The Graphic Novel Collection Southland Tales: The Prequel Saga is the Perfect Literary Companion to Richard Kelly's Cult Satire
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In one of the many lines in Southland Tales that I love so much that I would happily get it tattooed on my neck, Krysta Now, the ditzy Kim Kardashian figure Sarah Michelle Gellar plays to perfection states with her trademark pop profundity, “Scientists are saying the future is going to be far more futuristic than they originally predicted.”
The Southland Tales is about everything on some level. But it’s also about a screenplay that foretells the end of the world so it’s fascinating to me that Kelly’s screenplay seemingly predicted a future that has, in fact, proven far more futuristic than originally expected.
The future has proven even crazier and more surreal than the writer-director of Donnie Darko anticipated. Southland Tales: The Prequel Saga, a collection of three graphic novel prequels to The Southland Tales collected in one, hard to track down volume, is full of details both dead on and weirdly prescient.
Southland Tales: The Graphic Novel Prequel Saga would be worth tracking down and spending way too much money on for its excerpts from the screenplay for The Power alone.
The Power, as all my fellow Southland Tales cultists are well aware, is the screenplay foretelling the end of the world that an amnesia-riddled Boxer Santoros thinks that he wrote with porn star entrepreneur lover Krysta Now about a real world apocalypse lurking in the very near future.
Kelly, who wrote Southland Tales: The Graphic Novel Prequel Saga, breaks the format so that excerpts from the script litter the graphic novel.
The cult auteur has way too much fun spoofing the macho cheesiness of 1980s action movies about mismatched buddy cops, one of whom plays by his own rules and has only contempt for authority while the other does things strictly by the book.
Kelly has created, in The Power, the best/worst bloodbath Cannon never put out in its coked-up Reagan-era prime. It alternately suggests the transcendent ultra-violence of Cobra taken to an even greater extreme.
If I might give The Power sections of Southland Tales: The Graphic Novel Prequel Saga the highest possible praise, it reminded me throughout of the first season of Baywatch Nights, which looked back longingly at the eighties for style, masculinity and inspiration. Who starred in the abysmal Baywatch movie? Why Southland Tales star Dwayne Johnson, of course.
In a detail that is perfect now for very different reasons than it was in 2006, when the movie came out, Jericho Cane (Dwayne Johnson), the tough cop Santoros will be playing in The Power very ostentatiously only drinks Bud Light.
Jericho only drinks Bud Light. He has no interest in regular Budweiser, only its low-calorie variation. This is funny to me because Johnson would one day be synonymous with a film franchise with the most heavy-handed and successful product placement for beer ever. Corona consequently has two primary claims to fame. It has a VERY unfortunate name and it is the modestly priced beer of choice for the manly men and tough women of the Fast and the Furious franchise.
If you were to explain to Kelly in 2006 the reasons why seventeen years later his choice of Bud Light as Jericho Cane’s favorite beer would be chuckle-inducing it would blow his mind, and he’s the mind-blower behind Donnie Darko, Southland Tales and The Box.
You’d have to tell him that a vulgar reality show host who had appeared in films such as Ghosts Can’t Do It and The Little Rascals got elected President despite being caught on tape bragging about grabbing women by their genitalia during an Access Hollywood appearance.
Then you’d have to tell the cult auteur that a group called Q, with hundreds of thousands, if not millions of followers, thought that this pussy-grabbing Uber-vulgarian and probable sex criminal was literally sent by Jesus to save America from a Satanic cabal of cannibalistic pedophiles made up of prominent Democratic politicians and celebrities.
You’d go on to explain that an excitable flibbertigibbet named Dylan Mulvaney became so popular documenting her trans journey on a micro-video app called TikTok that she was sent a can of, you guessed it, Bud Light with her face on it and it enraged followers of the twice-impeached, pussy-grabbing ex-president like musician Kid Rock so much that they took a video of themselves shooting CANS OF INEXPENSIVE DOMESTIC BEER with a machine gun in a feverish attempt to counter its evil trans energy.
If I were Kelly, I would have a hard time believing all of that. Heck, I have a hard time believing that all happened and I had the misfortune to live through it.
The future turned out to be much more futuristic and weirder, not to mention more Southland Tales, than scientists or anyone else could have possibly have anticipated.
Kelly’s misunderstood masterpiece captures the contemporary condition as a sticky sweet brain fog that’s confusing and befuddling and overwhelming and oddly intoxicating all at the same time.
That’s the foggy mindset of Boxer Santaros as the graphic novel opens. He’s a household name in multiple fields due to his success as an athlete and then as an actor but he has no idea who he is, where he is, or how he found himself alone in the desert in a state of disorientation.
Boxer is a powerful man with connections to even more powerful figures within the Republican Party who is being furtively controlled, manipulated and bamboozled by a galaxy of oddball opportunists that include Krysta Now.
Southland Tales: The Graphic Novel Prequel Saga delves even deeper into the capitalist madness of Krysta Now, porn star, pop star, energy drink entrepreneur, reality show star and passionate advocate for the non-criminalization of teen horniness.
We get to know Krysta as a poet who delivers haikus to strip club patrons expecting lap dances and happy endings but also as a crackpot philosopher, screenwriter, Warholian celebrity and unlikely puppet-master.
Krysta emerges here as a figure of guile and cunning who will do anything or anyone to accomplish her objectives. She has more agency in this incarnation.
In Southland Tales: The Graphic Novel Prequel Saga what just barely passes for reality overlaps and echoes the lurid pulp sensationalism of The Power.
The Power serves as a funhouse mirror that reflects the action of the rest of the book at weird, revelatory angles.
In both incarnations, for example, Serpentine (Bai Ling), the girlfriend of sinister mogul Baron von Westphalen (Wallace Shawn) is a mysterious figure with the gift of prophecy.
In The Power she’s the Ebonics-slinging visionary who informs Boxer of his divine destiny to guard and protect a new, vulgar American baby messiah who levels restaurants with a single blast of flatulence, hurls fireballs and eats a dozen McDonald’s burgers at a time days after being born.
Southland Tales: The Graphic Novel Prequel Saga is prescient in other ways as well. It depicts the secret Republican power-brokers at US-Ident, its next level answer to the Patriot Act, as Dungeons & Dragons aficionados who see the game and their jobs as fundamentally the same.
What was Q if not a massive Live Action Role Playing Game where a Dungeon Master who called himself Q laid out the clues and established the laws of an alternate reality where players could lose themselves in a weird world where Tom Hanks rapes and eats babies while Donald Trump is a messianic figure of Christ-like selflessness?
If you’re as immersed in the world of Southland Tales as I am then you’ll get a kick out of learning that the Killers song that Justin Timberlake’s emotionally shattered veteran sings to the camera in the film is the same song that was playing on his walkman when he leaped out of a plane to a strange and tragic destiny.
Southland Tales: The Prequel Sequel has got soul AND it’s got soldiers.
In a perfect world Southland Tales would beget a Star Wars-like industry, complete with sequels and prequels and novels and spin-offs and television shows and ongoing comic book lines. I would love to see The Power adapted as a half-hour short film starring Johnson for Netflix.
I want to continue to play in this weird, wonderful world forever and the film’s trippy, funny, insane and inspired graphic novel prequel allows me to spend even more time inside Kelly’s mind, time I very much enjoyed and will continue to enjoy.
Reading this has made the long version of Southland Tales more coherent and understandable but don’t hold that against it!
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