Kuhbeere Kinepiffle: 21st Century Inferno

Tetsuo: The Iron Man (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1989)

Death Proof (Quentin Tarantino, 2007)

Motion in discontinuous lines. Everything is perfectly fine.

The personal lived experience of the phantomic and physiognomic plentitude of simultaneity, uneasy and irreal, hairs perhaps standing up on the back of the neck, has found us in our sundry errant mysticisms demeaning of God direct revelation of God’s Being and Nature and then immediately apologizing to God on our knees for the unthinkably rude affront. What can we say? We’re antsy. Why are we here and what even is this place? Help! It is the Christians who have for a solid while been leading the pack in apologizing to God. But what we need to know about reality and the fundamental parts of which it consists will not desist in pestering us, demanding rigorous inquiry and meditation, the sort of scrutiny the very heartbeat itself would appear to be asking after, practically hounding us on days of heightened generalized agitation in the aether. Fairly late in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2014 adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, a doper’s penny dreadful for the ages that haunts some of the author’s old haunts, scrounging for cigarette and reefer butts, Joaquin Phoenix’s Larry ‘Doc’ Sportello freezes suddenly whilst walking briskly down the street in the aftermath of a harrowing escape and near-miss at the hands of dope-peddling Aryan sadists. “Pssst. Doper's ESP, Doc,” warns Sortilège on the soundtrack, played and voiced as she is by the divine Joanna Newsom, her wry hard-nut commentary forever the antidote to all the dissonance and distortion frothing up off this intergalactically pretzeled, slightly droopy, and curiously disheveled lifeworld: “doper’s ESP... ohhhhh no.” If you get it, you get it. Consider yourself one of the minor oracles. This is what we mean, we brigands and flea-wranglers of the open road, as we slouch our way toward Bethlehem in Joan Didion’a sunglasses and our own cloaks and gowns, when we speak of uncanny simultaneity, prehension, and situated universal absurdity. Have you ever had a moment, for instance, where you saw a bird land on a branch in your peripheral vision and a chilling sensation shot through you that the exact timed and totally specific motion of the bird in apprehended space—space apprehended by you—corresponded directly and indeed cosmically, all hung and strung together, with other movements happening at the same time within your field of vision? Has something so stupid and absurd and strange ever happened to you that you thought: okay, reality isn’t even real at all?

Alive and absurd in defiance of popular disapproval. Simplify who you are so you can wear it like a medallion, a living invincible epitaph or epigraph underscoring bold tomorrows already sealed. Busy yourself about in the circuitry that has been arranged for you…and then quite badly tangled. When you speed up people and their machines and tools excessively, abandoning meaningful oversight and stewardship, you can expect heat, fires, and explosions in chain reaction. For the connoisseur watching Monte Hellman’s 1971 Samuel-Beckett-piston-head automobile western Two-Lane Blacktop for the first time, the film’s ending, which features an optical effect which makes it appear that the film you are watching is burning up in the projector, not only underscores what happens to machines and machine-assemblages when they run too hot, but also obviously pays direct homage to Ingmar Bergman, about halfway through whose 1966 Persona the image stammers, wobbles, and glitches, suddenly appearing to ignite, melt, and burn itself out inside the projector gate. In the late 20th century and early 21st century, there have been more and more narratives, especially in the cinema, that ignore the convention of three acts with a pattern of rising action and resolution, cobbling together instead runaway stories that go faster than they can handle and rise and rise like Icarus unto glitched-out overkill. Death by solar proximity. I guess because of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Gaspar Noé’s 2009 colossus of overkill Enter the Void is a ragtag serpentine spree that lurches forward with lurid abandon until the film itself bursts through some interstitial cosmic membrane and is reborn as a human child, screaming bloody murder. One of his best two or three movies no matter what folks may say, Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, the truncated version of which was part of 2007’s commercially-ill-advised Grindhouse along with Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, has, like many of the best Hong Kong genre movies of the ’80s and ‘90s, a story outline you could scrawl on a cocktail napkin. All the better. The payoff is we get to hang out with a whole bunch of incredibly fun young women, in two distinct spatiotemporal frames, as they talk, kid one another, drink, smoke pot, and cavort. It is a movie that is actually like hanging out with your friends and going places and doing things in a more or less extemporaneous way, activities delineated in a kind of purely ludic time, these idylls and episodes broken up by bravura action sequences that are shocking, inventive, surprising, and sometimes funny, including the final one, which culminates in Rosario Dawson, Tracie Thoms, and Zoë Bell going to town on Kurt Russell’s Stuntman Mike, levelling him with roundhouse kicks and debilitating jabs, one after another, as the editing picks up speed, fragments, freezes, lurches, stammers, goes schizz-on-a-stick. The ending of Death Proof is the most Tarantino has ever resembled über-independent Japanese maverick Shinya Tsukamoto, whose quintessential cyberpunk urtext Tetsuo: The Iron Man builds to a climax that finds speed-freaking salaryman hero and metalloid demon villain merging in flesh, metal, and mindset, forming a single grotesque machinic entity and declaring, bound in newfound solidarity, that they shall turn the whole earth into metal, leaking fluids, and rust. Rust never sleeps.