I close my eyes to conjure up somethingBut it's just a faint taste in my mouth
- Dum Dum Girls, Coming Down
The reappraisal economy, as Jacob Lambert in an article for The Week puts it, is a recent phenomenon that has made it incredibly difficult to distinguish between a genuine admiration for an unfairly maligned piece of work and fodder for the dreaded think-piece machine, which seems to exist to garner clicks from polarising headlines. What is the function of trying to find clarity and meaning in work that has been firmly established as terrible, especially when the people who made it turn out to have caused significant harm to others?
The Canyons (2013) is a hard film to like. It has a consistent yellow and green tinge, like stagnant pool water left to stew on the hottest day of the year. Everything is over-lit and cheap looking, empty and un-erotic. It's dry, garish and much too close to the sun. The dust settled on the cinema seats is hot to the touch. Paul Schrader's attempt to unravel the erotic thriller by aiming white-hot, high-definition fury at the supposed cesspool of the film industry did not enamour; it revolted people with its refusal to be immersive. The movie compels me because it doesn't seem to be for anyone. It simply persists.
David Lynch was singular because he was also someone who consistently used his work to exorcise his frustrations with the elusive processes that determined whether or not a movie could get made, but especially if it was going to be successful. Lost Highway (1997) was also a critical and commercial failure that purported to be an erotic thriller, only to baffle audiences with its aesthetic choices and deconstruction of the neo-noir genre. Both Lynch and Schrader are compelled by the way gendered violence and exploitation have to be foregrounded to expose the frightening realities of unchecked and emboldened masculinity.
The early 2010s was a financially and creatively fraught time for filmmakers. After the 2008 financial crash, the risk of financing a project that wasn't guaranteed to make its money back was not worth it in the eyes of studio investors. As a result, many household names like Stephen Soderbergh and Sofia Coppola were instead delivering pulpy projects that were extremely 'of the moment'. The Bling Ring (2012) had been based off a magazine article written about a series of robberies committed by teenagers in California, and The Girlfriend Experience (2009) interacted explicitly with the state of sex work after economic fallout. We saw auteurs exploiting 'the everyday media detritus we associate more with television and computer monitors than movie theatres', as Dennis Lim puts it, to tell the more low-brow stories associated with this aesthetic.
The Digital Canon had already been established, with the Dogme 95 movement foregrounding naturalism and making digital video the default mode for indie filmmaking the world over. The 2010s in particular saw new indie filmmakers and established directors alike forced to adopt the all-too shiny and detalied high-definition digital shooting style, a pristine kind of plastic that, when overlit and poorly constructed, only emphasised its tacky sheen. The new decade would produce a glossy kind of sleaze cinema, shot with an evident shine on the actors' cheeks and noses. We could see too much and it disgusted us.
When describing what a 'trash' movie is, Tim Lucas highlights that it should feel like it is shot without skill, how this 'acridly repell[ant]' mode of shooting only really underscores its taboo themes. He states, '[i]ts ineptitude should make murder hilarious, eroticism repugnant, [and] ugliness appealing', and whilst he is referring about filmmakers like Edward D. Wood Jr. and Doris Wishman with this description, I do think some consideration should be taken towards directors like Schrader, with the consistently snide Bret Easton Ellis in tow, who were furious at the state of modern filmmaking and made something grotesque, in story and image, to purge these feelings. The descriptor of 'anti-erotic thriller' has been stated as a flaw rather than the adoption of sleaze that a story like this deserves.
Set in the early stages of film production, two couples collide over dinner and discuss their attitudes towards showbiz and the fluidity of relationships. Three of these character, Tara, Christian and Noah, are going to be key to reiterating the corrosive influence both systems (the personal and the professional) have on one another. None of these people are happy, cultured or enthused about their future, and they prove over the course of the film that they have no reason to be.
Operating on an apocalyptic level, with its dilapidated cinemas and airless, empty mansions, The Canyons argues that the worst thing to happen to Hollywood, that being the gutting of any artful ounce that could lie in the flesh of the bright-eyed hopefuls who arrive with big dreams only to be stuck making some production company a lot of money with unpaid labour, has already happened. The audience is simply here to witness the aftermath.
The idea that Los Angeles is hellish or Hollywood is a hotbed of perversion and murder is not a new attitude. Ever exploitable, the city becomes a representation of dead dreams and the collapsing of identity, good people forced to perform forever. As Roxana Hadadi argues, it's a place where the hierarchy feels innate, the split between those destined to perform and those who must serve those performers, a dynamic that feels precariously close to falter. All it would need is one sharp push.
Schrader and Ellis stupefy heterosexuality, enraged that its supremacy has allowed such empty people to find success, and proceeds to point with malice at its unerotic gamefication, whether through the apps Christian uses to organise group sex, the pathetic pleading of Noah for the attention of a woman he will never end up with, or the resignation Tara has over her fate, stuck sitting at boring dinners with boring rich men. David Lynch is similarly obsessed with the bleak performance of heterosexuality, and Lost Highway collides with The Canyons because they are both about how this performance is held together by straight men flailing to assert a stable sense of identity as a means of control, something Christian, Noah, Fred and Pete will repeatedly fail to hold onto. They diverge because where Lost Highway seems haunted by its tragedies, The Canyons seems furious to even exist in the first place.
Tara is a tricky character. Frozen by circumstance and adjusted to going through the motions as someone's girlfriend, her life is funded and glitzy, on the condition that she fulfil her role as a beautiful arm piece and a regular participant in cuckold-based hookups with Christian. The bleakness of this character, who has no faith in the system to make her an artist, commits to a life of symbols, harbouring the greasy void of Hollywood inside her, with nowhere to turn in her time of need. Christian can't liberate her with money. Noah can't liberate her his love. She is accutely aware that it's only a matter of time before the bottom falls out. And she will not be the one holding the gun when the lights come back on. Every move Tara makes is tactical, all in the name of self-preservation. When art is bereft, we can only orient our lives towards our failures. In Los Angeles, there is power in owning nothing.
Renee is even less comprehensible, though on multiple watches of Lost Highway, it's clear that the audience is being directed towards Fred's paranoia at the expense of her personhood. She either was or is an actor, and may or may not have worked for some shady people. Lynch gives us little to linger on, slowly pushing us through the monotony of these people's lives, with the only thrill being that maybe something eerie is occuring. And then, Renee is murdered. Fred leaves the narrative. Pete takes over and attempts to wrangle control over Alice, who looks strangely like Renee. Seemingly, our main character gets a second chance, only to ruin it by falling into the same trap again. Falling for the conspiracy instead of the woman.
Where Schrader displays an endless present, containing people who operate seemingly with no past to speak of and no future to move towards, Lynch collapses time through disassociation, Fred becoming Pete as a way to escape culpability for the bloody violence he commits in the name of preserving the image of his marriage. Both directors present men whose masculinity seems endlessly probed by an outside force, but it's only Lynch that gives this force a body, a sickly pale man with a sharp widow's peak and a bulky camera. For Fred, his only power is being able to control how he remembers the events of his life, and Lynch works, piece by gruesome piece, to render him impotent, literally trying rip out of his own skin by the end. It's as if men trying to hold women as complex beings in their heads will literally implode at the collapsing of the image and the failure of genre tropes to warn them about these nuances.
Lost Highway anchors itself around surveillance, but most importantly, self-surveillance. Much like The Canyons, it has never been easier for Fred to fuel his paranoia through constant observation of his partner, whether it's phoning home to see if Renee will pick up, or watching the outside (and eventual inside) of his house through video tapes. Just because Fred doesn't have a phone with a camera in it doesn't mean he can't stoke the flames of conspiratorial thought through the technology available to him. Both movies buckle under the weight of capturing the image. Where Christian loses control over Tara through the absence of his smart phone to capture his version of reality, Fred no longer has the camera to carry the burden of his guilt. Christian explodes everyone else's lives but Fred implodes, and creates Pete, an apparition there to retrace his steps. Neither are able to hold on to the narrative.
In both films, men murdering the women they are attracted to is presented as a perverse form of self-discovery and a concentrated expression of control. In The Canyons, Christian can't bring himself to murder Tara, so he kills Cynthia, a woman he innately views as disposable. Unlike Renee, Tara gets to survive her movie. She is, however, endlessly burdened by the knowledge of the violence that maintains her wealthy lifestyle, how any man she could come to know may just be spinning his wheels, waiting to re-enact the same un-erotic game of jealously, betrayal and sexual violence. She can't tell anyone. The only person who would listen is Noah and she can never see him again, for fear that it will cost him his life. Tara was born to be watched and that is all she can be in a film that hates its own image-making as much as The Canyons does.
From the perspective of these filmmakers, paranoia exists on all sides of infidelity, whether you're the one having the affair or the one being cheated on. In order for this paranoia, and subsequent misogyny, to make sense, both women have to be made sinister and complicit their own abuse. Both Fred and Renee undergo their respective transformations, neither willingly but both with the purpose of exposing the shrinking confines of their marriage and the stark difference between the perceived threat Fred/Pete feels at the loss of his masculinity, and the actual threat Renee/Alice has experienced at the hands of men. Whether you choose to believe Fred/Pete's version of events, that his wife has at some point starred in pornography or that she has been having an affair with...someone, what matters is that in both realities, this woman has experienced some kind of horrific violence. Murdered by her husband or assaulted and coerced into sex work, Renee/Alice's main goal of the movie is escape this narrative. And she is willing to lie and steal to get what she wants.
Similarly, Tara's complicity in the abuse Christian may or may not have inflicted is called into question, and the treatment of sexual violence in The Canyons itself offers a similar parallel. When Tara is invited to Cynthia's house, Cynthia accuses Christian of repeated sexual violence, something the audience will come to learn is a fabrication to draw Tara away from her unstable boyfriend and into Noah's arms. In an attempt to regain some control over her life, she curtly refutes these claims and calls Cynthia a liar, unconscious evidence of her denial at the precarity of her life and a subtextual bucking against two opposing yet equally suffocating patriarchal demands. In this instance, despite its cruelty, her doubt is her shield, though it will not save her. Even though this accusation is a lie, it draws Tara's attention towards the potential this man could have for violence, which will end up being revealed to her by the end of the movie. Her unwillingness to actualise her doubts is caused by the fact that she holds herself responsible for being in the relationship in the first place. This can't go poorly for her because she doesn't have anything else.
The Canyons uses the stark and bright Los Angeles sun in the same way that Lost Highway uses the shadowy middle distance - both seem to flatten the frame, obscuring its intricacies. These are stories where the women are stoic and floundering. The audience isn't even given the catharsis of a hysterical outburst. Tara and Renee are trapped inside narratives they have not written and walk jagged, violent paths towards one conclusion. They exist in a genre that holds gender itself under the microscope, probing its mystic and incomprehensible properties, and then slams these qualities down under a hard fist. Nobody has won. Nobody lives, at least not really. They just persist, the skin of their tragic, bruised faces peeling away in their hands.