Green Room (dir. Jeremy Saulnier, 2015)
Well, this film became unexpectedly relevant, didn’t it?
I remember when I first realized the so-called alt-right were something that I would need to know about. I was sitting in a corner booth of a Waffle House, having a sad breakfast and looking at my phone. I clicked onto a link to a Vox article by Dylan Matthews titled “The Alt-Right Is More Than Warmed-Over White Supremacy. It’s That, But Way Weirder.” I read that piece which detailed the bizarre online world of the latest iteration of fascism with appropriate horror. After all, I’d seen the Republican National Convention the previous month wallowing in the old fashioned kind. I could barely get my mind around this new nonsense. But it was late August in 2016, and I thought that Trump and these neoreactionaries and Twitter racists were the last gasp of white rage in America.
I’ve never been more fucking wrong about anything.
I watched Green Room for the first time in January 2017 shortly before the inauguration. I hadn’t seen it again until today. I should have been taking notes.
The Ain’t Rights–bassist Pat (Anton Yelchin), guitarist Sam (Alia Shawkat), drummer Reece (Joe Cole), and vocalist Tiger (Callum Turner)–are a hardluck hardcore band from Arlington, Virginia, touring the Pacific Northwest. After one gig goes bad, they decide to take a much worse one: an isolated neo-Nazi venue run by a gang leader Darcy (Patrick Stewart). They’re bold, playing just the right Dead Kennedys cover, but they come upon the aftermath of a murder as they are leaving. The band and their fellow hostage Amber (Imogen Poots) must try to survive the night of what Darcy memorably calls “a pig fuck” [1].
Some people would classify it as a thriller or a siege film in the manner of Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo or John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13, but the gruesome violence of Green Room pushes it right into the horror category. There’s an injury here that’s yet to be surpassed in my viewing for effect. Other films may be more extreme, but I’ve never seen it look and feel more real than in this one. Saulnier’s command of tension and suspense, honed over his previous films Murder Party and Blue Ruin, has reached a degree of mastery here.
What makes the movie for me is the attention to detail. The realities of being a working band on the road are represented: running out of gas, bad venues, the lack of money, the misery of sharing rooms and a van with four people. The attention paid to the neo-Nazi skinheads as well is astounding. I don’t know what research Saulnier did, but it feels terrifyingly authentic. It’s not simply the racist regalia lining the walls or the identical looking legion of shaved headed white men. It’s the casual acceptance of violence and blind allegiance to someone like Darcy. It’s the gun pedantry displayed by Big Justin (Eric Edelstein) as he explains the difference between bullets and cartridges. It’s the acknowledgement of why someone like Amber would join up with these violent men. It’s even in the disrespect paid to the Ain’t Rights, whose name gets corrected to the Aren’t Rights on the sign. Because they’re literal grammar Nazis.
Most of all it’s in two men: Darcy and Gabe (Macon Blair). Darcy isn’t given any backstory. We don’t know how this Englishman found himself in Oregon, and we don’t particularly need to. He’s a racist who uses the cover of white supremacy to run a drug operation just like any number of other gangs. He’s absolutely capable of calculated violence, but there’s a tiredness and resignation to him, that he’s an old man still doing this. It’s a brilliant performance from Stewart, using his considerable gravitas to a sinister effect. Then there’s Gabe, representing a different facet of organized white supremacy: a man who seems to have just fallen into it. He’s utterly feckless and incompetent at everything that isn’t running a music venue and bar. It’s not that he’s intimidating like the heavies that surround him; it’s that he’s a meek functionary in the service of violence. It’s Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil as applied to unloading drum kits.
At the climax of the film, a character makes an observation that struck me resoundingly on a rewatch: “It’s funny. You were so scary at night.” The neo-Nazis here are deadly, but in the cold light of day you can see them for what they are. Since the election and more critically after the Charlottesville rally in August of last year, I’ve spent a lot of time reading about white supremacists and their ideology. Most of the academic texts provide great detail on the history of movements, biographies of the personalities involved, how and where their ideas spread and festered. The hundreds of pages of this I have read about all that, but the most insightful and succinct thing comes from that Dead Kennedys song the Ain’t Rights play:
“You still think swastikas look look/The real Nazis run your schools/They’re coaches, businessmen and cops/In a real Fourth Reich you’ll be the first to go”
And that’s basically it. White supremacy is embedded in a racist, patriarchal power structure supported by legal authorities. It’s voter disenfranchisement, generational poverty, and a militarized police force given free reign. A bunch of emboldened skinheads are dangerous and must be stopped whenever and wherever they are found, but they have nothing on the men actually running things. I just don’t know if it’s still night in this country, or the sun has risen yet. I hope it’s the latter and we realize the magnitude of the problem, but I’m not counting on it.
[1] The second best use of that phrase in a film, but Philip Seymour Hoffman’s utterance of it in The Master will always be first in my heart.
October 27, 2018
oliveresque 