On Paranoid Park

Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park does not express the psychology of its main character Alex, a teenage skateboarder who accidentally commits murder; the film embodies his psychology. If we see the film as a movement, it is a fractured, discontinuous, and fragmented one. It is a movement looking out, not an invitation to look inwards. As a film, it is self-consciously flat; both in its frontal shots of Alex and in its use of lenses to flatten the background and diminish deep space. In this way it does not treat Alex as an object - and camera (by proxy, the audience) as subject - the camera seeks to submerge itself in the face of Alex. The use of the full-frame aspect ratio (which favors close-ups and movement), as well as the sound design which is recorded extremely close to the actor and objects to pick up the sonorous sounds of their bodies even when they're not moving or talking, foreshortens the distance between screen and actors. The film is also interested in meta textures; its use of Super 8 footage reminds me of Japanese and Chinese painting, where paper texture is equally important in the value of a painting. In a sense, it deliberately creates a flatness both literally and metaphorically - the screen is reduced to the screen, the face reduced to a face.

The camera's relation to the characters (also, mise-en-scène) is not so much weak subjectivity as a submerged subjectivity, a subjective qua objective camera that does not merely record its character, Alex, but merges with him, influenced by his movements (as is the fragmented narrative of the film). Not only is the narrative also flatly constructed (no implied depth via psychological underpinnings of motive or reason), it also ignores the rules of causality. Scenes are repeated many times - sometimes out of context - and dialogue (direct speech) overlaps with voiceover (reported speech); these scenes, as in many Bresson films such as Diary of a Country Priest, A Man Escaped, and Pickpocket, lose their narrative meaning; they become independent slivers of events, outside of time, that construct a whole. In short, nothing happens because. Things just happen.

But what is this whole that the film talks about? Is it the main character Alex? In a sense, yes, and no. Alex is not a solid, unwavering 'I'. He has no personality per se; he is constructed by his interactions with the people around him and the things that happen to him. He is a product of his relationships with people, the trends and fashions at the moment, the zeitgeist (like the Iraq War, mentioned in passing in the film) etc. He is intricately tied to every little thing that happens in the world. He is not his own person. The murder is significant because it shakes this false sense of ego and shatters the psychoanalytic mirror into tiny reflecting shards - we are all products of everything that is happening and that has happened up to this point of time, gathering and dissolving and never staying the same. This is the film's point of view and its most profound.

From the outset, Alex is a stereotype: he is a skater, he wears his hair long, he has his left ear pierced, he has a pretty girlfriend etc. But contrary to other American filmmakers, Van Sant doesn't use stereotypes as a shorthand; instead, as in his previous high school film Elephant, Van Sant uses these stereotypes as ciphers (just as he uses the faces of his characters, the premises of his films as ciphers). Being a stereotypical 'skater' does not define Alex at all; the essence of his being exists independently of these attributes. It is when his life begins to take on the attributes of his stereotype that reality is called into question. His pretty girlfriend, who has sex with him so that she can lose her virginity, calls her friend right after to tell her how it was everything she'd expected it to be. Their petty flirtations at the school locker play out like a badly scripted version of Gossip Girl and The Hills with stiffer acting. (Van Sant never cuts to a reverse shot to cover up the awkward pauses and rough intonations of his unprofessional cast; he chooses, instead, to rest on Alex's POV during the dialogue scenes.) Their lives are not a high school drama; they're what a high school drama should be.

Alex lives a stereotyped life, one that has already been institutionalized and glorified by the media. In a way, Alex represents the psyche of the 21st century teenager: with the global consciousness being fragmented by the internet and the movies, every emotion - love, sex, and death - has already been experienced for you. What does it mean then to experience things for the first time yourself?