For this edition of the DIRECTOR FOCUS series, I recorded two back-to-back episodes highlighting the first four films of Rick Alverson's career thus far: The Builder & New Jerusalem (Episode 276), and The Comedy & Entertainment (Episode 277). I also suggest you hit those links to read the corresponding reviews in chronological order before ingesting this post, which will seek to tie all of them to his most recent and–in my opinion–best film, The Mountain.
To start, if you'll allow it, I'd like to put forth the idea that the first four films are all essentially about the same thing: reckoning with existential dread. They all come at the idea from a different position, with the thematic scope broadening until we arrive at The Mountain, a culmination of this idea, parsed from various angles under the umbrella of the American experience. If we think of this as the construction of a simple house, then the first four films are the pillars and The Mountain is the apex, at once a resolution and a series of even more complex questions.
#5 New Jerusalem
There's an oversaturated amount of symbolism and subtext and metaphor in the whole film, and the idea of utopia is throughout it, and the aspirational models and modes of athletics and medicine and spirituality and this idea of the perfectible, perfect union between people, between the genders, between the past. That's a whole theme through the hermaphrodite of antiquity, the platonic ideal of the union of the man and the woman. This glorious being, the perfectible, perfect union that runs through the thing, and ultimately, the normative idea of coupling in the '50s. It's sort of consistent with the normative suppression of the prickly particulars of personalities with a lobotomy. And ultimately, the couple, they end up in this uncertain space of normalized passivity, and it's a domestic space. They do what they should do, they follow the dream, and, you know, ascend the mountain, and there's just not a hell of a lot up there [laughs]. –Rick Alverson, Thrillist
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. –Genesis 1:27You can go a long way trying to connect the dots, seeing a throughway in a maze that may or may not be there (seeing something as a maze instead of a wide-open space to begin with, etc). All of these connections came naturally to me, though. Intentionality and meaning are not the same thing; only one is subjective. And explaining art is always a zero sum game.
Laying out how The Mountain is the culmination of ideas up to this point is the ultimate zero sum game; there's enough going on in each film–especially the most recent three–to fill a book (however oversaturated or not). But there's something exhilarating in seeing/finding the throughlines even if they're wholly imaginary. In New Jerusalem, Ike's attempt to bond with Sean through holiness isn't necessarily subversive but the homoerotic undertones are undeniable...
That Sean ultimately rejects his proposal, using the prayer card story, falls in line with that same idea of the "glorious being." We're at once sickened and fully enamored. We can't understand why things don't feel natural.
#4 The Builder
For some reason, I’m irritated by so much in cinema but metaphors particularly drive me insane, and allegories. But this movie is just all metaphors, allegory and me speaking through the characters. It’s raw building blocks, because I didn’t understand those things that irritated me so I wanted to engage with them in different ways. –Rick Alverson, The Upcoming
Instead of committing suicide, people go to work. –Thomas Bernhard, Correction
The thematic scope gets exponentially larger with each subsequent movie; The Builder is by far the most insular, and sparse. All of the supporting characters might as well be ghosts. Every interaction is a stifling hiccup. The Builder, the immigrant, the outsider is a stand-in for anyone who's ever felt alienated or destroyed by the conflicts of purpose and duty. We have to put our hands to good use: to make something, or wash a dish.
When the lie of all this is revealed, we take solace in the simple things, like potholes...
There's a limiter on apathy when you have to work.
#3 Entertainment
One of my favorite writers is the novelist Thomas Bernhard, and every one of his books resemble one another. They have surrogates for the same position and value of characters in previous books, and so there’s this tonal exploration of a very small space over the course of many novels. I think there’s something beautiful about that. –Rick Alverson, Slant Magazine
Until writing was invented, man lived in an acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog. –Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage
While Entertainment stands out, in many ways, as Alverson's most unique picture (it contains, by far, the most scripted dialogue to date), its resemblance to the others is still clear. We aren't necessarily supposed to resonate with The Comedian. He's but the (distorted) mirror for us to see passing characters both large and small. If the stillborn baby in the bathroom is the artist's art, then Michael Cera's stranger in the bathroom is the artist's audience: feeding on the art, not because it means anything, but because somewhere deep inside it is a map. Follow it long enough (ie., consume enough content!) and you'll get to the end.
Conversely, the union of Andy and Susan by the end of The Mountain is a hybrid of both entities, both art and audience. They are the ultimate passive machine–it's all intake, together as one–and to our eyes: purely spectacle...
#2 The Comedy
The subject matter of the film is the subject matter of the film, and this isn't some kind of propagandistic tirade in promotion of reckless behavior, misogyny, and racism. It's patently obvious that the ugliness of those things, and the way that they're portrayed in the film, is its own form of criticism ... The moral ambiguity that's in the film is in there for a reason. –Rick Alverson, The Austin Chronicle
Why do you lie awake all night staring at the ceiling? Why, why, why do you refuse to recognize you have problems and deal with them? The answer is that people have forgotten how to relate or respond. In this day of mass communications and instant communications, there is no communication between people. Instead it’s long-winded stories or hostile bits, or laughter. But nobody’s really laughing. It’s more an hysterical, joyless kind of sound. –John Cassavetes, Cassavetes on CassavetesThere might not be a piece of cinema that struck me so deeply in the last ten years. Tim Heidecker's Swanson is not an antihero. I'm sure there are equally vile if not worse protagonists in cinematic history, but to find one so arbitrarily callous in a contemporary setting? you'd be hard-pressed. The scene where Swanson watches a woman have a seizure on his boat is often mentioned as the nadir of this sickening apathy, but the scene with his father's male nurse (above) is just as difficult. His pain is real. As Wally is in search of tortured souls, Swanson is in search of souls to torture. They seek discomfort. One on a mission to quell and the other on a mission to extort. The joke is, it's the same mission in the end...
The scenes where Swanson abuses or fucks with innocent strangers seem to go on forever. The effects of his cruelty on these subjects, by and large, likely won't extend into the night. When Wally jams a pick into the brains of his subjects, it's over in an instance, and the effects last forever.
#1 The Mountain
Largely, the lobotomy was a pacifying procedure. There are a lot of parallels to cinema here—essentially, Andy is a surrogate for the audience, as all protagonists are. The audience, by default, has an expectation of being pacified, as opposed to being activated by the film. –Rick Alverson, Texas Monthly
You imagine the carefully pruned, shaped thing that is presented to you is truth. That is just what it isn't. The truth is improbable, the truth is fantastic; it's in what you think is a distorting mirror that you see the truth. –Jean Rhys, Good Morning, MidnightSo how is The Mountain a culmination of all these thematic elements re existential dread? Well, plainly put, I feel the delineations are clear:
• PURPOSE/WORK (The Builder): Both characters are struggling in their roles: Wally as the increasingly controversial doctor/savior, and Andy as photographer/assistant/anything at all. As The Builder failed to build to anything, both men meet the same fate here.
• RELIGION/FAITH (New Jerusalem): While not addressed directly, religious ephemera is prevalent is throughout the walls of this film, and the lobotomy procedure itself is a stand-in for a kind of religious act.
• APATHY/PRIVILEGE (The Comedy): Arguably the most difficult element to tie in, it feels again, on some level, that there is a privilege in the ability to shut things off completely. All of Wally's patients seem like people of some means.
• ENTERTAINMENT (Entertainment): The clear relation here is the picture metaphor: the difference between a mountain and a picture of a mountain.
And how does all that add up to something I've previously referred to as the "American Experience"? It's such a big and a vague idea that to try to spell it out, letter by letter, would seem to defeat the purpose. (Rick Alverson is not shy about talking about the meanings and themes in his films and many of the interviews linked to above are a great start, FYI.) On a personal level, I see in these four concepts the building blocks of the American way of life that's been cultivated over the 20th century and into today. And I see in the American 1950s–a golden age of sorts of the entire history of the country–captured in The Mountain to represent the lie inherent in the American dream. It's beyond impressive to me that Alverson's most classically structured movie is also the closest he's come to constructing the film equivalent of a tone poem, of making movies like John Cage made music.