Rubber

Rubber – Nothing is more irritating, then, an attempt by hyper-sophisticated film-makers to produce a “cult-movie.” Rubber f(2010) fits into this category. A lonely tire arises from a field of dusty debris in the middle of the Mojave desert. The tire is named Robert and he soon discovers that he has psycho-kinetic powers and can generate brain-waves sufficient to cause people’s heads to explode. He rolls around the desert encountering various people and kills them by bursting their heads into big sprays of bone and meat and blood. After awhile, Robert falls in love with a beautiful young woman and pursues her. Ultimately, she tries to lure him with her voice out of the motel where he is holed-up – the cops have put hidden speakers in a mannequin. A guy in a wheelchair tells the cops to stop screwing around and just go into the motel and blast the homicidal tire with their shotguns. This is accomplished, but Robert’s spirit is reincarnated in a child’s tricycle that continues the killing spree. This plot comprises about fifty minutes of the film – to expand the thing into a feature, Quentin Dupieux, the director, adds a frame-story that is about thirty minutes – a group of people assembled in the desert for “no reason” are given binoculars and watch the film unfold through those binoculars. For “no reason,” a nerdy accountant poisons them with a turkey he has butchered in his shabby desert motel room. The man in the wheelchair doesn’t eat or get hungry and so he is not poisoned. As long as he exists, the film must continue since there is a viewer for the spectacle of Robert’s adventures. The film begins with a striking image of folding chairs sitting empty on a desert road. A car comes and systematically knocks over the scattered chairs. A man dressed as a cop emerges from the trunk of the car and delivers a speech arguing that all films contain completely arbitrary factors – images or details that exist for “no reason.” “This film,” the man says (he’s the cop who leads the tire-hunt for Robert) “is a hommage to no reason” --- a use of hommage that doesn’t comport with any sense of the word that I understand. On paper, I suppose, the movie sounds interesting – that’s why I rented it – but, in fact, it’s not very good and the idea of a film in which things happen for “no reason” is not sufficiently interesting to power an eighty minute picture. The movie is mean-spirited about its audience – the surrogate audience on screen is tortured to death in grisly images of people dying from poisoning – and also mean-spirited about the actors trapped in the endeavor: the beautiful heroine has a droopy ass after the manner of Ingres’ goddesses (the film maker is a Frenchman after all) but it’s nasty for someone to comment on that aspect of her physiognomy in the film. The actors are all people that you recognize as minor characters with repeating roles in sit-coms, good-looking ciphers who can’t act. They appear in short interviews after the film in the DVD specials praising the genius of director Quentin Dupieux (the name seems a joke) and we can’t tell if this is a “put-on” or not – Dupieux gives an interview to a male sex doll interlocutor. The one thing that a cult-film is not is self-deprecating and mean-spirited – cult films like Plan 9 from Outer Space are fascinating because they have the courage of their own crazy-ass convictions and regard themselves as monumental works of art. This is something you can’t fake. (Dupieux is better known as Mr. Oizo, a French musician who makes disco-records with computer equipment – “Oizo” is a pun for “Oiseau” or bird – he’s a real guy, quite well-known in Europe for his electronic disco music – his film Wrong premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2012).