Another view of The Canyons
3
By @groovyfokker
âWhen was the last time you went to see a movie in a theater? A movie that really meant something to you?â Itâs a loaded question, asked by one of the characters in crowd-funded, Bret Easton Ellis-scripted, Paul Schrader-directed film about the part of Los Angeles that exists on the periphery of the movie business, and which opens, ends and is intercut with arty photographs of boarded-up movie theaters. Ellis and Schrader want to ask us the same question, because they want us, the audience, to ask ourselves the same question â when did we last see a good movie? â and, ideally, agree with their pronouncement that the movies are dead.
There are two reasons why they want this: one is that, in the cynical world of the hipster, nothing is cooler than to be the first to pronounce something dead. The other reason it suits Ellis and Schrader to declare cinema dead is that it is, effectively, dead for them. Ellis, who wrote the novels Less than Zero and American Psycho in his twenties, both of which spawned well-received films, hasnât been able to get a movie made for years; the last two films adapted from his work (The Rules of Attraction and The Informers) were critically derided, commercial failures. Schrader, who in his heyday scripted Martin Scorseseâs Taxi Driver and The Last Temptation of Christ, has fared even worse, getting fired from the last film he was hired to direct, Exorcist: The Beginning, and replaced⊠by Renny Harlin.
Obviously, movies arenât dead â no more than baseball or football is dead just because most people watch them at home on their big flatscreens, rather than actually go to games. Leaving aside the obvious irony of making a movie which declares, more than decries, the death of movies, what Ellis and Schrader seem to be saying, subtextually for the most part, is that the movie business has changed beyond recognition â and the peripheral players in it are panicking. How fitting, then, that the two principle characters are played by individuals who epitomise the darker side of Hollywood: James Deen, the well-endowed star of some 4,000 porn films, whose very name evokes Old Hollywood in the same awful way that porn films often ape the titles of mainstream films; and Lindsay Lohan, the former child star and preternaturally talented actress (so great in The Parent Trap and Mean Girls) whose personal life and nose-diving career have become punchlines for the mean-spirited, give-me-reality-or-give-me-death TMZ generation she partly helped to create. When their casting was announced, shortly after the film reached its $150,000 funding goal on Kickstarter, it seemed like a sick joke at the expense of no one in particular, except perhaps for the few thousand crowd-funding backers. But hereâs the real surprise: it works.
Deen, whose typical films commonly require him to perform rather than act, has a weirdly blank expression entirely suited to the role of Christian, a feckless trust fund film producer who only makes films to show his father heâs actually doing something. Lohan, meanwhile, follows her underrated portrayal of Elizabeth Taylor (for the TV movie Liz and Dick) by bringing exactly the right amount of ingĂ©nue-gone-to-seed insouciance to the role of Tara, who once dreamed of being an actress, but having tired of the endless drudge of waiting tables, auditions and rejections, has taken the easier option of becoming Christianâs live-in girlfriend and plaything.
As we meet the unhappy couple, in an excruciating restaurant scene that mercifully gets the filmâs low point out of the way early on, Christian is regaling his assistantâs boyfriend, Ryan (who is secretly having an affair with Tara), with tales of his and Taraâs sexual adventures, largely involving threesomes and foursomes found via the (fictitious) Amore app, which locates casual sex hook-ups without the bother of having to advertise on Craigslist. Tara is too jaded to be seriously offended by Christianâs airing of their dirty laundry; she has made her bed (with Christian), and she would sooner lie in it than ever go back to Ryanâs life of âwaiting tables for eight bucks an hourâ â even if the part of her that still loves, loves Ryan.
Christian is the classic obsessive/possessive/abusive type: he stalks Tara, checks her phone messages, and grills her about her movements and encounters⊠and yet he is turned on by watching her have sex with other people. While this seems paradoxical behaviour, it isnât: polyamorous relationships tend to involve sanctioned, contextualised adultery, often within pre-determined boundaires; thus, in a mĂ©nage a trois, rather than cheating on Christian, Tara is acting out his (or her) sexual fantasies in the confines of a situation which Christian controls; any liaison (such as her affair with Ryan) that might take place outside of Christianâs control would constitute an unforgivable betrayal. The true paradox is really that, despite all the stalking, hacking and demonstrative jealousy, Christian doesnât love Tara â and neither does she love him. They are, however, monstrously co-dependent, like younger, but equally jaded simulacra of Martha and George from Whoâs Afraid of Virginia Woolf, who, like Christian, invites another couple, less worldly and bitter than they are, to the epicentre of their miserable existence.
The Canyons is not, in the end, about the death of motion pictures â although itâs an added irony that youâd have to drive a lot further than the actual Canyons to find a theatre showing it â but about the death of privacy and intimacy. It's uneven, and its last-minute genre switch is unconvincing, but for all its flaws, itâs a thoughtful and thoroughly modern look at the way in which we wilfully sacrifice our privacy, by sharing every thought, image and memory with whoever will listen, and confuse true intimacy with a kind of reality-show pseudo-reality in which we know everything about everyone â without ever really knowing them.
