The Audacious 2018 Cult Mystery Comedy Under the Silver Lake Is Exactly My Kind of Crazy
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Sometimes you encounter a movie that matches your sensibilities and interests to such an extent that it feels like it was created specifically for you. That’s how I felt about 2018’s Under the Silver Lake, director David Robert Mitchell’s famously unsuccessful follow-up to his 2014 breakthrough film It Follows
It almost felt as if Mitchell had access to my brain and my memories and used it to create something I would find irresistible. Mitchell’s instant cult classic is fundamentally concerned with two very different kinds of mysteries. On one level, Under the Silver Lake is about the mystery of a beautiful woman’s disappearance, the catalyst for many a detective yarn. On another, Under the Silver Lake is about the maddening, unsolvable mystery of existence and the meaning of life.
It’s a detective story about a man uniquely unqualified to play amateur shamus, a lost soul who doesn’t seem to understand himself, his life and the world around him, let alone possess special insight into the inner workings of the criminal world.
In that respect it reminded me of The Big Lebowski. It’s a very original motion picture that I can best describe by comparing it to a bunch of other movies and filmmakers. Imagine Alfred Hitchcock directing a Richard Kelly screenplay and you have a sense of the film’s general vibe.
Hitchcock was legendary for his icy control so there’s something wonderfully perverse about applying that visual mastery to a story and a screenplay that is a giddy goddamn mess in the best possible sense.
Under the Silver Lake combines the pop culture obsessions of Donnie Darko and Southland Tales with the aesthetic elegance of someone like Paul Verhoeven or Brian DePalma.
The critically derided and commercially unsuccessful head film/mind fuck has an unmistakable The Long Goodbye quality as well, which can only ever be a very good thing.
An ideally cast Andrew Garfield plays Sam, an aimless thirty-three year old Silver Lake resident in 2011 who is about to get evicted due to non-payment of rent.
The intense spiritual seeker has a crush on gorgeous neighbor Sarah (Riley Keough, whose Elvis genes are strong) but just when it seems like they’re about to hook up, she has to leave.
When Sarah goes missing Sam investigates her disappearance. This sends him on a surreal, mind-melting journey through a waking dream world involving a mass murderer of dogs, the apparent death of billionaire Uber-celebrity Jefferson Sevence (Chris Gann) and a rock band whose ubiquitous single might contain a code or secret message with potentially life-altering ramifications.
Garfield suggests Jake Gyllenhaal in his ability to be at once strikingly handsome and charismatic and creepy, clammy and weird. He has the looks and magnetism of a movie star and the personality and ingratiating weirdness of a character actor.
Sam is a half-mad man-child in a Los Angeles careening irrevocably into apocalyptic madness. Sam’s journey leads him into an underworld in both a literal and a figurative sense, a secret realm underneath and beyond the world as we know it governed by dream logic rather than the dreary dictates of reality.
Under the Silver Lake doesn’t just call to mind both an acid trip and a dream; it suggests a dream that I specifically had but only half remembered. What are the best, most resonant movies if not half-remembered dreams?
Sam’s descent leads him to a conspiracy involving the James Dean statue at The Griffith Park Observatory, the magazine Nintendo Power, a grizzled man at a piano who claims to have written many, if not most, popular songs, the King of the Homeless, a murderous owl woman, the life masks of the rich and famous, the eccentric writer of the titular zine and a whole bunch of other freaky-ass shit.
Under the Silver Lake starts off loopy and gets progressively sillier as it progresses but it never veers into camp or self-parody. For all of its ridiculousness, Under the Silver Lake does not wink at its audience to let them know it’s in on the joke because in its own weird way it’s achingly sincere.
It’s rare and wonderful to see such a personal vision realized so purely. In making a movie to satisfy himself and his oddball muse, Mitchell ended up making a movie perfect for the Nathan Rabin demographic and weirdoes like me, who strongly believe that there need to be way more movies like Southland Tales and The Nines.
The idea of music with a secret message resonates with me because I am a Juggalo, and the Clowns famously have a secret message in their music, which is, “Don’t be a dick. Be a good person.”
I know I personally try to live up to that ethos and not be a dick. Under the Silver Lake immerses itself in an absurdist fantasy world obsessed with entirety of pop culture, from music and musicals to the premiums that come in cereal boxes.
What does it all mean? Does it have to mean anything? Can’t it mean everything and nothing at the same time? Is there any reason in the world it can’t be a complete goof but also dead serious?
Thinking about Under the Silver Lake and my intense emotional and spiritual connection to it, I realized something about myself and the film’s setting. Geographically and literally, I am a resident of Alpharetta, Georgia.
But in my dreams and in my imagination I’m at least a part time resident of Los Angeles and Hollywood and have been for as long as I can remember. That’s why when I return to Los Angeles it feels like I’m coming home even though I’ve never actually lived there and only worked in L.A for a couple of months.
Under the Silver Lake is a movie about movies in an appropriately abstract, dream-like fashion. It is haunted by the movies and their decadent sexuality and populated in part by sex workers who are also actresses and see the two jobs as fundamentally the same, a matter of satiating the insatiable desire of a voyeuristic public.
Mitchell’s audacious gift to cult cinema is one hundred and forty minutes long but I didn’t notice the time any more than I would in a dream, where time either functions much more differently than it does in the non-dream world, or doesn’t function at all.
Under the Silver Lake may be a quintessential messy, excessively ambitious and eccentric follow-up to a zeitgeist-capturing smash but that’s a big part of what I love about it. Mitchell’s unforgettable trip to the recent past may overreach wildly, but in our timid cinematic universe only audacious movies that aspire to do the impossible like this reach far enough.
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