Sunday, November 20, 2011

Rubber

Quentin Dupieux intelligently and playfully pulls off a ridiculous off-beat puréed slice of incongruity with Rubber, a film which challenges you to keep watching even though its subject matter is incredibly discombobulated.

Question: can we improve upon the typical Hollywood horror-comedy by stripping it down to its bear essentials, presenting an inanimate villain, crafting a film within a film, and then virulently exterminating its audience?

Or to put it another way, is watching a tire that rolls around randomly blowing up things and people preferable to series such as Final Destination or I Know What You Did Last Summer (note that I did like Final Destination 2)?

Without providing any back story explaining why or how the tire gained consciousness and why it decided to start randomly destroying.

The answer is yes, it can be improved upon, and a back story is not required, if you don't care in the slightest what your audience thinks but still take the time to expertly craft an audacious non sequitur which appears as if it was haphazardly constructed.

Rather than simply destroying the minds of its audience with nauseating dialogue and unimaginative viaducts, Rubber simply destroys its audience half way through after they ravenously gorge on a roasted turkey.

Rather than trying to seem as if there's a point or introduce something saccharinely tragic, Rubber makes it quite clear that there is no reason structuring its dementia, and proceeds to unreel unabashedly.

But nothing can exist without placing itself within a multifaceted logical fulcrum, as each subject is free to express their interpretive difference in regards to the ways in which artistic objects are constructed (or sporting objects etc.), thanks to the freedom built into democratic societies made viable by the internet, and it's possible to gain constructive insights into complicated dynamics from bizarre examples of lucid frivolity, if you search for them (search for them within the new show Picnicface, especially the Lost Highway themed episode wherein the Mystery Man looks like John Waters).

Reason underlies Rubber's tracks although its content salutes insanity. But it's only insane from the point of view of the monotonous narrative that has been produced to shackle the many as the few exercise their free self-development (Terry Eagleton), and from this point of view, accentuating difference, it makes nothing but perfect sense, and a rational explanation is provided for its not so subtle ending.

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