finally watched the dirties and god that was so sickening to watch. im surprised to see it mostly discussed in the context of the themes of queerness when the movie in it's entirety feels so incredibly self reflective and about matt johnson's whole creative ethos (which is a crazy move for a debut feature)
it feels like it is about matt's compulsion to put on these performances as a way to explore boundaries and repressed desire without it having to be real because he is just "shooting his movie" and the lengths he will go to to create. the element of exploring desires through creating a new reality is obviously going to come with a queer subtext, as it so often does with matt, but it feels like a smaller point in a larger picture about what it means to escape into your own fiction. matt is only capable of enacting this violence because of his detachment from reality and the lie he tells himself about it's purpose. the goal of creation is the only justification needed to turn this terrible thing he is going to do from a real event to something that is acceptable to him in its fiction. the violence is more of a vehicle for the film than the film is the vehicle for the violence.
but it feels like the movie has this metatextual tension between matt johnson the character, who cannot exist beyond performance, and matt johnson the director who is quite literally performing. the scene where actor owen is mad at director matt on the cliff gets recontextualized in the edit as high schooler owen and matt because in that moment both matts are the same, someone who cannot drop the performance and their focus on the fictitious because that performance is who they are. both matts are filming real people, real students, real locations that are alive with the mundane and in the end, both of their movies are one and the same. the dirties that you, the audience, are watching is the same movie that matt the shooter is making, based on the included end cards, and it is also the movie that exists in our world. both of these matts are making this film together because what they make is identical, they just hold different contexts. it gives this deep feeling of complicity and voyeurism because the audience proxy, jared and his camera, are a big part of why matt is doing this and in being awed by it, you fulfill and justify his desires to film this thing he does.
part of the genius of the dirties as a school shooting movie is that it is drawing an interesting comparison between the morbid cultural fixation with school shootings and how that satisfies the shooters desires to be seen and understood with the way that films provide a similar type of experience (while still letting the violence be detached in it's fictional nature) and the satisfaction that brings the director. and it feels like matt johnson is so uniquely equipped to make that comparison considering the type of low budget, reality bending filmmaking he specializes in.
we get to experience real matt johnson indulging in his typical impulses of deception of real people through performance as a means of controlling reality (something that he continues to do to a larger degree in ntbts and operation avalanche) while also pointing to the fact that this blurring of fiction and reality and the exhibitionism/voyeurism of filmmaking is what gives school shooter matt the psychological cover to kill people. there is a deep, dreadful, impending feeling of violence and harm in this self deception about what is true and what is performance. matt can't even really understand why owen is scared of him in that final scene because he has so fully convinced himself that he is the good guy of his movie rather than a murderer in real life. holding a gun, blood splattered, the line, "it's me," holds a more truthful implication, which is the violence matt commits is the real him that neither him nor owen could really see up until now through the veil of his performance. it kind of made me think about that bit of the webseries commentary where matt didn't realize how terrible it was to use his real sister's name for his sister in the web series where the whole point is blurring what is real and fake until he saw how deeply it upset her. matt's approach to making art is that he tries to distance himself from the constructed reality he is making while still getting to put as much of his real self in it as possible. he wants to exist as matt johnson who is both completely genuine and also a completely fabricated performance and the dirties feels like him pulling out that part of his creative impulse and showing the worst aspects of it while still getting to play in the fiction he continues to construct. it's simultaneously self critical and self indulgent which just heightens the sickening sense of reality as you are watching both matts enact their plots.
the parallels to ntbts are also really interesting because matt reflects a very similar impulse in the series. he is not able to grasp the real ramifications of the terrible and manipulative things he does because he is so fixated on his goals, his performance and the lies he unconsciously tells himself (though in this world it is more fixated on jay and their life together). he experiences no moral weight to drugging his best friend in the same way that matt displays no moral weight to actually killing these students in the dirties. neither of them can conceptualize consequence when so enthralled by the act of doing something they see as incredible or a means to an end. i can't remember which interview this is from or what movie it was about but i remember that anecdote about matt being insistent on getting a shot of him running straight at a moving train that is barreling towards him and could not be convinced that he would absolutely die from that because he could "jump out of the way in time" and it got to the point where matthew miller had to call everyone matt knew in the industry and make them promise to refuse to film this with him because it was the only way to stop him. matt could not comprehend the consequences but in our world, his creative collaborators seem to recognize just how serious he is about it in a way that owen couldn't.
and in this confessional nature of the film there is a messiness that makes it hard to fully grapple with. even while writing this post, i experienced a type of frustration with the linguistic clunkiness of distinguishing real matt from dirties matt before i realized that is part of the function. in playing this character that is so hard to isolate from his real self, the core of what this movie is about, both culturally and personally, is further emphasized. it is about that type of ironic detachment, that is actually probably more common now in the 2020s than it was in 2013, where people are lying all the time about what they believe through jokes and performances but in doing so, they just further themselves from reality and an understanding of themselves. it is impossible to dissect this type of social performance cleanly, to figure out what people like this really believe, because its purpose is to obfuscate. and it lends an excuse for apathy to even the most horrific actions because in performing, the world is made unreal. however, in that performance is an honesty, a part of this person that has the impulse to say and do these things gets put on display. matt is telling the truth when he tells people that they are going to shoot up the school but no one takes it seriously through his ironic tone. and real matt wants to so fully enmesh himself with this character that has that same impulse of ironic and creative detachment and in doing so, the movie becomes one of the most vulnerable he has ever done. he wants to make himself indistinguishable from this kid who commits one of the worst things someone can do as a confession of his own destructive creative impulses.
it's beautiful that one of the most direct references in dirties is to being john malkovich because kaufman and johnson both have a very similar self reflective style to filmmaking. they both love making movies about their inserts (sometimes even with the same name) trying to desperately control and reconstruct reality around them that allows them to grapple with things they cannot otherwise. just an incredible film im going to think about for a long time
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