Drive

A few nights ago I watched Drive starring Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan, directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. I'm not really familiar with Refn's work. The first thing that struck me was the most unconventional soundtrack I've heard in a long time featuring what sounded to me like 80's synth pop. Some of the music I really hated, some of it seemed to work but mostly it seemed to continually draw my attention away from the movie. The whole movie seemed to have an odd late seventies, early eighties feel to it. Aside from the occasional cellphone this film could easily have been made in 1978 with Steve McQueen in the leader role. The role certainly felt like a Steve McQueen part and, oddly enough, in the poster Gosling even looks like McQueen.

I would probably list Gosling as one of my favorite actors of his generation. My first exposure to Gosling was in the 2001 film "The Believer". Gosling would have been roughly 20 at the time and he single handedly carried the film through his incredibly powerful performance as Danny Balint, a young Jewish man who becomes a neo-nazi. In Drive Gosling's character, the unnamed "Driver" is the anti-Balint. Where Balint was able to move people to hate with the powerful force of his words, the Driver rarely speaks at all and has no interest in changing anyone's mind. I think he has half a dozen lines which are sentences of more than two words.

The other thing that really stood out for me was the violence. It was extremely and gratuitously violent. I'm not generally one to complain about excessive violence but it went to far for me to give it a recommendation.

The Resurgence of Revenge.

I've been wondering lately what the resurgence of the revenge film says about the state of American culture. I remember a teacher in junior high describing the film "I Spit on Your Grade" to me as the epitome of everything that was cheap and base about 70's shock films. Just the title is a parody of the genre and yet in the past two years we've seen remakes of "Last House on the Left", "I Spit on Your Grave" and "Straw Dogs", which was just released on video, just to name a few of the higher profile examples. I think part of the trend may be driven by the return of "grindhouse" films like, well, Grindhouse by Tarantino and Rodriguez as well as the "Kill Bill" films.

But somehow I get the feeling that there is a political and cultural similarity between the 70's and the late 00's. The war in Vietnam and the war in Iraq. The economic recession. The extreme polarization of the electorate. There's also a general attitude of angry bitterness on both sides of the political spectrum as well as a sense of alienation.