Originally intended as a nine-part transmedia opus (later reduced to six), Richard Kelly's Southland Tales (2006) comprises three graphic novels and a feature film containing the concluding chapters. With a who’s-who-of-the-aughts ensemble cast performing iconic musical numbers, Kelly’s follow-up to Donnie Darko (2001) is nauseating, referential, absurd, and sometimes even a little fun.
Infamously made for $17 million, Southland Tales bombed at the box office a year and half after its unfavorable premiere at Cannes. (This “Cannes Cut,” which Kelly prefers but still finds unsatisfying, was made available for home viewing in 2021.) Though very much a film that plays on and with stunt casting, it’s not just a novel time capsule of Bush-era America, fuck yeah-isms. The story generally follows a few character arcs: Jericho Cane, aka Boxer Santaros, an action star with amnesia, played by a post–Scorpion King (2002) Dwayne Johnson; his girlfriend Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar), a former porn star and reality TV hopeful; and identical twins on opposite ends of the political spectrum, played by Seann William Scott. Their star-crossed paths collide in and around Los Angeles in 2008, a not-too-distant hellscape in the midst of World War III, which means constant surveillance of civilians by snipers, like our narrator, Private Pilot Abilene (Justin Timberlake). Understanding the significance of the casting relies on some knowledge of a very specific time and place in American culture, and the film may not fully deliver the same punch to those less familiar with a certain stable of Mad TV and SNL alum, WB slayers, indie directors, and Total Request Live chart-toppers (like a great “Cock Chuggers”–screaming Mandy Moore, who plays Santaros’s wife). For those in possession of such arcana, the text is rich.
Adding yet another layer is a celestial score by Moby, another artist at a downturn of his own unprecedented superstardom at this time, which brings several convoluted scenes to great emotional heights. The soundtrack also includes the Pixies, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Radiohead, and Blur, as well as the original earworm "Teen Horniness Is Not a Crime," performed by Gellar. The centerpiece is a drug-induced single-take music-video montage of Pilot Abilene lip-syncing to "All These Things That I've Done" by The Killers. The popular song from 2004 was written by frontman Brandon Flowers about the MTV VJ Matt Pinfield’s work with Iraq War veterans suffering from PTSD, and this poignant mirroring in the film is centered by Timberlake’s pop-star persona (then at the beginning of its transition to the silver screen), bordering on camp.
Kelly has a lot to say, even if it tends to get clouded in the telling. Southland Tales is an ambitious undertaking that attempts to hammer in on a prescient darkness that now seems like a reality stranger than fiction, and was likely impossible to perfectly articulate as it happened: it is a gluttonous, animated look at media and celebrity, the military-industrial complex, and the surveillance state. In all its mess, it now feels like one of the defining post-9/11 films. The film not only bottles a very specific cultural and political moment, but also a time in which a film like this could be made.
Southland Tales screens on 35mm on Wednesday, March 13th at the Roxie.
Previously:
Southland Tales screens this afternoon, July 29, at BAM on 35mm as part of the series “Second Features.”
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