Gerry (aka Passion In The Desert)

Gus Van Sant has had quite the chequered career. One of the most prominent figures in the emerging queer cinema movement of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Portland-based director got his start with such singular independent fare as Mala Noche (1986), Drugstore Cowboy (1989) and My Own Private Idaho (1991). His initial attempt to play around with an expanded budget went over poorly, with the ill-fated adaptation of Tom Robbins' cult novel Even Cowgirls Get The Blues (1993), but he rebounded in 1995 with To Die For, a blackly comic media satire starring Nicole Kidman. Having achieved real breakthrough success with the Academy Award-winning Good Will Hunting in 1997, still his most popular and well-known film to date, Van Sant followed things up with what many would deem to be his all-time career low, a shot-for-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, which flopped both critically and commercially and has lingered in the discourse purely as its yardstick for an exercise in confounding pointlessness (although if you ask me there's a whole spate of recent Disney pictures that give it a run for its money). Now, Psycho '98 is one of those films that I probably could say a whole lot more about at a later date, given my deep reverence for the original, and for Anthony Perkins' Norman, but I am conscious that it's been many years since I saw it and my enthusiasm is not such that I can see myself revisiting it any time soon - and besides, I suspect that my observations would ultimately boil down to the most predictable criticisms imaginable (William H Macy does a reasonable job, Viggo Mortensen and Julianne Moore are both pretty bland, though arguably no more so than John Gavin and Vera Miles...but holy shit is Vince Vaughn woefully miscast as Norman). Van Sant's great transgression, of course, was less in making an ill-received picture than in taking a wide, salivary bite out of one of Hollywood's most sacred cows in the process, and in an effort to clear the soured air his next step was the moderate hit Finding Forrester (2000). Nevertheless, the mainstream arena seemed to have already lost much of its lustre for Van Sant, as the new millennium saw him going in search of his indie roots with a string of aggressively anti-Hollywood projects that would be come to be affectionately known as his "Death Trilogy" - Gerry (2002), Elephant (2003) and Last Days (2005). A threesome of films that, as their collective term implies, all have human mortality on their minds, but also lengthy silences, unhurried pacing and narratives stripped down to their most unrelentingly austere cores.

Gerry in particular is as brutally barebones a cinematic yarn as they come, a Man versus Nature tale comprised of very little other than a pair of human figures (Matt Damon and Casey Affleck) traversing a seemingly unending landscape, searching for a route back toward a civilisation that remains wildly elusive. The characters themselves remain as blank and unchartered as their surroundings - over the course of the picture, we learn few of the finer details regarding who they are and what kind of lives they've inadvertently walked in from - which is not to say that either character is any more interesting or enigmatic for it. Hollywood convention has conditioned us to expect some kind of grand revelation in the midst of crisis, in which heroes come to understand themselves better and how to navigate through some broader personal dilemma - a convention roundly mocked in one of the film's more prominent contemporaries, Spike Jonze's Adaptation. (2002) - but none occurs here. We don't even learn their names, really - the characters refer to one another by the common moniker "Gerry", but then they seem to refer to just about everything as "Gerry". It is a catch-all term in slang that might well have been concocted exclusively between them. Gerry is a picture that runs on its own terrifying emptiness. The only obviously Hollywood-friendly aspect of the picture is in the presence of Damon, who had accumulated significant star power in the years between Good Will Hunting and Gerry (Affleck, who had previously worked with Van Sant in To Die For, was still a relatively minor name at this point).

Gerry was first screened at the Sundance Film Festival in 2002, but would not receive a theatrical distribution until the following year. Overall, reception was less enthusiastic than it was for succeeding "Death" installment Elephant, a fictionalised interpretation of the 1999 Columbine high school massacre that netted Van Sant the Palme d'Or at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival. Elephant stood out, in part, for having topicality on its side - it had the advantage of appearing to be about something, whereas Gerry (despite also taking inspiration from a recent real-life killing, albeit loosely) appeared to be, quite literally, about nothing. The characters disappear into a vacuum between two seemingly arbitrary narrative poles and the viewer gets the experience of disappearing along with them. Another exercise in confounding pointlessness, then, like Van Sant's earlier misadventure in resurrecting the timid taxidermist? Or does Gerry tease us with the slightest possibility of a hidden depth, if we're willing to gaze long enough into its arid abyss? Critics have certainly attempted. The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw proposes that the film might be perceived as a commentary on the demise of the American dream - "there's something parodically American in their horror of the vast and implacable emptiness of an uncivilised landscape which in the 21st century is no longer fertile with opportunity but merely a concealed abyss of fruitless inconvenience and danger." Donato Totaro of online film journal Offscreen interprets the film as a "a studied play on cinematic seeing and hearing, more accurately how the camera, character, and spectator ‘see and hear’ differently. I don’t think the location choice of the desert, land of illusion and mirage, was a coincidence." Speculation has been made over Van Sant's probable influences, including Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot (a play where, in the words of contemporary critic Vivian Mercer, nothing happens, twice) and Hungarian film-maker Bela Tarr, from whom Van Sant borrows the technique of almost unbearably stretched out single takes.

It goes without saying that Gerry is not to all tastes. You can probably tell from reading the plot outline whether or not it's for you. Personally, I have long championed it as Van Sant's masterpiece. This could indeed be a film about absolutely nothing. But I would argue that "nothing" does not automatically equate to pointlessness in the vein of Psycho '98. Oblivion is one heck of an enthralling subject, after all.

Gerry opens with our protagonists driving to a location vaguely defined as the "Wilderness Trail", with the half-hearted intention of reaching the even more vaguely defined "thing", a lacklustre term that seems designed to discourage the viewer from forming even the slightest whisker of narrative curiosity as to what it might be. Geoff King, who brings up the film in his book American Independent Cinema, describes the opening sequence as "deliberately arbitrary and unconvincing" (p. 147), by which I presume he's referring to the transparency that neither Gerry has very much interest in finding "the thing" in the first place. The film does not devote too much time in trying to convince its audience that it's headed for anything particularly solid or defined. Totaro suggests that the "thing" might be seen as a nod to the mainstream Hollywood conventions the film so determinedly avoids: "The characters/film ‘strays’ from the sea of Hollywood conformity (of which Van Sant was himself trapped with Good Will Hunting (1997) and Finding Forrester [2000]) and becomes ‘lost’ in an oasis of personal, visionary cinema." In other words, the "thing" signifies the plot we might have expected to develop in a more conventional picture; the protagonists' total indifference is both a teasing concession to that expectation and a mistrustful dismissal of the value of narrative convention - the film goes through the motions at the point where it feels obligated to develop some kind of perfunctory narrative trigger. As Affleck's character proclaims, "Fuck the thing!" Does anybody care about the thing, really?

The more intriguing narrative puzzle occurs at film's climax, when Affleck's Gerry informs Damon's Gerry that "I'm leaving", whereupon Damon's Gerry proceeds to strangle him, a seemingly unmotivated action, and go the rest of the journey alone. As it turns out, he does not have far to travel. No sooner has he abandoned Affleck's freshly-strangled corpse than do the miniature shapes of distant vehicles appear on the horizon, and Damon realises that he is within reach of an adjacent road. Damon makes his long-awaited reconnection with civilisation by hitching a ride with a parent and child. No words are exchanged between them. The characters sit in an uncomfortable silence, barely even acknowledging each other. The closest we get to any interaction between Damon and his saviours is in the voyeuristic glimpse the driver sneaks at him in his rear view mirror, shortly before the picture fades to blue. The final word, appropriately, goes to the landscape itself; we get another extended shot of the desert from the perspective of the car window. Its presence continues to dominate and haunt the surviving Gerry, and he regards it with such a manner suggesting that it is now the world with which he is better able to identify.

The film's baffling final outcome - the inexplicable slaughter of one Gerry by the other - was later echoed in Elephant, where one of the two shooters abruptly turns his gun on his own partner (with whom he had prior shared an intimate kiss) while their massacre is still underway. Unlike Elephant, which makes the bold and unsettling move of ending before the massacre does, Gerry bows out on a relatively conclusive note, with the restoration of one of its two protagonists to the world from which they diverged. The film has a cyclic structure, opening with the two main characters on the road and closing with Damon's character riding along inside a vehicle once again. Noteworthy is that Damon is the passenger in both cases - although he is clearly the more dominant and emotionally composed of the two Gerrys throughout the crisis, he is not, at the beginning or end, behind the wheel and in charge of where he is headed. Affleck, meanwhile, visibly the younger of the two Gerrys, emerges as the more desperate and misfortune-prone of the two - if the ending comes in any way as a shock to us, it is certainly no surprise that this particular Gerry would be the one dispatching this particular Gerry. It is also Affleck with whom the viewer is more likely to sympathise; his vulnerability and barely-concealed despair in the face of endless uncertainty seems more relatable than Damon's stoicism. Affleck's vulnerability is further enforced during a monologue from early in the picture, the most substantial portion of dialogue we experience from either character, and the only real illumination we get into the world our world have left behind. Only even then, it is a fantasy life that Affleck has experienced via a video simulation - he mentions to Damon that he has "conquered Thebes" and describes how, due to his failure to appease Demeter, the Greek goddess of the harvest ("she got really pissed off, she made my fields infertile"), his empire slowly crumbled. It is not explicitly acknowledged, but he is talking about his fortunes in playing the video game Civilization. The specifics of Affleck's dialogue tend not to elicit much curiosity from commentators - it has no bearing on the story and seems almost absurdly detached from the reality of their situation. Nevertheless, I find it interesting that Affleck is describing the process through which human conquest is thwarted by the forces of nature, and the various individual threads that, when pulled, cause society to collapse completely. The fragile barrier that stands between civilisation and barbarity is echoed in the startling ease with which he and Damon take a few too many steps off the beaten track and wind up right in the belly of oblivion, and is especially salient if we interpret Gerry as a parable where Nature unleashes a retribution on Man, albeit with an eerie passivity. When Affleck insists that he had, technically, conquered Thebes before his fall, he comes off as ridiculous, particularly for as little and overwhelmed as he is out here in the world - we know that he has no more conquered Thebes than he was ever in control of his own destiny, despite his positioning in the driver seat in the opening sequence. Furthermore, his presentation of this desultory anecdote  suggests a tendency, however casually, to blur fantasy and reality, something that becomes genuinely threatening in later on when, in his dazed and dehydrated state, he struggles to distinguish between his physical surroundings and mirages.

The film's applicability to the "Death" trilogy refers to the ultimate outcome of the characters' journey, but also the geographical location, the film being partially shot in California's Death Valley. The location of the desert is never specified, in narrative terms - it is simply a vast, generic desert that seems to expand ever onward - but what the viewer actually sees is Damon and Affleck maundering across a variety of terrains, and not exclusively American. Van Sant and his crew had initially travelled to Argentina with the intention of filming the entire picture, but struggled with the local climate and wound up relocating parts of the production to Utah and California. The floating location may have made things easier on the production, but it also plays to the film's advantage. The desert's composite nature means that it has no fixed form or character, feeling less like a site to be crossed over than a rolling nightmare that morphs and expands with every step the heroes take, constantly deceiving them and spitting them out at another point entirely. The Bela Tarr influence is evident in the manner in which the film, at times, seems to play like the most low-key of horror stories, with the terror arising from the sheer monotony with which the characters are obligated to endure the apparently interminable (I had similar thoughts about The Turin Horse). In a sequence that seems plucked directly from more conventional horror cinema, a third Gerry momentarily appears on the horizon and heads in the protagonists' direction, a hazy, indistinct figure who is so out of focus as to not appear fully human, and whom the two "original" Gerrys do not seem to notice. In a dislocating twist, that hazy third Gerry transpires to be the "real" Damon, while the Damon with whom Affleck has just been conversing - living out another variation on his assertion of having conquered Thebes, in which he claims to have found water and figured out the location of their vehicle - has completely disappeared. It is here that Van Sant most obviously pits the subjective against the objective to create a sense of unravelling reality, and the extent to which the characters' already vaguely-defined identities are beginning to merge with their surroundings; the hazily-defined figure of the perpetually wandering Gerry, now an imprint on the landscape, becomes an approaching threat, a wraith lurching toward the ostensibly triumphant Affleck to commandeer the naarative trajectory and nullify his claims of heroism.

The most plausible explanation for the climactic murder is that Damon kills Affleck at Affleck's request - it is an assisted suicide carried out on the mutual understanding that Affleck is, whether physically or mentally, incapable of continuing the journey. The killing is prompted not merely by Affleck's cryptic final statement, but by his reaching out and touching the initially unresponsive Damon, an imploration that he enables him to make good on his assertion that his role in this futile non-narrative be ended then and there. Has his body already started to succumb to death, hence his insistence that he is "leaving", or is he (more likely) submitting his formal surrender - not merely to the elements, but to the narrative inertia? Perhaps it is the film's equivalent of one of the most haunting exchanges in Waiting For Godot, when Estragon insists that, "I can't go on like this", only in place of Vladimir's deeply foreboding response ("That's what you think"),  Damon answers his companion's plea with a silent humaneness that paradoxically necessitates his destruction.

If Damon's Gerry kills Affleck as an act of compassion, then is this ultimately rendered meaningless by the revelation that the characters were, apparently, only ten minutes or so away from salvation?  In this regard, the outcome bears ostensible resemblance to the ham-fistedly bleak conclusion of Frank Darabont's 2007 film The Mist - only whereas with that film the ending felt like a particularly harsh and mean-spirited joke at the characters' expense, Gerry doesn't offer the same sense of overwrought tragedy (or tragicomedy?). The ending does not seem designed to evoke a response of "If only..." Rather, one gets the impression that it is (somehow) through the destruction of his close companion that Damon himself is able to cross back into the civilised world. It is as if the elimination of Affleck has altered the very course of what lies head. Perhaps Affleck understands that some kind of narrative climax is necessary in order to progress to a conclusion, and he offers up his life in order to release them both from their entrapment. Circling back to the moment of tender intimacy shared by the young mass murderers of Elephant shortly before their killing spree, it is tempting to interpret the act of strangulation as itself an allusion to sexual intimacy. As Damon carries out the deed, Affleck raises his arms and grips Damon's back - a sign of resistance, if only reflexively? Or is he attempting to hold his companion in a final, loving embrace?The Gerrys have always been bound to one another throughout in terms of their destiny and common identity, but this is the first time we have seen them physically converge.

Multiple critics have picked up on the possibility that the Gerrys might in fact be two halves of a single entity. Bradshaw writes that, "it's tempting to think each is a hallucination the other is having, staring into a terrifying, existential mirror." Totaro compares the outcome to the Edgar Allan Poe story "William Wilson", in which a man murders his own doppelganger, and to David Lynch's 1997 film Lost Highway, observing that, "we start the film with the psychic split already having occurred; and only at the end is the psychic split healed, when the double is ‘killed’ and the character’s single identity restored." Something similar occurs at the end of the aforementioned Adaptation., in which Nicolas Cage plays a pair of identical twin "brothers", Charlie and Donald, the latter of whom is likely nothing more than a grotesque mirror image of the former (both are screenwriters, yet Donald indulges in everything that Charlie considers obnoxious and undesirable about their craft). Donald perishes during the film's climactic sequence while Charlie survives, and it is through Donald's destruction that he finds both the catharsis and the incentive he needs to navigate through his writer's block and finish the picture (both the one he is writing and the one the audience is watching). Charlie prospers by simultaneously conquering and embracing his demon, in the form of Donald; it is through the accommodation and mastery of his shadow self that he figures out how to thrive in the world. In Gerry, Damon's elimination of Affleck is succeeded by his own salvation (ostensibly, anyway), for Damon, like Charlie, discovers that he is now able to progress to something resembling an ending. But whereas Charlie appears to have successfully healed the gap between the two warring halves of his psyche, Damon is forced to leave Affleck's body out in the desert; the Damon we see riding the car at the end has not been fully restored but is instead represents one half of a former whole. We are reminded of the warning at the end of Poe's story: "from now on you are also dead - dead to the World, dead to Heaven, dead to Hope." So heavily bound is one Gerry's identity to the other that Damon's supposed survival has, in practice, amounted to his own destruction. Think back to poor Norman and to the war with Mother that he was always fated to lose.

The final image of Adaptation. is an optimistic, if somewhat troubling one. A sequence of time lapse photography shows a box of flowers thriving amid a bustling cityscape. The petals of the flowers open and close to the rhythms of day and night as a constant stream of traffic rushes past. Perhaps Jonze is being deliberately evocative of Koyaanisqatsi, but in a manner which suggests the ultimate prevailing of the natural amid the technological, much as Charlie learns to prosper in a world that seems overwhelmingly stacked against his personal and professional ambitions. The ending's sinister underside is conveyed in the tell-tale accompanying track, "Happy Together" by The Turtles, which Donald had previously planned to insert into his screenplay, a messy quagmire of Hollywood cliches about a character with (what else?) a split personality. It clues us in that the harmony is an uneasy one, and that the co-existence may eventually give way to reckoning. Compare it to the ending of Gerry, which also juxtaposes the natural with the technological, with the vehicle that carries Damon and these two strangers running alongside the desert that continues to dominate the picture until the very last frame. The aridness of the desert contrasts with the vitality of the flowers of Adaptation., in which the natural world signifies survival, an ability to thrive and move forward with which the neurotic human world has overwhelmingly lost touch. In Gerry, the natural world, for all of its awe-inspiring grandeur, is less a source of comfort and inspiration to its human cast than it is a frightening reminder of the omnipresence and inevitability of death. At one point, early on in their adventure, Damon speculates that, "Everything's going to lead to the thing, everything's going to lead to the same place", which makes me wonder if this mysterious "thing" and the desert really aren't just two sides of the same coin. The Gerrys amble along, in no particular hurry to reach their fated destination, and happen upon it far sooner than they'd anticipated.

Totaro proposes that Affleck's Gerry is the "mirage", hence why it is Damon who ultimately emerges, yet if I was going to advocate that only one of the two Gerrys is physically real, I'd be more inclined to take the the reverse position - that Affleck represents the corporeal half of Gerry, the half of him that lies motionless in the desert at the end, whereas Damon signifies Gerry's anima, represented throughout as an external character (and potentially even splitting into two figures at one point, as Affleck's grip on reality begins to fragment). Both of them cross through the Valley of Death, until Affleck finally succumbs, whereupon the road reappears and Damon finds himself headed for a new body or two with which to align himself. It represents a renewal of the cycle - a reincarnation, if you will. The final scene within the vehicle interior presents something of an enigma, for Van Sant omits what would be a crucial scene in a more conventional narrative - the rescue itself, coupled with some exposition on the identity of his rescuers. Instead, we jump abruptly to find Damon travelling with these two unknowns, leaving some uncertainty as to what, precisely, is going on. Has Damon really been rescued, or is this merely another mirage? It strikes me as significant that the child seated in the back of the vehicle with Damon (but with his gaze turned firmly away from him) looks like a younger version of himself; he seems as if he could pass for Damon's own son over the driver we would presume to be his actual father. This reinforces our sense of a rebirthing, that we are once again at the beginning of a cycle. Nevertheless, the suggestion of restoration is undercut by the obvious unease of the final arrangement - Damon's newly-acquired mirror image refuses to acknowledge him, as if disturbed by the vision of what he is fated to become, and when he looks toward the actual rear view mirror he is met with the unwelcome gaze of the driver, another supposed controller of destiny who regards this relic of a fallen would-be empire with both fascination and suspicion. Instead, Damon finds greater affinity out there in the desert, for what is important is that all routes eventually lead to it. This is something Damon understands at the end, as he contemplates his ostensible victory over the landscape - sooner or later, he's going to wind up right back there again.