Revisiting Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales.

Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales is the perfect analogy for America Now. A sprawling, often confusing mess, I rewatched the film for the first time in a number of years last night ahead of the US Presidential debate. What can I say, other than it felt like apt viewing.

Full disclosure; I really liked Southland Tales upon initial release. I travelled cross-county to see the film play in what was an infamously limited run, itself a reaction by the film’s distributor to the hype-quashing response the film received upon it’s premiere at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival (a great post-mortem of which can be found here). That the film screened as part of the festival’s official competition shows just how high expectations were for Kelly’s Donnie Darko follow-up, with every detail about the mysterious project pored over and speculated about during the film’s lengthy production. Was it really a musical? Why was Kelly casting the film with professional wrestlers, Saturday Night Live comedians and pop-stars? Do I really have to read three graphic novels prior to seeing the thing?

For all of it’s faults the ambition on display in Southland Tales is genuinely awe-inspiring. It’s a big-budget folly in the key of David Lynch’s Dune, or Kevin Costner’s The Postman, the kind of film they say Hollywood doesn’t make any more (though it has to be said that Kelly’s budget was nowhere near as high as those films, and the professional damage caused seemed to have been purely personal). It’s also a prescient piece of work, with its examination of the connected world and the age of information making for stark viewing some ten years on from production, in a world where the sight of a remote figure surrounded by countless video feeds broadcasting everything from rolling news to chat shows fronted by porn stars and sex-heavy car adverts feels like the everyday of a now populated by such technology and programming.