Aggro Dr1ft

Harmony Korine has been a blind spot of mine. I can't recall when I first heard his name, but it must have been in the last few years. All that I learned gave the impression that upon seeing one of his movies, I'd either be 100% on board, or never want to watch another. Living close (enough) to a premier arthouse theater meant I had the chance to see Aggro Dr1ft on the big screen, so I finally made a point to dip my toe into his oeuvre. I started with Gummo, his 1997 debut...coming of age film? It's about life in a town which never recovered after a tornado ripped it apart, mostly following various teenagers. Then moved on to Trash Humpers against the advice of a friend, simply because the trailer grabbed me.

I learned something about Korine almost immediately: he does not care one iota if anyone else likes his movies. His goal with film is not to communicate something deeper about the human condition, or to bring you in to his world. Rather, it's to depict exactly the kind of things he finds funny or cool or sexy, absolutely refusing to hold your hand. If you like it, awesome, you're his brand of weirdo. If not, fuck you. In a way, it's one of the most honest approaches to filmmaking you can take, not giving an inch to concepts like "good taste" or "plot" or "themes". Instead, he's baring his naked, unadulterated soul in the best way he knows how. You're either gonna like it or not.

So. Why was I dedicated enough to drive over an hour to catch a screening at midnight on a Saturday?

Primarily its gimmick: the movie was entirely shot in infrared. This requires fully colorizing the image, and choosing a baseline from which to anchor that gradient since the infrared spectrum is so much wider than that of visible light. This means that when something warm enters an otherwise cool space (for example, a lit cigarette moving indoors), the entire color scheme of the shot might flip. It means that moving the camera can cause colors to shift drastically, in turn changing what's emphasized in the shot. However, the nature of infrared and how our brains work with shadows and such means that this style of filmmaking loses a ton of detail in the world, most noticeably in people's faces. Body heat is far more uniform than skin features, so people often seems like poorly rendered video game characters, save for the few times Korine pushes in for a true close up, highlighting even their facial hair.

Obscured by an extra layer of VFX, it's hard to spot for certain what was and wasn't CGI. However, even that couldn't cover up some incredibly dated character animations that must have at least been computer assisted, such as the repeated air humping from crime lord and Big Bad, Toto (Joshua Tilley). Of course, if already using CGI for people, why not use it to augment the rest of the world? Each time BO (Jordi Mollà) looks at someone for long enough, some part of their skin starts to show signs of a pattern which reveals something about their character. Granted, there are only a couple we see, primarily "circuit board" and "flowers", with undersized angel wings reserved for Toto. And if that's not enough, there's the huge, Tenacious D style devil silhouetted in the sky sometimes when BO looks up.

If you're curious for yourself with no nearby screenings, you get a sense of the look in either trailer.

The natural question that follows any sort of experiment is: why? What were they trying to accomplish, and what does the experiment allow them to better explore? As previously discussed, this isn't always the most fruitful question for Korine. In addition to his sense of humor being that of a fifteen year-old boy, he loves to troll. The bits I've seen of his work is provocative for its own sake, with only the thinnest attempts at actually using it to say something. He seems to revel in it, even establishing a video game studio slash art collective in Miami called EDGLRD to help produce and distribute this movie.

That being said, finding out EDGLRD also calls itself a video game studio helps clarify his intent with the film. It seems the infrared was merely a tool for trying to more seamlessly blend the video game aspects with reality. Which itself does make a statement, albeit not a strong one. As our entertainment has converged, with video games looking more and more photo-real and audience expectations being that they tell a compelling and complex story, he seems to be observed the confluence of video games with real life. The plot, the character's absurdly simplistic dialog, the way almost everyone apart from BO reads as an NPC, all of that makes some more sense. However, they read as a game from (generously) twenty years ago, causing the whole thing to fall apart as a mind-numbing disaster on screen.

The score pulses throughout the entire film, barely stopping to breathe for even a moment. While music has always been an important part of games, the ones that can get away with wall-to-wall tend to lack a real story. They know that blanketing the whole thing with music, especially mixed only slightly quieter than the dialog, serves to distance you from any plot beats. Which may have been intentional here, as the plot amounts to "An assassin is tasked with killing Toto, a demonic crime boss", and the dialog is baffling. It mostly consists of BO, speaking in a voice over fit for ASMR, making bland statements about the world and family, occasionally repeating the same exact line a dozen times like a deranged Bart Simpson. Or else it's BO's unnamed wife (Chanya Middleton) moaning how she misses and wants him while writhing and twerking on their bed. Or else it's Toto shouting "Bitch!" at the women hanging off of him as well as those he's kidnapped and displayed in cages. All of which makes it clear we're not meant to care, because how could you?

Instead, I think the people seated behind me had the right idea. From the beginning, they were having a grand old time, laughing at the exact same lines and shots that caused my face to scrunch up in confusion. They kept it quiet at first, seemingly a bit self-conscious that they were the only ones. But slowly, surely, it dawned on the rest of the audience (myself included) that there was no use trying to extract meaning or story or anything we normally want from a movie. As any and all expectations fell away, short bursts came from various parts of the theater, until they accompanied every shot of jiggling flesh, every time Travis Scott showed up for some reason, every time the little people showed up in their robes and swinging their swords with all the enthusiasm of a kid in a school play. It was all nonsense, meant to create a vibe but full of so much amateurism and self-importance that it instead resulted in a laughably confused soup of insanity. And it was over that mediocrity that we bonded, partially laughing at the film, and partially laughing at ourselves for paying to see it.