The following post contains spoilers about Alex Ross Perry's The Color Wheel. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!I tried really hard to find out online whether Alex Ross Perry has a sister. Ultimately, I failed.
But I sure hope he doesn't, because The Color Wheel is a really weird way to introduce yourself to the world.
Since I can't be sure you've heeded my spoiler warning, I'll prattle on a bit further before getting to my point.
This was not technically the first introduction of the former Kim's Video clerk to the world, as The Color Wheel is actually his second feature, the first being something I'd never even heard of called Impolex. For the sake of simplicity, let's say that movie I'd never heard of doesn't exist.
Pretty bold, then, to make your first movie about brother-sister incest.
To say The Color Wheel is about that is not really accurate, as it doesn't happen until the final ten minutes. Of course, once you've seen it all the way through, you can't help thinking that this is the movie's theme, and the last ten minutes just bring to a culmination something that had been building the whole time, only you didn't notice it.
Speaking of building up to things, you'd figured you'd build to the movie about brother-sister incest, not go to it right out of the gate.
For those of you who haven't seen this movie but didn't care about having it spoiled, I'll tell you a little bit about it. Although it was made in 2011, it's got the grainy, DIY quality of an early 1990s indie movie, complete with the black and white and the use of supporting actors who were actors in name only. I won't say the filmmaking itself is amateurish, as there are some nice long takes and details in the writing that I thought were quite good. I will say that Perry has refined his craft over the years in films like Listen Up Phillip, Queen of Earth and Golden Exits. (In fact, that's the entire Perry filmography to date, though Her Smell is set to debut next month.)
The story concerns a mid-20s brother who has agreed to go on a road trip to help his black sheep sister (also mid-20s) move her stuff out of the house of her most recent ex, a university professor she was sleeping with. There's not much more to the story than that, though they do attend a party thrown by his sister's frenemy from childhood. Carlen Altman plays the sister and Perry himself plays the brother.
Oh, and in the last ten minutes, while lying on the couch together in increasingly suggestive proximity, they start making out, and it's implied that they have sex.
Huh?
I knew something oddball was going to occur in the last ten minutes because the film's reputation preceded it, and I was fairly sure this was what it would be, though my second bet was on a random murder occurring if it wasn't incest. Well, it was incest. And I was surprised even though I guessed it, just because that type of thing usually takes you by surprise. It's just so taboo that you only include it in a movie as a sign that the characters are really damaged and this is what they've been reduced to.
Except I don't really think that JR and Colin are all that damaged. They've got tendencies toward narcissism, sure, and are a bit insufferable. A couple reviews quoted on Wikipedia characterize them as "unpleasant." Weirdly, Colin is also a bit racist (another randomly provocative thing for Perry to include in his "first" (not really his first) film). But damaged? No more than any of us.
Yet there they are, making out, having the type of sex that could result in severely deformed offspring, like it was nothing.
I'm not even actually being critical of it, because I did find it interesting. It's about a five-minute take of mostly her talking that ends in this, which would be impressive in terms of the staging if nothing else. I just find it a very strange thing to include in the film you hope will get you noticed, because it could get you noticed for all the wrong reasons.
And really skeeve out your sister if you have one.
Then again, this kind of thing is not actually unprecedented. Ever heard of a guy named David O. Russell? His first feature was called Spanking the Monkey, and it ends with an act of incest between a mother and a son. And I know David O. Russell has, or at least had, a mother.
I suppose the argument could be made that it's better to start with the brother-sister incest movie than to make it only once you've gotten a certain measure of creative control. (Many indie directors do have creative control of their minuscule-budgeted films, but you know what I mean.) If you build up to it, I suppose that could be interpreted as you finally getting to make your passion project after cutting your teeth on things that only paid the bills. Better maybe to toss off your incest movie randomly. Perry hasn't returned to that topic in his films, anyway.
I guess it did get Perry the right kind of attention, because like Russell, he has been regularly releasing films every couple years since The Color Wheel. Though maybe the disastrous 2015 pairing of Accidental Love, which was directed under a pseudonym, and Joy finally knocked Russell off that pace, because I don't see anything for him in the pipeline.
Posts like this, I suppose, demonstrate how much bravery it takes for an artist to make something truly provocative. I and at least half the people who saw The Color Wheel wondered if Alex Ross Perry was a sister fucker. He's probably not, but to his credit, he's not really worried about people thinking he is. If he were an actual sister fucker, he'd probably keep that a secret, just as if he were an actual racist he probably wouldn't make a movie in which a character played by him is a racist.
You do write what you know, though, so on some level, this is something Perry "knows" -- even if it's being transmogrified in order to appear in this form.
I've thought about writing stories about provocative topics, but shied away from them because I thought they revealed something about me that I didn't want revealed -- something shameful. A true artist does not feel the shame that would prevent them from sharing their art with the world, and so I guess, at least in that sense if not others, Perry is a true artist.
No comments:
Post a Comment