Paranoid Park

directed by Gus Van Sant
screenplay by Gus Van Sant
novel by Blake Nelson
France, USA 2007

What Gus Van Sant has done this time around is he's slightly shifted his main focus. Elephant, Last Days, and his more recent Paris, je t'aime segment are so interesting because they walk a fine line between familiarity and extreme strangeness. In 1942, Albert Camus imprisoned his "stranger" for a failure to assimilate, emotionally, thus removing him from the existential trap posed by the world. Van Sant has been positioning his own emotional strangers in what we would have assumed were familiar environments, and deliberately allowing them to remain, unbridled, until some inevitable natural dissonance. I'm seeing this latter phase as a transition from the formal ambitions of his earlier years to a more zen-like acceptance of the inconsistencies that represent a so-called "normal" life in the weirdness of today's upper middle class society. The past three releases have also seemed to drop that passionate devotion to the angst of youth in favor of a clinical indifference. This quiet, contemplative phase sees Van Sant exploring--rather than battling against--the strangeness. In PP, however, there's a return to that passion. What was strange for us in Elephant--the diverse social lives of children, confused sexual attractions, a world that literally comes in and out of focus--now helps to define main character Alex. Rather than holding up a carnival mirror, distorting the lives of children in order for a grown-up audience to understand the inconsistencies in their own lives, PP really invests in the worldview of Alex and his skater friends, while still pointing out that unnamable, universally frustrating dissonance.

Part of that frustration stems not from Alex's crisis of conscience (which throughout the film nicely serves as a moral weathervane, the old kind, where it's ambiguous which way it's actually pointing), but from the constant reminder that it's possible for rich white males to get away with murder. Detective Liu is sickeningly cordial with Alex. With no pressure from an interrogation, it's not surprising that he's able to breeze his way through the ordeal. In a world such as Larry Clark's, for instance, skaters are pushed around and dehumanized, while Gus Van Sant's counter-culture are treated with the kind of retroactive immunity popularized by today's corporate-controlled leadership. Have we reached the point where skating is finally an acceptable outlet for our children, rather than a dangerous sign of rebellion? One more subcultural trend transcending into the mainstream, perhaps.

While this kind of incongruity is happening, Van Sant follows, with a great degree of compassion, his youthful subjects. He and cinematographers Kathy Li and Christopher Doyle (my favorite; he's Wong Kar-wai's go-to guy) seem to enjoy spinning the rings on the lens, as this time not only the focus shifts, but the exposure as well. It's a nice touch, providing a kind of physical punctuation to color Alex's internal (and the audience's external) struggle. This photographic style is quite interesting in that it provides a visceral tension without the usual discordant music, jagged editing, disturbing content (although there is some of that included in one of the many flashback sequences), hand-held jumpiness, straight out of the textbook, etc. And speaking of flashback sequences, we're once again provided with an incongruity. The story being framed within Alex's own narrative, the question is posed as to why certain story elements have been included earlier and some later. I would argue the plot follows a familiar path from establishment and foreshadowing, through decision and complication, and finally to resolution. The question, then, is why would such an obviously novice writer choose to tell it in such a way? Perhaps the point is that we see our own lives in terms of plot structure, in a sort of an attempt to make sense out of the mess.