If this film were a book it would have become a classic, a Snow Crash, Vurt, or Neuromancer sort of classic. And oddly enough it was a book, in the form of six graphic novels commissioned by Richard Kelly to lead audiences up to the premiere of the actual film which served as the narrative conclusion to the entire series. These six novels were compacted into three, largely unread, and then the film opened to mild derision at Cannes.


Which is unfortunate because it simply is a masterful riff on the near-future fiction of Gibson, Stephenson, Sterling, and a few others. The film seems intent on sprawl, the quintessence of all things cyberpunk. The sprawl of urban planning, social systems, information, and eventually the biographies of people affected by these emerging structures. After a long time, Kelly’s film sprawls to a conclusion that to those uninitiated by the graphic novels is as senseless as it is hypnotic. (The storyline wanders quite a bit, which seemed to be the main contention people have had with the film. But it seems to me that this is more a result of the film being the conclusion to a series of six largely unread graphic novels than Kelly's inability to direct the film. The story isn't contained by the film itself, which exhausts itself on tying up loose ends from a broader story.) His knack for the transcendent and uncanny again proven, Southland Tales collapses in a heap of memes orchestrated by perfectly cast pop-culture icons like the Rock, Mandy Moore, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Justin Timberlake, and Seann William Scott. There is a floating ice cream truck, spiritually powered by Scott (yes – Stifler), at the end that works well as an example for the way the rest of the film develops. It is an utterly unpredictable cultural reference that will leave all but the most oddly equipped audiences in the dust. If there is a future for a Tarantino-like fascination with 1990’s pop culture done in Snow Crash mode, then Kelly may have identified its path of least resistance.


Additional comments penned elsewhere:


There is a large difference between interpreting something and alluding to it, or even aping its narrative trajectories. And the sorts of allusions that lead to allegory are much different than the allusions that occur in the cultural web of reference that typifies cyberpunk lit and Kelly's film. This latter context is more Eco than Bunyan. He has said things about the film like: "It’s like if someone took mushrooms and read the Book of Revelations [sic] and had this crazy pop dream… that’s the film in a nutshell." And: "I think for me, I think of a way I guess in which the world could end immediately, and there's obviously the theory of the second coming, the Christian theory of revelation [also sic]."


So he isn't interpreting Revelation at all, rather using it as a structural starting point for this giant sprawl of a film that touches on a lot of current issues and references (that second link is helpful in this respect). When he says things such as, "It was like the city self-destructing, a big comedy about the city self-destructing," it becomes clear that allusions to Revelation are just one of many devices that build this momentum. There is a small collection of films that do this with other sections of the Bible, most often the Gospels, but this is one of the better purely aesthetic uses of Revelation imagery in film I can recall along with films Notre Musique and Heaven. It really is wonderfully poised, Southland Tales being what would happen if MTV ingested the Left Behind series, guzzled a few years of Drudge Report links, and then got sick all over the director's cut of Donnie Darko.