LASHINGS OF THE OLD ULTRA-VIOLENCE

The Baader Meinhof Complex, Dir: Uli Edel; Surveillance, Dir: Jennifer Lynch

The Baader Meinhof gang—as the press called them - did not play around. In the early 1970s, the Red Army Faction—the name they preferred—set off bombs in US Army barracks, German newspaper offices and various police headquarters. They trained in Palestinian guerilla camps, robbed German banks, gunned down district attorneys and kidnapped police chiefs.Our psychosis features a sexual/political agenda. © Constantin Film Produktion

The RAF did not lack for hubris or competence as they helped to invent modern day terrorism. According to this dramatization of the eponymous non-fiction book, they could bomb, shoot, kidnap and speechify.  But they sucked at avoiding arrest. And so the second half of their grand political drama played out in German prisons and courtrooms. Led by whining complainer journalist/social theorist Ulrike Meinhof (while on the lam she would not stay anywhere without central heating and kept telling the Palestinians what uncomfortable shitholes their desert training camps were) and charismatic sociopath Andreas Baader, the RAF made a mockery of the German justice system –an easy target, granted. While imprisoned, they gained increasing control over their day to day lives to the point that their colleagues smuggled in pistols and ammunition. Meinhof hung herself after four years in jail, much of it spent in solitary and the rest in the forced company of Baader’s main squeeze, Gudrun Ensslin. Apparently Gudrun—something of a sociopath her own self—made Meinhof’s life inside an utter hell.

After  members of the RAF had been incarcerated for five years, Palestinian-trained terrorists hijacked a German commercial flight with the specific purpose of ransoming out the RAFers and terrorists held in other countries. When the hijacking failed, and the hijackers were shot down on a runway in Mogadishu, theRAFers died in their cells. The film suggests the two with guns shot themselves and the others followed Meinhof’s example….shortly after, a kidnapped German industrialist was murdered by the new cells of the RAF in  revenge.

It’s quite a saga, and director Uli Edel captures all aspects of the gang: their charisma, the romance of their struggle, their sex appeal (apparently the women robbed banks with Uzis and leapt over teller counters in mini-skirts, peasant crop-tops and lace-up knee-high white boots). Not to mention their at one time good intentions, the repressive German police apparatus which they so despised and the state-sponsored violence against protestors. With equal emphasis, Edel depicts the horrific bloody consequences of the RAF’s actions and the internal blood-letting without which no revolutionary cell would be complete. Gudrun held Meinhof in such contempt that while they were training at a desert camp, Gudrun gave Al Fatah the secret code word that Meinhof’s fugitive children and nanny would assume came only from Meinhof. Al Fatah made it clear to Gudrun (who spoke English, which Meinhof did not), that if they picked up the kids (who were safe somewhere in Europe at the time), they would be whisked into Palestinian camps and never seen again. Without consulting Meinhof, Gudrun gave the go-ahead.

Edel walks the narrowest of tightropes and never falters. He shows the broader political actions that  triggered the gang’s rage and the internal logic of their arguments, yet never once fails to also show the dismembered bodies of their victims… Or the profound sexual kicks the gang got from its violence. Edel takes no moral or political position. He’s a historian. I’ve never seen so brave a film, a film so willing and even more surprising, able, to embrace such a narrative with the complexity it warrants.                      

He takes a while to do it, too. Complex is over two hours long, and every sequence seems necessary. The opening is a bravura urban spectacle. Iranian pro-Shah apparatchiks assault anti-Shah protestors on the streets of Berlin, and, with the cops’ passive approval, beat the living shit of out of them. In a moment evokingPotemkin’s Odessa Steps, the German mounted police charge down the cobbled streets into Edel’s deliriously tracking camera, smashing the heads of fleeing students. A right-wing goon squad executes a student in the plain view of the cops. They do nothing. This is presented as the seminal radicalizing event for the RAF.The brutal thrills of this sequence evoke Edel’s model: Costa-Gavras’ Z and State of Siege, two of the most visually dynamic political histories (and political thrillers) ever made.

Ours omits the politicsOurs omits the politics. © Lago Films.

Once the leaders get thrown into jail, the pace slows. The RAF argues with each other in their cells and the judge in court. Baader had better instincts for political theatre than politics, and he turned the courtroom into his stage. Newbie cells sprang up around Germany, and their younger more hardassed members easily equaled the RAF founders for viciousness. Baader plaintively tells one cop: “These new groups operating in our name are so much more violent than we ever were.”

Jennifer Lynch, the writer/director of Surveillance, takes a much more American view of sociopathic violence; her protagonists kill and maim because, in a modern America of alienation, crippling boredom and dysfunctional relationships, it gets them off when nothing else will. This forms a rather old-fashioned view of the cathartic killing off of squares by a hip elite. It springs from the heyday of arty low budget violent exploitation, the American International Pictures (and their imitators) of the early and mid 1970s.

Bill Pullman appears to have aged poorly. He looks like a drunk Irish cop. Julia Ormond was once briefly the next big thing and here reclaims her career by turning an exploitation caricature into an icon of sophisticated sex appeal and depth. Lynch’s last film—ten years back—was the abomination Boxing Helena, which showcased her dad’s disdain for narrative and her own inability to convincingly create atmosphere. Here, there actually is a plot. Serial killers terrorize the countryside; Bill and Julia play the FBI agents brought in to bring them down.

They arrive in psychotic American nowheresville, where the local cops shoot out the tires of passing tourists, then sexually humiliate and rob them. Again, just for kicks and pocket change – harmless fun. The traffic stop scenes prove as harrowing as the explicit serial killer violence and get as close to a theme as Lynch embraces: America makes people crazy. And what do crazy people like the best? They like to make other people crazy.

The traffic stop cops, who see themselves as morally superior to the serial killers, are presented as only the first falling domino in the collapse of society. They and the serial kiiller are not ying and yang, but only points on a continuum. How old-school hipster is that?

The tiny cast are unknown but recognizable character and stage actors. They relish their hinky roles and only occasionally y drift into self-parody. The dialogue offers plenty of Lynchian quirk and some really unsettling subconscious character reveals. Lynch toys with the idea that the killers are the sanest folks in town, if only because they are the least in denial. But she chucks that notion overboard for an orgasmic bloodletting finale both truly disturbing and creepily hot. Very AIP.

This would be a smart genre picture if this genre still existed. Now it’s an anomaly: a self-conscious, amusing, far from perfect but still compelling journey into unease, madness and blood. And all, it turns out, in the service of letting true love thrive. 

Fancy French Screwing

And fancier French thinking

Exterminating Angels, DIR: Jean-Claude Brisseau

Lenny Bruce said that as near as he could tell, what the Supreme Court regarded as obscene or not obscene came down to the “difference between dirty screwing and fancy screwing.” Exterminating Angels, a piquantly post-modern French meditation on the mystery (to men) of the psychology of feminine arousal, features supremely fancy screwing indeed. Not screwing qua screwing: le sex is girl-on-girl. The male lead gets totally screwed himself, but he never gets laid.

Director Jean-Claude Brisseau pursues his deconstructivist-French-person-pondering-the-sexual-mysteries intellectual agenda straight-up. Unlike Catherine Briellat’s explicit mega-downer Anatomy of Hell or her merely annoying Sex Is Comedy, Brisseau does not present his Big Questions interwoven into the drama. Here, they are the drama. Brisseau’s protagonist is a movie director who repeatedly posits aloud the motivating inquiries of the story. This post-Godardian ploy works because Brisseau wants to remind us of his own distance from, and intimacy with, this story.

Fancy French mutual masturbation. Courtesy, IFC Films

The Director (played by Frédéric van den Driessche) finds himself enthralled (in a French brains-fuel-groin, groin-fuels-brains kinda way) after an actress unexpectedly masturbates during her audition. Director then sets out to find girls who’ll do it on purpose, on camera, and who’ll make love to another woman as well. Brisseau/Director presents this quest as the innocent fulfilling of his own curiosity. A key part of the deal is that he cannot touch the women, ever. He has a tough-ass, loving, cautionary wife waiting for him at home after a wearying day of watching exquisite young French women get off for his—and their—benefit. The Director’s blank-faced faux naiveté/obsession when confronted with these feminine avatars is nowhere near as irritating as it could be: Director makes a plausible stand-in for every other dumbstruck male facing similar mysteries. The Director’s implicit plea of innocence (“I never touched those girls, honest!”) seems disingenuous and a key aspect of Brisseau’s notion of the erotic. That he becomes a dumbstruck male, and can thus claim no culpability, is passive aggression of the first order. Bottoming from the top, one might say.

Brisseau’s also cannibalizing his own life. Apparently he ran into legal troubles after auditions wherein he really did ask actresses to masturbate. He was later accused of harassment and had to stand trial. Angels is, among other things, Brisseau’s defense of his behavior.

Being French and piquantly post-modern, Angels commences with the Director dreaming of his dead grandmother. In a frightening, dislocating sequence, Granny warns Director against pursuing his own pleasures too avidly. Lurking in the stairwell as Granny speaks are two fabulous French babes in tank-tops and to-the-minute jeans. They are, it turns out, angels. But they ain’t nice angels. When the actress appears who will turn out to be Director’s great obsession and undoing (ain’t that always the way?), one of the super-babe angels whispers into Director’s ear, telling him that this girl will be his muse. The muse, who’s periodically inhabitanted by Satan, insists the Director take her to a hotel right away, so she can masturbate under his gaze.

Opening with a Buñuel-evoking dream/fantasy/foreboding sequence immediately clues us to Brisseau’s Is It A Film Or Is It a Commentary On A Film? This dynamic rules not so much the staging or story, but the editing. Brisseau holds the reaction shot close-ups of his doppelganger for so long—and they are so badly lit, that, as in a David Cronenberg film, you can’t tell whether he’s is making some obscure point about identity (or something) or doesn’t know how to cut a scene in rhythm. The reverse cut from the Director returns to one of four young actresses, and they’re lit like a page from Bazaar. Is Brisseau communicating that the Director has more moral or dramatic weight than the women? Or that his dilemmas are more compelling than their beauty? Or does Brisseau hold for too long to remind us—Godard style—that it’s only a movie?

T his sounds pretentious, off-putting and exasperating—and it’s all three, really—yet Brisseau’s methods and questioning gain force as the film continues. Because the sex scenes are the most true-seeming (with a shockingly touching air of awkwardness and sincerity) and hottest I’ve ever seen, the film certainly rewards attention. Because the film is also about the difficulty of staging sex scenes, and the concomitant difficulty for actresses to sincerely screw on-camera, all the questions the Director finds alluring flood the mind as the women go at it: Are they faking? Could a man tell if they were? How does the presence of the camera and the Director alter their behavior? And, most crucially for Director and hottest for, uh, me: When do the women lose themselves in pleasure and what usually concealed aspect of self is revealed when they do? The elegant, arousing, mutual masturbation and the naïve sophistication of the Director’s questions makeExterminating Angels irresistible and thought-provoking even as you sit there and enumerate every flaw. However galling the rising tide of high-minded French horseshit, Brisseau’s combination of fancy thinking and fancy screwing makes for fun viewing.

That fun may be limited to my side of the gender fence, I dunno. Remove the fancy trappings and self-conscious cinema and what remains is an older man turning young women into his fantasy objects by tapping into their fantasies. Brisseau’s “Who, me?” defense of his actions gets tiresome, as does the regularly occurring assertions by different actresses that they love Director and that Director freed them up for new and liberating sexual experiences. Brisseau thus uses the oldest abuser-excuse in the book: “See? They liked it!” But the film is nothing if not a welter of contradictions, because no one can deny the erotic lure of the situation—for those who swing like that. Nor can anyone deny the exploitative/abusive aspects of it, either.

In the end, Director pays heavy dues for leading the actresses into this liberating or oppressive gestalt. The dues are presented as injustice stemming from Director’s misunderstood motives and/or his well-deserved karma. Whether Director accrued this karma by overstepping the limits of pleasure the universe intended for him, or because he exploited the actresses, remains unclear. Either way, Director’s suffering is so thorough, and his protestations of innocence so relentless, that Brisseau’s credibility suffers. After the fancy screwing is over, what remains foremost is the question Brisseau is clearly asking himself: What really happened?

LESS TALK, MORE SMOKE: GODARD AT THE FILM FORUM

Godard’s ’60s, The Film Forum

 Godard was always smarter than everybody else. That was his blessing and his curse. Nobody could talk him out of a bad idea, including himself. Happily, in the ‘60s, during Godard’s incomprehensibly creative ferment, during his pre-Maoist, pre-I’m-going-to-stand-in-a-French-corner- and-hold-my-breath-until-the-revolution-comes-or-I-turn-blue phase, Godard had damn few of them. Bad ideas, I mean. And if the relentless modernity of his pictures might argue that JLG thought too much and felt not enough, his characters usually suffer the opposite dilemma.

Godard’s oxymoronic, all right: cinema’s most self-conscious intellectual and heart-wrenching romantic; its most innovative technician and compassionate charter of the heart; its most deadly political thinker and smartest gag-writer. Godard invented the second half of cinema’s first century. And for all of his technical, visual, structural and narrative innovations, a seldom-mentioned reason for his work standing up so well is an entirely different sort of wild intelligence, a wild intelligence JLG never got sufficient credit for: chic.

Godard himself was not a bad dresser,. His style was monochromatic and snappy: tight pants, tweed jacket, dark glasses, five o’clock shadow and, for a while, that tiny fedora. But the women in his films! Like the movies themselves, they never seem dated. They seem cooler, better dressed, more indifferent to their beauty and to-the-moment style than any women characters in film. Their self-distance and distance from their own iconography makes them even cooler, more chic. Godard wields their chic as character development, as eye candy, as beauty for beauty’s sake (thus using primality to confound/transcend the uber-rationality of his constantly reinvented cinematic structure) and as demonstration that there can be no cinema without the most hypnotizing of the movie star’s gifts: glamour.

The short version: if you have the time, see every film in the series. If not, here you go:

 1) Two or Three Things I Know About Her

Godard presents the soul-rotting suburbs surrounding Paris in a quiet riot of screaming Cinemascope and too-cool Eggleston-like barely moving frames. When his heroine—a housewife who turns tricks to pay for a color TV—appears, Godard asks us in a whisper: “Is her hair auburn? Does it matter?” The heartache here lies not in his characters’ fate, but in Godard finding a transcendent, wrenching beauty in the most desolate (sub)urban scapes. The fragmented moments of music mirror the disconnected, episodic lives that Godard barely depicts, but perfectly evokes.

 2) Contempt

Jack Palance in the performance of his career as the bluntest American blunt object of all time: a Hollywood big-studio producer who quotes from Mao’s Little Red Book. Red is everywhere: a red bike leaning on a wall, Jack’s lethal red convertible, the gleaming pink of Casa Malaparte, Capri’s deranged architectural masterpiece that Godard somehow turns into a symbol of unattainable beauty and the heartbreak that accompanies it. Bardot, too, gives the performance of her life, and shows a range no one had any reason to expect she possessed. Godard opens with an unforgettable scene—unbearably intimate, suspended in time, true—that shows even a sex goddess could yearn for love.

 3) Weekend

This opening scene is simply the deadpan funniest, as one of Godard’s prototypical distanced French beauties demonstrates for us the gap between action and narration. Then, we’re off to cinema’s greatest traffic jam, as forlorn and unironically funny as Godard ever got. JLG proves a master of expressed greed like Scorcese’s a master of fuming rage. He shows us rich folks with their hostility turned up a couple notches past the then-socially acceptable. Back then, they were the height of barbarity, a parody, an exaggeration. Now—with their lovely clothes and whining frustration—they seem all too current and real.

 4) Masculine Feminin

Godard’s one pop culture confection that expressed his disdain and great affection for pop. Casting a yé-yé singer (Chantal Goya, a pop confection herself) as the ever-elusive love interest for Jean-Pierre Leaud’s classically bumbling, yet stubborn suitor, JLG seems to leave humans-as-metaphors behind in favor, shockingly, of humans as human beings. The story—despite a few narrative-wrecking interruptions—is remarkably sincere. Godard proves his theory that language is the least effective weapon for laying siege to a heart, and demonstrates his surprisingly Rohmer-like view that in romance, women hold the cards, and men seldom have a clue.

5) Pierrot le Fou

Leaud plays the bumbler—he thinks and talks himself and everyone else into paralysis. With Jean-Paul Belmondo, there’s more smoke and less talk. Nobody in cinema history could wield a Galois with the cool Belmondo barely notices he possesses. He teams up with Anna Karina and they play at being Bonnie & Clyde in the blinding sunshine of the south of France. One unforgettable pop-art shot of a boat’s blue cabin and white hull against a blue sea and a bluer sky will show just how much emotion can be expressed by the incantory capturing of pure color. The story makes no sense: the characters run amok in their own movie, and we fall helplessly in love with them for it.

 6) Vivre Sa Vie

Godard was mad for Anna Karina until he wasn’t, until he came to understand he loved her more through the lens than in life. But while he adored her, he changed the rules of narrative forever. Karina plays a dispassionate shopgirl who drifts into prostitution. Godard never tells the story straight up; he hints, he shows one-tenth of a conversation that we have to finish, he lets locations take the place of dialogue. This is cinema of mood, of evocation, of achingly beautiful black and white. It’s a social tragedy without a message, and all the more moving as a result.

 7) Band of Outsiders

As Godard groped his way around a two-guys-one-girl romance that’s also a caper movie, he chose an languid narrative style, chucking the usual norms of tension so the director could amuse himself. This might make it a tougher sit-through for the uninitiated, and a great delight for those not quite so hung up on pacing. Do The Madison—JLG’s two-minute homage to the great Hollywood dance numbers condenses enough sweetness, Brechtian storytelling and pure movie-star allure to more than make up for any narrative sloth. 

8) A Woman Is A Woman

Here’s that two-guys-one-girl thing again, in Godard’s first color and Cinemascope frames. He revels in both, staging dance and bicycle sequences in studio apartments, and putting Karina in one post-Aubrey Hepburn eye-popping Pop outfit after another. In all these films, JLG demonstrates what cinema might be capable of, how expansive and embracing the shattering of (while always remaining in love with) the old norms could be.

9) Alphaville

In frigid perpetually nighttime Paris, under the blistering glare of fluorescence and the all-seeing eye of a totalitarian future, seamed-face B-movie icon Eddie Constantine arrives from the ’40s to bring amour back to France. Featuring the funniest chase sequence and chicest executions ever filmed, Godard lays his heart on his sleeve in high-contrast black and white, finding the secret engine of all noir (and little science fiction): love.

 10) Sympathy For the Devil

Chic? Try the Rolling Stones painstakingly building their song verse by verse, failed attempt by failed attempt, take by take. Or endless shots of the back of Brian Jones’ blonde head or looping mad circles around the studio or Bill Wyman’s ridiculous purple outfit. Intercut this with black radicals passing rifles back and forth in auto-graveyards while reading aloud from Soul On Ice. What does it mean? What does ‘meaning’ mean? While steadfastly having no idea, I can tell you just as steadfastly that the closing sequence, which is as free of meaning as any in Godard, will make you weep. Ominously, Anne Wiazemsky runs all around London putting up agit-prop graffiti, foreshadowing Godard’s leaving the ’60s and narrative, way behind.

CRITERION'S REBEL SAMURAI BOXED SET

by David Wilentz

Criterion’s Rebel Samurai box set features four gripping entries in the genre, all depicting men challenged by unscrupulous hierarchies struggling for power: Sword of the Beast; Samurai Spy; Samurai Rebellion; Kill! These four pictures offer alook at the second wave of post war samurai films and the key directors who emerged from that wave. Focusing on the perennial samurai dilemma of giri (duty) versus ninjo (morality) allowed each auteur to make his mark artistically despite genre convention. These directors were in a sense rebellious like the samurai of their films, and still very much aware of their duty.

Samurai, like cowboy heroes, lived and were defined by a code of honor and morality. But what does a samurai do when pushed to the limit of his convictions? After being tricked into killing the counselor of his clan, Gennosuke (Mikijiro Hira), the protagonist of Hideo Gosha’s Sword of the Beast (1965), faces his pursuers with the fervor of a cornered animal. Gosha’s film has an abundance of brisk paced, well choreographed chanbara (sword swinging) action but what really stands out is how his gritty, naturalistic style reflects the vehement angst with which this anti-hero reacts to the corrupt world around him.

Samurai Spy (1965) plays almost like a Saturday matinee serial with damsels in distress, ninjas leaping through the air, face- offs atop bridges and so forth. However, director Masahiro Shinoda, who brought us the lyrical yakuza noir Pale Flower, imbues his work with an impressionistic element through stylized montage and unusual framing, catapulting this yarn beyond formulaic conventions. All the films in this box are lusciously shot in B/W but Shinoda finds moments to utilize light and dark as a metaphor for the film’s diegetic as well as emotional complexities.

What makes the Criterion brand so transcendent, so necessary, is their ability to combine PBS-style austerity with an acute genre sensibility. Authors of the attached essays include Japanese film luminaries like Donald Ritchie (A Hundred Years of Japanese Film) and Alain Silver (The Samurai Film) as well as Patrick Macias, author of Tokyo scope, a study of Japanese cult and trash films. Masaki Kobayashi’s Samurai Rebellion (1967), more so than the other films included, has the classic and prestigious feel that western audiences may be more accustomed to (being familiar with Kurosawa’s oeuvre or Kobayashi’s Hara Kiri and Kwaidan). The drama is Shakespearean, building slowly but intensely, perfectly mirrored by the extraordinary restraint that Toshiro Mifune’s character exhibits. Only in the final reel do the film’s dramatic tensions finally explode in a barrage of physical action. And do they ever explode.

Kihachi Okamoto offers the other extreme of the samurai film with Kill! (1968). All archetypes are exaggerated to the max, allowing a chaotic send-up of the chanbara genre. Tatsuya Nakadai gleefully wallows in the comic side of his ronin character, a stark contrast to the characterization of pure evil that he delivered in Okamoto’s Sword of Doom. The convoluted plot gets a little hard to follow (interestingly it was based on the same novel that served as the source for Kurosawa’s Sanjuro) but the odd assortment of characters and Spaghetti Western style abandon manage to bring it to a rollicking finish; thus making Kill! the perfect capper to the set.

TWO LANE BLACKTOP

Laurie Bird as The Girl, James Taylor as The Driver, Dennis Wilson as The Mechanic, '55 Chevy as The Car. Courtesy of the Criterion Collection

By David Wilentz

Is there anything left unsaid about the greatness of Two Lane Blacktop? Note to the uninitiated: Two Lane is the epitome of that modern American art form, the road movie. Easy Rider established the genre (For The Mainstream) with its counter-culture quest for the self unraveling along the American highway.

Two Lane took this concept to another level, breaking all the tropes down to a bare minimum until all that remains are characters named ‘Driver’ and ‘Mechanic.’ Even more telling is that the cars (a ’55 Chevy and a ’70 Pontiac GTO) are characters themselves, who rival the humans for prominence as they fly through our languid landscape. While Easy Rider overtly referenced that other great American genre, the Western (protagonists named Wyatt and Billy), Two Lane thematically and stylistically bears the trait that defines the greatest heroes of the West: restraint.Two Lane replaces both the horse and the gun with the cars; the drag races that move the narrative are metonymical gunfights. Curiously, the journey has been inverted—our protagonists travel west to east, and their path seems to have neither goal, nor an end in sight. The quest has been reduced to nothingness: these characters go just to go.

Director Monte Hellman’s vision leaves exposition by the wayside, allowing the visuals to elicit devastating emotions from the weight of simply being; framing often removes the audience from the usual role of spectator, putting us inside the existence-defining action (or non-action). In the film’s opening, a figure glows in the darkness as he switches the red-green light signal that starts a street race. The figure—isolated in that one tiny but momentous moment—is removed from any cultural assumptions as the illumination of Hellman’s mesmerizing frame grants him transcendence from any identifiable existence.

Hellman’s elliptical style recalls European auteurs such as that other non-actor-employing existentialist Bresson or that former painter Antonioni. But the American tradition is also strongly felt. Working for Roger Corman trained Hellman in the fast buck, no-budget school of filmmaking. Corman’s first film was The Fast and Furious, a racing picture. Car and highway culture are, after all, vital elements of Americana. Mesh that with counterculture fallout and youthful ennui and you arrive at the makings of a road movie.

Hellman’s mastery of efficient, minimal storytelling is evident in the power and beauty of Two Lane’s simple, stripped down visuals. Those seeking a story-driven plot and tangible character motivations will find Two Lane challenging. What makes Two Lane rewarding is the dream-like state it evokes from seemingly mundane moments. iftheymovekillem's very own film editor David N. Meyer is featured on one of the two commentary tracks on this deluxe edition, in which he had the honor of interviewing Two Lane screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer. Meyer and Wurlitzer pose the question “What is a road movie?” On a basic level they posit a simple aspect of a multi-layered definition: it is so American to be able to use so called low-culture, such as that of gear heads and drag racing, as a lens through which to examine some seriously heavy metaphysical shit. Ultimately it doesn’t matter if anyone wins the race—the drive exists forever in a dreamscape.