Korine: Mister Lonely (2007)

Harmony Korine’s third feature takes place within the impersonating community, revolving around a Michael Jackson (Diego Luna) who meets a Marilyn Monroe  (Samantha Morton) on the streets of Paris and follows her to an impersonator commune deep in the Scottish highlands. Populated by Charlie Chaplin, Shirley Temple, Madonna and the Queen among others, it’s an eccentric, oddball community in the vein of Gummo, partly because these characters, as their professions might suggest, take an imitative rather than a reactive approach to the world and each other. For the most part, they don’t respond to things, they replicate them – or respond by replicating – meaning that’s there’s no moment or movement that’s not an attempt to become something else, or an effort to displace whatever’s happening around it. As a result, there’s something deeply transfigurative about Korine’s mise-en-scene – or, perhaps, more accurately, his mise-en-abyme – as his camera adopts takes the same imitative approach, jettisoning any trace of ironic distance or detachment in the process. In fact, Korine’s camera goes further than his characters – in its hands, imitation isn’t merely a principle of human interaction but of the entire universe, harmonising the most unusual objects, spaces and atmospheres by way of their alchemical ability to imitate and generate each other. On the one hand, that makes for something generative and self-replicating about the film’s dialogue, which is always centrifuging around monologues of infinitestimal self-imitation, as the characters latch onto a phrase, tic or hook and see how many ways they can impersonate it. At the same time, the dialogue’s subsumed into the logic of music video, rather than film – specifically, the way music videos manage to make the most diverse, disjunctive situations feel like manifestations of a single pulse, rhythm or melody; after all, it was Michael Jackson who gave credence to music video as an art form, fusing animal, vegetable and mineral into a new kind of mimetic grace. It makes sense, then, that there are no song fragments on the soundtrack – every song is allowed to play out in full, as Korine treats each musical moment as the pretext for a full-blown music video phantasmagoria. And Korine ultimately includes himself in this imitative cycle, punctuating the main story with a series of music videos in the life of a transfigurative priest and pilot, played by mentor Werner Herzog, that feel less like a subplot than an actual short by Herzog interpolated into the film as an object of imitation and veneration – and there’s no better subject for Herzog's “dreams that allow us to find one another” than Michael Jackson.