Gerry
Directed by Gus Van Sant (2002)
“How do you think the hike is going so far?”
As soon as he mentioned Thebes I knew they were fucked. Based on true, tragic events, this film is a self-indulgent masterpiece. The first of Gus Van Sant’s “Death Trilogy”, Gerry kick started his run of small, low budget pieces of work including Elephant and Last Days. All unusual and unconventional in nature, these films fuelled Van Sant’s hunger for internalised reflection and the act of asking questions with answers that may never be found. This is a common motif in Van Sant’s filmography, even in bigger projects like My Own Private Idaho, and brings a sort of heavy blanketed comfort knowing that life is not about searching for those highly converted answers, but the small, intricate details of WHY we ask these questions. Films like Gerry feel like Van Sant severing his brain in two and pouring the contents on the screen, filling this barren landscape with a desert storm of his internal monologue. Of the whole trilogy, Gerry is the most alienating for casual audiences, with a pace as slow as molasses and dialogue that truly means nothing except to project the two Gerry’s inner workings. However, it’s definitely his bravest work, truly groundbreaking in commercial American narrative cinema. There is an all encompassing sense of impending doom that is draped across this desolate landscape, and from the very start of the film you can feel the inevitable ending looming over your shoulder. When it finally comes it knocks the wind out of you, and both you and the film have to come to terms with what has unfolded. Casey Affleck and Matt Damon play two lost, wandering souls who flicker in and out of the camera as if they themselves are mirages. They are strangers we are forced to know throughout the runtime, becoming intimately familiar with their mental states, opinions and even their unique language. We become their friends, we become lost and rambling with them, and it makes the climax of the film even more crushing. Van Sant has a talent in making the audience tragically accustomed to his protagonists. The experience of this film is extremely private. It is hypnotising, and forces introspection. I was so entranced by this, it’s a challenge for your brain. When there’s nothing but silence and landscape on screen your mind starts to think off track and you end up spiralling. what would I do if this was me? How would I cope? Would I give up? Is this what death is like? Is this what knowing death is like? You can only imagine what the characters themselves were thinking as they endlessly walked, almost as if they were on autopilot, only the rocks watching them. I was reminded a lot of The Odyssey. The search for your home, your beginning, surrounded by the unavoidable omens of death in a journey that seems to bring you nothing. In a way, Gerry is it’s own Greek tragedy, it’s own conquering of Thebes. I think this is genuinely one of the most terrifying movies I’ve ever seen. The stench of doom crawls across every frame and the hopelessness I felt outdoes almost every horror film I’ve come across, the sword of Damocles never more present. The bone deep loneliness and the heavy introspection you yourself are forced to deal with scares me to death. Staring, fixated at the screen I was made to face the truth, that nothing was here first and nothing will be here after, that barren wasteland is ineffable and that I am small and I will die knowing how small I am. It was a fear I knew but didn’t face, something that I reconciled with during the course of this film and grew slightly more comfortable with. This film made me discover new things about myself and my own relationship with death, and if that isn’t genius I don’t know what is. If you knew you were going to die, would you sit down and accept it or keep walking?
