Ugh. You know what I'm like when I have a boner for a movie and I'm wide
awake. So now you have to suffer with my analogy of "The Dirties".
I am in love with this film, its core concept and the people who made
it. I don't love Kevin Smith for increasing its audience and once again
there's songs in there ironically that are hard to find IRL. Even though
he didn't make it. Him just being associated with it makes that a
thing.
I only stumbled on it because of him, and a conversation on Bret Eastern Ellis's podcast
that I bothered suffering through, because I don't find Kevin Smith
that insufferable to listen to if I'm in the right frame of mind. And he
mentioned this flick and I managed to find it. I've seen it maybe four
times now. It's so perfect and perfect that I got all the pop culture
references. The leads aren't high school kids, but they were just the
essence of the geek boys I hung with in high school. The "one of these
days" kinda guys who always had something to prove, and were either too
egotistical to like you if you liked them, or too in love with you when
you wanted to friendzone them but still felt shitty about it. We
friendzoned the shit out of boys before it was even a thing, and Owen is
right, essentially we all did it and had it done to us. Bullying was a
thing that wasn't taken all that seriously in my day because we didn't
have access to guns. There's been a stabbing at my school since I
graduated. That's about all.
But this movie nailed it. It just got to the crux of a school shooting
in America the way Elephant or any other movie just didn't do. I don't
even like that Elephant implied the two Columbine guys were gay and in a
secret relationship. That's insulting and unnecessary, and doesn't help
gay teen boys. It makes all shootings about sex. Because that's the
American way.
Matt and Owen aren't gay or gay for each other. There's a bromance of
sorts going on in terms of who's more important to the other that they
subtly joke about in one of the montages, but you know the dynamic. You
know those two guys who always hung out almost exclusively with one
another but things got sour over a girl or one growing up or moving on
too fast.
And to call this a "found footage" movie isn't quite fair. It doesn't
purport itself to be that despite using that convention. It's reached
its own uniqueness by the approach the filmmakers took, keeping the
story line loose enough and the conversations real enough that we're
believing this is real on a whole other level. There's none of that
contrived found footage horror shit going on. There's no long drawn out
camera runs in the dark where you're not seeing shit but you feel it
coming up on you. It's not a mocumentary. You're not getting a sense of
these kids being interviewed. They do vox pop shit but it ties into it
in terms of what the two main characters are doing as a school project.
All of it blends, and like Matt says, and his teacher loses in
translation, it's a genre-bender in the truest sense. It doesn't claim
to be any of these things and ultimately becomes all of those things in
an almost perfect way that hasn't been achieved before.
Your inner critic who can't suspend enough disbelief will always pick
apart the found footage notion. Things felt edited and there was a story
despite these people just continuously filming and each "cut" is just
them turning off the camera. Things are too polished as opposed to
genuine. When the Blair Witch people attempted this back in the late 90s
and kind of birthed the form, the movie industry shat its pants.
Suddenly you could make low budget blockbuster shit. Whoops. Then the
experts were all "how to make a movie on a shoestring budget" but then
Paranormal Activity happened and those movies are over budgeted for now (one of their producers actually lamented not jumping on Blair Witch when it was presented to them).
And Paranormal Activity is cliched as fuck. Person is on the screen. Person goes flying
backwards due to unseen force. Person who wasn't there suddenly is
there. It becomes desensitizing so you have to up the ante to scare the
fans all the time.
The Dirties just reels that all back in to a logical standpoint. It so
much more organic despite there being multiple schools and only half the
people being aware of what's going on. They made it seamless enough for
me to think it was the same school, but high schools over there are
generic compared to the ones here, that are campus types with mapped out
buildings. If you were to do a school shooting in my old school as it
was, there were too many places to hide, the whole thing takes up a
couple of acres in total, and it's too spread out to effectively kill a
ton of kids at once. You would need a squad of teens, at least five
working in tandem at various points, to effectively kill the majority of
the 1500 odd kids who were there. But you know we thought about it. I
still think about it. A shooting is a perfect fantasy in your mind,
you're good with a gun already, you just whip it out and point it at
your enemy and they're dead. Doesn't matter who they were. It's so easy
to orchestrate in fantasy and harder to pull off in reality. And we
don't have enough survivors, victims or perpetrators, to give that
perspective. No one interviews the victims and the shooters take
themselves out to preserve their myth for television. The world will
know them in death. But as the Dirties points out, psychotic behaviour
is NOT that simple, no matter how badly you want it to be. It's just
FUCKING NOT.
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