An early line in Creative
Control is a direct quote from Tommy Wiseau’s The Room: “You’re my favorite customer,” said by the protagonist’s
co-worker in order to mock him.
Ironically enough, this moment perfectly encapsulates why Creative Control does not work as a
movie; the reference exists for those in the know, but doesn’t serve a purpose
in the narrative and is meant to portray the character speaking as someone we
aren’t supposed to relate to because he knows it. The movie doesn’t seem to understand that it
is purposely offending the very people who would find its aesthetic and
cultural touchstones entertaining. The
film uses hipster bullshit in order to take potshots at bullshit aspects of
hipster culture, which just makes it a hipster bullshit snake eating its own
tail.
Set in the near future, David (played by director and
co-writer Benjamin Dickinson, making the comparison to Mr. Wiseau again more
apt) works for an advertising agency, and the stress of the position causes him
to lose interest in his girlfriend and become interested in his best friend’s
girlfriend, Sophie. When his company
takes on a campaign for a new reality augmentation system called Augmenta,
David uses his sample of the product to design a virtual version of Sophie, which
he masturbates to as it goes through the motions of fucking him.
The first thing one is likely to notice about Creative Control is that it is shot in
black and white, with color only entering the frame in the form of David’s
interactions with Augmenta. It’s a
pretty pedestrian way to show that David is more connected with his virtual
world than with reality, particularly when he’s downing handfuls of
anti-depressants and spanking it to his high tech hologram love toy in vivid
color, but it would actually work if the film had much more to say than “Hey,
hipsters are kinda self-destructive sadsacks, aren’t they?” Unfortunately, the dialogue and story beats
really only convey just that, as characters spout niche referential tidbits and
produce ironically commercial “art” with barely an arc to be seen until the
film’s final moments, when David has to make a contrived choice about how he
wants his life to proceed, only to cut to credits before that choice is shown.
Dickinson asks us to accept his artistic pretentions while
attacking the same pretentious sensibilities of the privileged hipster class
that serve as the grounding for his film’s sense of humor, cinematographic
style, and self-contragulatory, masturbatory story about douchebags being
douchebags. He either wants to be the
butt of his own joke or wants to take down those he perceives as egotistic
hacks without realizing that he is one himself, and I’m not sure which. He’s like Tommy Wiseau in that regard, but
with much more raw talent; he can frame a shot, write some entertaining
dialogue here and there, and can even act to a certain extent, yet he doesn’t
understand that the methods by which he tries to communicate his points are
self-defeating and, ultimately, self-indulgent.
Creative Control could have
benefited from a more straightforward, less artistic-for-artistry’s-sake
mentality, but as it stands, Benjamin Dickinson is just jerking off into the
camera, literally and figuratively.
No comments:
Post a Comment