"Twentynine Palms" (2003)

Bruno Dumont's "american film," one in which a certain strain of vulgar, savage Americanism is represented (not altogether incorrectly) by the wasteland through which two accidental lovers decide to trek across on a whim. It is the part of America I know quite well, the region known to a few as David Lynch's Inland Empire (a very real place) and to the rest of the world as San Bernardino County -- the region I grew up in. In Dumont's eyes, America is perfectly encapsulated in the grotesqueries of the California desert lifestyle, in which civilization seems to be represented by a chain of cheap motels and Dairy Queens, apoplectic pickup truck drivers who scream "This is my street!" when someone jaywalks in front of them, or the lurid glare of a solitary car lurching through early morning darkness in search of street walkers. America is the glibly titled "Desert Ranch Market," it is Route 66, yellow Hummers, massive windmill generators, mute off-duty U.S. Marines licking ice cream cones in weird contemplation. America is "emptiness." It is quotation marks. Dumont, aware of all this hyperbole and sarcasm, uses a variety of tongue-in-cheek citations to lull us into passivity. The sex helps of course and the couple (the male lead played by a slightly disagreeable actor by the name of David Wissak and the female lead played by Sharunas Bartas' muse Yekaterina Golubeva) come across as sufficiently odd-matched as to make their sex creditably necessary and desperate. "J'ai envie de toi" is a very real emotion for people who have very little in common. Sex on the brain, but also: animalism. Eventually, the death-drive. In a Hummer of course, driving toward nowhere, toward oblivion. 29 Palms -- whose name resembles nothing of its character, indeed whose name seems to evoke all the absurdity of Beckett-like emptiness -- is the site of oblivion.

For all of this unfortunately spot-on symbolism (unfortunate because people in the Inland Empire actually enjoy driving Hummers and raging, lifted Ford pickup trucks) and in spite of Dumont's quite excellent stagecraft (his pacing is quite superb to be honest), I have to agree with some of his critics and dissenters: Dumont's intentions are very much disingenuous -- we learn only at the end that the careful setup of intimacy shared by the two lovers was used as a ruse for a classic carpet-pulled-from-under-your-feet parlor trick. But without giving anything away, it is really so much worse than that, so much more vile: the film seems to exist only for its ending, flattening out the potential for any emotions other than fear and desire. In a word, 29 Palms is structurally (and literally) abusive: and Dumont congratulates himself on it (there is a quote somewhere in which he declares that film can be reduced to these two emotions: fear and desire, death and sex.) Reduced to these two polarities -- death and sex, fear and desire -- 29 Palms is effective, undeniably haunting, and it leaves a brand on the brain. It sets out to perform a ruthless act, and it pulls it off with stark determination.

Yet for all this type of abuse, there also results a quite vivid lack in clarity. 29 Palms makes its point, but fails to surpass the stringent circumference of its shock-value. A nihilist, after all, is nothing but a nihilist. An inexplicable act occurs... and then what? Is this philosophy at work? Is this mysticism? (One character says quite bluntly: "But there is nothing to understand.") Certainly not a metaphysics of time; rather, a very conservative materialism masquerading as "being and nothingness." The point is: the dog eats the dog. Meat wants meat. The aesthetic problem lies not with the inexplicable demon-ex-machina ending, but with the total collapse of sensitivity that was built up so carefully in the earlier passages. Yes, we get it: one man's pleasure is another man's rape (notice the similarity with which sexual joy [which to Dumont is nearly always a disguised sadism] etches its grimace of pain across the lover's and the tormentor's face equally). Humans are beasts after all. The sex and violence binary all over again. Eros versus Thanatos, but in Dumont's world, Eros = Thanatos. Hence the odd animalistic orgasms of the two lovers, the spontaneous spurts of violence shared between them, the recriminations, the strangling and slapping. Eventually, the boredom, only to be countered by another miraculous surge of lust, the words that rise to their mouths like a prayer: "J'ai envie de toi."

I read somewhere that 29 Palms should be considered Dumont's horror film, but I find the genre specificity of  the horror film insufficient to account for how much emphasis he places on the development of the lovers' relationship, something which is, I think, the only (almost) authentic feature of the film. They are believable to me, and their emptiness, reflected by the diurnal motions of the lust that drives them forward, endlessly forward, is very real: there are indeed people like this, attractive sexually-motivated people like this, in "real life." I see a perverse Antonioni at work here, a bit of Pasolini as well, unfortunately lacking any of those directors' gifts for actual catharsis. Ironically, Dumont's films are nearly always parodies or simulacra of catharsis: catharsis for dummies, catharsis with a baseball bat. If one were to accept the claim that 29 Palms is Dumont's horror film, then it would be akin to declaring that practically any of Dumont's films are variations of the horror-in-disguise. Dumont's nihilism is fundamentally horror-driven, a philosophical horror at what he conceives to be the impossibility of actual human goodness (or he implies this, since not much else can be gleaned from a lot of heavy-handed gestures). Perhaps all horror films derive from this principle, but the horror film enjoys a certain friction with genre constraints that make it either revelatory or asinine: with 29 Palms the constraints are nowhere to be found, the desert is everywhere, the limitations are only what can be drawn from weeds and rocks and gasoline stations. The boundlessness of 29 Palms prevents it from being a proper horror film -- and Dumont, moreover, is not very interested in such restraints. I would aver that Dumont's style could possibly improve if he ever developed a taste for genre, for the straight-ahead horror film -- but he is a style unto himself, he is Dumont, and that trademark carries enough cultural capital on its own to keep him in the shock-and-awe business for a long time coming.