalyptic fantasies is worth this much work. Kelly may be one of the first filmmakers of the Information Age, building mixed-media collages that can't be fully appreciated on their own until you've read the comic book, seen the director's cut on DVD, diagrammed the interviews, checked out the YouTube ephemera, etc. He might also just be a talented but undisciplined guy making a mess. The possibility that he's a bit of both is enough to ensure that he remains interesting at least for a while.