I once saw D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) at the Cinematheque Française. Perhaps the most controversial film ever made—it sympathetically tells the story of the post-Civil War origins of the Ku Klux Klan—I was curious to see how the audience would respond. The film, apart from its subject matter, is known for revolutionizing film technique in terms of visual narrative. I thought the audience of the Cinematheque would be there to appreciate its filmic qualities rather than simply to react to its well-known racist narrative. I was mistaken. The audience, as if to let each other know of their positions on the film, seemed oblivious to the film as art, rather laughing and cat-calling. Everyone knew what they were in for. It struck me like watching a documentary on Hitler and booing each time his image appeared.
Were they aware that, despite their intentions, this was a testament to the film’s power? They were engrossed, eyes fixed on the screen, their buttons pushed emotionally, no one walked out indignantly though the film lasted three hours. One of the more interesting moments occurred when The Little Dear One, about to be raped by Gus, The Renegade, commits suicide by leaping to her death. The audience cheered, perhaps preferring to see her raped. One of Griffith’s story techniques was the use of stereotyped characters. Besides The Little Dear One and the Renegade Gus, there are The Colonel, the Faithful Servants, the Proud Daughter of the South, the Youthful Chums, etc. Watching, it occurred to me that not much has changed since 1915 either technically or narratively.
I saw Gus van Sant’s Dead Man’s Wire (2025) the other day. Though his work is uneven artistically, even amateurish, he has ideas. My Own Private Idaho was interesting because it borrowed from Chimes at Midnight by Orson Welles, a much superior film. Van Sant’s Psycho was interesting because it was a shot-for-shot color remake of Hitchcock’s masterpiece. Though it was a lousy film, it was a worthwhile experiment. It was daring to add images to the Shower Sequence, even if they seemed pointless; like the work of a sophomoric film student saying, “I can do that, too!” Last Days, about Kurt Cobain, realistically portrayed a rich rock star out of his mind on drugs doing nothing while surrounded by hangers-on.
His new film is based on a true story: a man finds a piece of real estate which he wants to develop as a shopping mall. He goes to a mortgage company and is granted a loan. He defaults on a single payment, the land is foreclosed upon, the mortgage company takes over and develops the property. The man takes the son of the firm’s owner hostage demanding reparations and a public apology. As this unfolds, the public takes an interest in the story of this “underdog” fighting the system.
There’s a conscious awkwardness. At the end of the film he includes images from period news shows so we know that many of the shots in the film were exact recreations of images that people would’ve seen on TV had they been around in 1977 following the events. This translates into shaky camera movement, and documentary-like hand-held framing: it was curious to see a film shot to look bad.
It’s not good, its value is as a sort of anthropological artifact shining light both on our times and culture. Like almost every American film made since The Birth of a Nation, it uses the same stereotyped character technique developed by Griffith. And just as Griffith’s characters revealed the social categories of his day, Van Sant’s film reveals them in ours.
There’s Bill Skarsgård as the wronged Average Joe White American, a bit white-trashy (he puts ice cubes in his milk) and not a guy who seems to read much, like Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath. He’s a man with no second-degree psychology. Al Pacino plays The Unfeeling White Capitalist; we see him send back a sandwich at a posh resort which has been cut not into thirds as he likes, but only in halves. Later he put his son’s life in jeopardy rather than admitting his wrongdoing. Next, we have his son, the kidnap victim, another White Man, who almost opens up a side of his wounded humanity—his father was difficult to grow up with—under the pressure of captivity, but once freed, reverts to his old crushed-by-dad towing-the-Capitalist-line subservience. Other one-dimensional white characters include the kidnapper’s brother, another trashy man, this time, obese, and policemen, functional white men with no depth or soul to speak of, just doing their jobs.
And then we have the Spiritual Black Characters, the mellow Buddha-like unperturbable radio DJ who’s the only person in the film—along with his wife who has no dialogue to speak of, but who’s of noble bearing—who has anything remotely resembling multi-dimensional humanity. There’s also the Young Cute Black “golly-gee” TV reporter trying to break her first big story and establish her career.
The film failed in the USA, earning back little of its $12 million budget. It’s doing better in France where images of lopsided dysfunctional Americans always guarantee box office receipts. I suspect also that watching it with subtitles may help because they allow one to give depth to what would be otherwise clichéd and lifeless characters.