Scott: The Counselor (2013)

The Counselor is Cormac McCarthy’s first original screenplay and it’s an unusual one. Alternately expository and elliptical, it revolves around an unnamed El Paso counselor (Michael Fassbender) who attempts to capitalise on the drug trade, with dire consequences. For the most part,  it’s driven by ambience and décor, as Scott floods his mise-en-scenes with wealthy, gilded light,  purifying, rather than illuminating, the enormous amount of product placement and conspicuous consumption that drives the film. Early in the narrative, a jeweller tells the counselor that the ideal diamond would be pure light, and that feels like what Scott has tried to achieve here - even the most precious objects are flawed by the cinematography, which exudes a seething, threatening ambience that’s not constricted to the homes and environs of the wealthy. Instead, the instability, danger and strangeness of bordertown has been transplanted vertically: it’s no longer Ciudad Juarez that’s exotic or threatening, but the lives of the wealthy who move across the actual border with ease. And that creates an extraordinary series of class cusps: every movement from one class experience to another takes on the majesty and terror of the many crossings that dot McCarthy’s literary career. For all Scott’s tendency to displace the characters into the illict networks surrounding them, then, this isn’t exactly a network critique in the manner of, say, Traffic or The Wire, just as the cast isn’t quite large or elastic enough to be an ensemble cast. Instead, McCarthy’s sense of class is so drastic and so primal that there are worlds in the film that remain forever unknowable to other worlds, crossings that can never be made. And that unknowability is what moves the film towards horror: unlike other pundits, McCarthy seems to have no understanding, and no real interest in understanding, what could motivate the counselor to migrate from the 1% to the 0.1%. By conventional standards, that makes for quite a superficial, skin-deep critique, but the film’s power lies in showing how easily wealth registers as horror when it precedes rationalisation, when it is all there on the surface – and it's a film that fervently believes in the seething sentience of surfaces, the power of high camp to recover the horrors that hide in plain sight.