Kelly: Southland Tales (2006)

One of the most confounding, ambitious dystopias of the 00s, Southland Tales is set in an alternate present, in which the United States has been hit by a second wave of terrorist attacks, precipitating a third world war. Against that backdrop, Kelly traces out a series of characters trying to revise or renegotiate their identity in Los Angeles, including Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar), a film star trying to rebrand herself as a reality show host, Private Roland Taverner and Officer Roland Taverner (Sean William Scott), a pair of identical twins who gradually suspect they might be the same person, and Boxer Santoros (The Rock), an action star who’s been struck with amnesia, and searches the city for traces of his previous identity. Like so many films set in L.A.,  it’s an ensemble drama – but where L.A. ensemble dramas of the past used the city to gesture towards some imminent, unimaginable connectivity, Southland Tales makes it clear that that moment is well and truly behind us. In this world, connectivity has reached saturation point – for the most part, the film unfolds as a multimedia event, rather than a film per se, as Kelly floods his frames with a bewildering proliferation of screens and interfaces, just as his vast cast is, for the most part, only tangentially or obliquely related to what we’d think of as the traditional film industry, devoid of any privileged distance from the media-drenched citizens they play. Relayed and related from one media device to another, Kelly’s images don’t even feel second-hand – they’ve lost all connection to their original image, let alone their original subject, as every frame feels gripped by a kind of free-form, hysterical amnesia, perhaps explaining why most of the threads coalesce around Boxer’s search for his identity. As soon as we emerge from one screen, we discover we’re in another – the transition between scenes, the whole point of editing and montage, seems more to remind us that what we’re watching has already been processed by someone else, rather than for any narrative reason. Or if there is a narrative, it’s unfolding simultaneously, rather than sequentially, incorporating whatever screen you might happen to be watching it on, as well as any other screens that might be in the vicinity. A film like this can’t really end, if only because, by the end, it’s no longer really a film – it’s an event whose parameters change depending on its platform, creating a new space for itself each time it’s screened.