Under the Silver Lake: Unwriting the Story of Us
We forget that the best thrillers undo the best thrillers: Hitchcock unwrote the love that sleuths have for their dames when he turned them into Jungian dreamers in Vertigo; David Lynch made us ashamed of ever having it in the first place in Blue Velvet. David Robert Mitchell’s Under the Silver Lake is in that genealogy. It seems to be about a plot, but it’s really about the mystery of the way that men love women, and how it defines our entire society from Super Mario Bros. to serial killing. Or maybe we just hope that it is.
Sam lives life with resting stoner face, and I don’t imagine anyone better for it than Andrew Garfield. Garfield’s more important than that though: he has the ability to spy on his hot neighbor (Riley Keough) without coming off as a sleaze. There’s an innocence about the way he admires her, not because his intentions are innocent but because his goal really seems to be admiration. When she goes missing, he wants to save her more than he wants her. He thinks it will solve something about the whole world to do so. But his princess is in another castle.
The concept of everything being connected is a thriller concept, and also an information age one. Mitchell gets adventurous with symbolism, creating an unnerving singularity of experiences that mirror the egos of people who believe that their experiences define the whole world. Mitchell’s spin on that perspective is apocalyptic: it has climaxes more undoing than when Neo met the Architect in The Matrix Reloaded. He loves MacGuffins like Hitchcock used to; he sees the comedy in them (directing us to something unimportant and then removing it was always Hitchcock’s idea of “scaring” us: he played a minor chord on our hearts). Mitchell’s world is full of MacGuffins, because of how many things we think are important.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking the movie is sexist just because Sam has a troubled idea of women: observe the scene where two hipsters watch a lingerie model cry on her bed-sheets from behind a drone camera to know how seriously the film takes the idea of our image in modern media. Disasterpeace’s score is full of movie-perfect drops and suspense highs (lots of cellos) but it’s hard to know how to be guided, to horror or irony. That’s what makes it horrific. If people believe that Mitchell isn’t taking the mystery seriously, they know a truth of him in the form of a misconception: he takes it seriously enough for us to realize how pointless it is, next to a woman propped up like Marilyn by the pool, barking like a dog. It’s those images he’s after, and the truth of why they’re necessary to see.
You have to carry on through this movie, let it dupe you: it’s impossible to know how serious to take it at first. It seems alien; this makes its nearness more frightening. This is the kind of movie that really scares me. Nothing jumps out at you that couldn’t be in a mirror.
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Image is a screenshot from the film.
