Twentynine Palms.
This is a film by Bruno Dumont, the French filmmaker often accused of eye-rolling pretension in his movies.
I have to say that I agree with one of the critics of Twentynine Palms, who said it was a far better film in retrospect. That when recalling the experience of watching the film, it became good, but the actual experience of watching the movie was almost unendurable.
It’s slow, boring, and nothing much happens until the last ten minutes, which is filled with graphic and shocking violence. SPOILER ALERT!
Probably half the movie is a an American man and his Russian girlfriend driving around the desert scouting film locations. They drive through the desert, get naked, have sex, then return to their hotel room, where they have more sex.
Dumont said his intention when making Twentynine Palms was to portray the most abstracted version of the American slasher film he could. To distill it to only its functioning parts.
In short: People enter the wilderness. In the wilderness, they are freed from the norms of civilization: primarily sexual norms. This freedom is not without risk: those who are barbaric and violent are also allowed to express their prurience in this wilderness.
So after two hours of nothing happening, the couple in the Hummer is driven off the road by rednecks and the man is raped while his girlfriend is forced to watch.
The narrative thrust behind this movie and the slasher genre (Friday the 13th, specifically, but also Deliverance and Straw Dogs), is that the wilderness is where you go to shed the dross of civilized behavior, and go savage. Living like a pagan, acting like a devil, dancing like a witch in the light of a bonfire. It’s where you go to succumb to Satan and live nihilistically, but also to find the guiltless naivete and innocence of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
And of course there are repercussions to this violation of social norms. Namely, violation and debasement. It’s a theme that goes back to our Puritan roots, and is also explored in famously unread stories like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown. The wildnerness and civilization as two mortal enemies, and the forces of civilization always having to remain diligent in their fight against savagery.
I think films like Twentynine Palms also resonate in a really troubling way in light of events like the recent massacre in Las Vegas and Sandy Hook, or in Europe (the Bataclan and Paris shootings, Nice, Berlin), and in Africa and Bali, and a million other places.
There’s a feeling that, regardless of its statistical unlikelihood, we are always in danger of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and suffering the savagery of some psycho or fanatic who lives far outsides the bounds of the modern social contract.
We might be lost in the midst of trying to figure out our own complicated lives, or trying to celebrate life with drink and song, or just doing something mundane like commuting or going to work; and yet in all these circumstances some crazy religious nut or antisocial misfit will suddenly break into our bubble with incomprehensible violence and hatred.