The MOST 21st-Century Movie
"Under the Silver Lake" is flawed, kind of stupid and brilliant. Let's talk about it.
There’s a thing that directors sometimes do that’s called the "one for them, one for me." I don’t know if he came up with the phrase, but the idea is often attributed to Martin Scorsese and has shown up here or there over the decades. The basic premise is that a director will switch back and forth between a crowd-pleaser and a more personal film that may not connect with audiences in the same way as the former, purely because it means something to the person making it.
David Lowery is an excellent example of this as he jumps back and forth between IP-centric Disney properties and existential indie projects. The man did a Peter Pan movie for Disney+ right after The Green Knight. That’s a real juxtaposition.
Anyway … this is my attempt at doing that within Aerial Shot. It’s a quiet week in the movie landscape, so I’m going to write some words on a movie I love and you can read it or not. Frankly, I don’t give a damn.
Odds are you haven’t seen Under the Silver Lake. It made $2,053,469 at the box office and was an epic bomb despite the fact that it featured Andrew Garfield and was David Robert Mitchell’s follow-up to the horror hit It Follows. Silver Lake came out five years ago and is a rambling neo-noir that is purposefully confusing and disjointed. It’s funny at points, terrifying in sections and is as much a love letter to movies as anything else over the last decade. It’s also a critical artifact when it comes to understanding the 21st century. In good ways and (of course) very, very bad.
The summary for the movie is as follows: Sam is a disenchanted 33-year-old who discovers a mysterious woman, Sarah, frolicking in his apartment's swimming pool. When she vanishes, Sam embarks on a surreal quest across Los Angeles to decode the secret behind her disappearance, leading him into the murkiest depths of mystery, scandal, and conspiracy in the City of Angels.
I guess this is technically true, but what this movie is really about is how stupid an individual (most likely a man) can be when given too much time and a hunch. There’s a conspiracy theory at the center of the case that both leads to something and also nothing, which feels like the best cinematic portrayal of modern-day conspiracy theories. This is a movie both for Reddit while also making fun of it relentlessly. It’s purposefully digressive with Garfield just meandering about trying to find purpose. It feels extra-relevant in a world where glorified buzzwords like “trauma,” “purpose” and “meaning” are tossed around online without a second thought. It’s very possible that a Qanon subscriber would love this movie without understanding that it’s ridiculing that entire subculture in the same way that someone would idolize Jordan Belfort missing the entire point of The Wolf of Wall Street.
The thing you have to remember about Garfield’s Sam is that he’s an idiot. He’s the protagonist only because he is, not because he’s a person that matters or is likable. In fact, he’s kind of a womanizing asshole and the movie knows that going in. Casting the beloved Garfield is a stroke of genius as it keeps you on your toes, searching for reasons to like him despite all of his behavior keeping you cautious. The guy who played Spider-Man can’t be this much of a fuck-up, and yet he is.
After a very specific and grounded nightmare like It Follows, it’s funny that Mitchell followed that up with a sprawling Los Angeles chockful of underground passages and an array of characters that float in and out of the story. It’s the polar opposite of the preceding film and it flopped when the first succeeded. There’s even an extra conspiracy theory at the center of the story that is both crucial to understanding the protagonist and shoddily tossed in.
Under the Silver Lake’s obsession with internet culture, fixation with deriving the meaning of art and grotesque caricatures of young adults feels like the closest anyone has gotten to making sense of the age we live in. Along with movies like Get Out, Thank You for Smoking, TÁR and In the Loop, Silver Lake seems to hit on something about the era we live in. This is not necessarily a good thing.
Anyway, I’m sure I have more thoughts somewhere, but I just wanted to write the first ideas that came to me. You should watch Under the Silver Lake and let me know what you think. If you love it, great. If you hate it, great.