Cinema
Rough trade
Peter Ackroyd
The Loveless ('X', selected cinemas)
An organisation known as 'Pioneer Films' appears in the opening credits, and a voice at the beginning of the film matches the spirit of that rather vague label — 'pioneer' being a noun which in the absence of suitable subjects has become an adjective — '1 was what you call ragged. 1 mean, way beyond torn up. I was going to be no man's friend today ... '. This is the conventional voice of the American cowboy who, when not indulging in the escapades of primitive tribalism, is a loner, the wan- derer who eschews emotional attachments and social responsibilities.
It is a mark of the permanence of this myth that it should in The Loveless be at- tached not to a man on a horse but a man on a bike. This is a film about young men who encase themselves in leather, run combs through hair soggy with brilliantine, click their fingers, and find themselves as a general rule 'going to hell in a bread basket'. As far as I am concerned they can do so; the cult of the biker is not an appeal- ing one. Anyone in uniform is a bore, especially when they talk in a uniform man- ner.
Five bikers have arrived in a small Georgia town, on their way to some kind of rally, and at once their presence causes waves of unease among the natives. But, as always, the thing they most fear is that which is already concealed within themselves and, although the bikers are described as 'animals', the behaviour of the Southerners themselves is not free of low passion. A middle-aged 'red neck' who ac- cuses the bikers of being 'commie trash' harbours incestuous longings toward his daughter; the coy waitress in the local cof- fee shop spends her spare time as a stripper. When violence does occur, it is caused by the townspeople themselves, with the bikers only as the mindless catalysts.
But the unpleasant events themselves, a murder and a suicide among them, are real- ly only narrative conveniences — ways of beginning and ending a film which in general pays scant attention to the conven- tional demands of a 'story'. The Loveless manages instead to evoke with some preci- sion the atmosphere of poisonous boredom which hovers over this little town, a boredom which leads to suspicion and ag- gression in equal measure. The mood is both sombre and sullen, fuelled by racial and sexual tensions that lie just beneath the surface and turn what is apparently an or- dinary community into a bizarre melange of repressed life, half Diane Arbus and half Katherine Anne Porter.
For if the bikers are the direct descen- dants of the Western cowboys, something has happened to the myth which sustains their somewhat exaggerated sense of life and 'freedom'. Where before it was the myth of exploration and domination, through which the Hollywood film industry provided colourful emblems of aggressive capitalism, it is now one so drained of all its old meanings that it can support only an image of aimlessness and boredom. The bikers engage in laconic and quite mean- ingless conversations, they hang around for hours with nothing to do, they drink to fill the empty hours and play dangerous games with knives.
The style of The Loveless becomes very important, then, if the film itself is not to become as aimless and as boring as its characters. It is written and directed by two young 'unknowns', Kathryn Bigelow and Monty Montgomery (the cast itself is also unknown). Instead of drawing their in- spiration from the glossy methods and styles of the conventional film industry, they draw half their strength from the once flourishing tradition of 'underground' pic- tures in the United States: from the motor- bike films of Kenneth Anger just as much as from the banal naturalism of the Warhol films. What we see, characteristically, are a number of scenes and events which are linked not thematically but emotionally, in which the plot is less important than the mood which is created and in which the in- terest of the film resides in its visual surface rather than in its narrative complications.
As a result, even the most violent or pas- sionate scenes are curiously empty of significance, as random as a knife game and as meaningless as a drunken quarrel, suf- fused with the same air of apathy which the characters themselves embody. We get a series of pictures, not all of them pretty. And since the film is set in 1959, it has that attention to detail which we expect from Americans — so fascinated by their recent history that they seem able effortlessly to recreate its imagery and its tone.
I suspect, however, that the fascination which these particular film-makers have for this period lies in the fact that it represents the time of their infancy; they have recreated the world of their childhood hence its vividness, which is both comfort-
ing and suffocating. This would account, also, for the simplistic nature of the nnYth which animates this film — since the world is an infantile one, its effects are so power" ful that it needs only a slight or conven* tional structure to support it. The danger, of course, is that the picture will seem WIT ly vacant for those who do not share that vi- sion. The Loveless is stylish enough to avoid that danger, but representative enough to remind one of it.
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