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Too Old to Die Young
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Excess is the Best Revenge
A smooth, lateral tracking movement follows the path
of Yaritza (Cristina Rodlo from the 2019 Miss
Bala remake) along the façade of a cheap motel. With a gun in one hand and
a knife in the other, Yaritza swiftly disposes of three henchmen stationed
outside two rooms, after greeting them with a breathy “Hi, guys”. She then coolly
steps inside, kills three more guys (pausing to reload her gun to finish off
the final victim) – but leaves alive the women who have been corralled into
sex slavery. We see a Nazi flag positioned prominently in one of these rooms.
All of this is done in one take (including diverse
digital effects) lasting one and three-quarter minutes, with no slow motion,
underneath the dreamy synth music score of Cliff Martinez. It’s the type of
undeniably virtuosic – even breathtaking – moment that fans of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill (2003 & 2004) movies are likely to
acclaim: such spectacular violence, such a strangely poetic beauty of bloody
action – and with a feminist message, too! Oh, did I mention that Yaritza likes
to call herself the High Priestess of Death?
Too Old to Die Young – not to be
confused with the excellent Chilean film by Dominga Sotomayor, Too Late to Die Young (2018) – is a 10
episode, 13 hour series by Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive, 2011) for Amazon Video. Very much in the footsteps of David
Lynch and Twin Peaks: The Return (2017),
Refn – who directed every episode, sharing the writing credits with Ed Brubaker
– describes it not as an episodic series but one, long movie. Long and slow it
certainly is – and means to be – with an excruciatingly stretched-out
storyline that is far from being resolved at the end of the first season. And
that is, as far as anyone can tell, indeed the end: the series (reception of
which has been referred to, accurately or not, as “disastrous”) was cancelled in
July 2019.
My response to it, on initial release, was ambivalent:
a true case of fascination meeting repulsion. Yet I cannot deny that, 4 months
after binging it, I am still thinking about it constantly, and recommending it
to other people. It’s a monster (in every sense), but it sticks with you; my
estimation of its quality his risen over time.
Refn aims for excess on most levels of style and
content; Too Old to Die Young is
definitely not for the squeamish. Even the series title appears anywhere during
an episode that Refn chooses to drop it. I confess that, one scene and five
minutes down in the first episode, I was entirely ready to ditch it – every
line of dialogue was preceded and followed by a protracted pause, the actors (Miles
Teller as Martin and Lance Gross as Larry, two crooked cops) looked constrained
to emote as little as possible, and the colours in literally every shot are an unforgiving
mélange of hot pink, purple, blue, yellow (with as much neon lighting crammed
into the frame as possible). But I held on grimly, and I’m glad I did (the
second episode, set in Mexico and delivered almost wholly in subtitled Spanish,
is the best of the series). I have plenty of reservations about its
increasingly convoluted, self-destructing themes, but Too Old to Die Young is definitely worth something as a fairly
unique “TV event”.
The motor of
the story – if motor is the right word for this protracted crawl through many
characters, places and (for a long time) only loosely connected events – is
simple. Larry is killed in a Los Angeles street by a mysterious figure, Jesus
(Augusto Aguilera), who declares that he is avenging the murder of his mother.
In fact, Jesus has targeted the wrong guy; Martin was the culprit. From there,
the plot splits in two: while Martin spins deeper into obligations involving
shady underworld figures, Jesus returns to his birthplace of Mexico, where the ageing
patriarch of his criminal family, Don Ricardo (Emiliano Díez), dotes over
Yaritza and rages over the creeping loss of their American territory. But is
his hot-headed, bad-mannered son, Miguel (Roberto Aguire), really the best
choice to take over this empire? These two major plot strands will slowly
intersect – due, in part, to the unusual therapeutic practice of the beyond-New
Age Diana (Jena Malone), herself straddling the spheres of crumbling law and anarchic
disorder.
Like in Only God Forgives (2013) – the exact
point in his career where he became more ambitious and grandiose – Refn tries
to keep a balance between elements of the film
noir genre (crime, mystery, murder) and formal explorations that border on
the avant-garde (sometimes rather chintzily). It’s the same combo perfected in Lost Highway (1997) – with “neo-pulp” co-writer Barry
Gifford giving Lynch there what graphic-novelist Brubaker gives Refn here – and
that Luca Guadagnino scuttled in his atrocious remake of the horror classic Suspiria (2018).
One index of
the noir element in Too Old to Die Young – and it gets
ever-more hypnotic with accumulation over the episodes – is its perfectly
systematic and well-wrought choice of locations, a little in the way that Bruno
Dumont gathered them in his memorable USA jaunt Twentynine Palms (2003): diners, gas stations, sinister voids hidden
in hangars or bowling alleys … it becomes quite a geo-cultural list, finally.
At other points, however, Refn adroitly plays right against generic
expectations, whether of noir,
action-thriller or suspense: a protracted “car chase” in episode 5 that plays
out in a kind of anti-climactic, even uneventful real-time slow motion is a
highlight in this respect. (It was one of two episodes that Refn chose to
premiere at Cannes in May 2019.) Likewise, certain happenings in the series
deliberately beggar belief on the verisimilitude scale, opting instead for a
oneiric flux of time, space and incident: this is especially so in relation to
a fleeting, unidentified character’s miraculous ability to survive while locked
inside a box buried far in the desert (also in episode 5).
As with Tarantino, one can always play the game of
spotting the influences and allusions. It’s a heady stew: Lynch, William Friedkin, Gaspar
Noé, Kenneth Anger (for the Aleister Crowley black magic ingredient), Alejandro Jodorowsky (Refn’s
avowed artistic mentor), Rainer Werner Fassbinder (for the eye-burning garish
colour schemes), Abel Ferrara (a scene from his Bad Lieutenant [1992] is restaged for a film-within-the film segment), even that severe,
spiritual master Robert Bresson. Both Teller and Rodlo are the blank “models”,
utterly devoid of facial expression, that Bresson never had a chance to meet
and cast – but Refn hedges his bet here by introducing the psychological
motivation of sociopathy (Martin frequently admits to his “lack of feeling”
when killing).
But I defy anybody to make coherent sense of Too Old to Die Young, to discern or
decipher its “deep structure” of meaning. (What the heck does even the title
mean?) With this necessary caveat: it is entirely possible that Refn and Brubaker
intended to re-scramble the plot elements (and their associated semantic values)
in the subsequent season, if they ever got to make it. Who knows how far ahead
they projected in their planning? But let’s juggle with what we’ve got, what has
been presented to us in the sole season of this saga – for it’s on this ground
that Refn seems stranded a long way from the complex perspectival clarity of a Fassbinder
or a Ferrara.
Observe, first up, that this is a narrative entirely
obsessed with what is tagged today as “age inappropriate” relationships in the
modern world. Martin started sleeping with Janey (Nell Tiger Free) when she was
16. The relationship between Yaritza and Don Ricardo (who “adopted” her)
remains charged and ambiguous. This brings us to an incest motif: there’s a
strong rhyme between Jesus with his mother, Magdalena (Carlotta Montanari,
glimpsed in lurid fantasy flashbacks) on the one hand, and Janey with her
wildly out-of control, coked-up father, Theo (William Baldwin, who gets some
the creepiest scenes in screen history here), on the other. In this series
where single parenthood seems to be the golden rule, there’s even something a
little odd going on between Diane’s ailing hired killer Viggo (John Hawkes) and
his senile old Mom, Eloise (Joanna Cassidy).
Is all this coded as so much “perversion” in the moral
landscape of the series? It would appear so: while Yaritza goes about freeing
oppressed women with her nifty knife/gun work, Diana despatches her killers
(Viggo and Martin) to deal with those who abuse vulnerable children (there is a
nod here to the great films of Samuel Fuller). Diana proclaims that at the end
of this mission of righteous revenge – and after a great, apocalyptic spilling
of blood – there will one day be a rebirth of innocence, a new dawn for
mankind. A curious vision!
At the same time, however – and this is where the
theme-diagram gets confusing and contradictory – Refn is toying with a Twin Peaks-style overlay of Good versus
Evil conceived on a mystical, supernatural and cosmic scale (as he also did in The Neon Demon, 2016). Yet Yaritza is
surely positioned on the negative side of that opposition; and Martin himself
is all over the semantic map. Several torture scenes – which provide queasily
sadomasochistic thrills for the characters and for us – also complicate our
response to the supposed meaning of events. As well, there’s a heavy-handed
overlay of political satire “in the age of Trump” that marks the series’ lowest
point, and clarifies little: cops sing happy chants about fascism, the
underclass drapes itself in Nazi flags, and most of the “ordinary folk” on
display are unadulterated grotesques. Plus other complications: it is
constantly implied (Tarantino style) that revenge-killing may not only be a
little sociopathic, but also liable to spin out of control; it’s just too much
darn fun for the guys executing it.
And maybe also for Refn himself. (By the way, I
strongly advise avoiding all public pronouncements by this director; in
interviews as on festival stages, he tends to glorify himself and insult
everybody else.) Like some thundering preacher of the Old Testament, Refn
denounces, in this series, a society awash with pornography and mindlessly
thrilling acts of violence and torture on our streets as on our screens. He
appears especially perturbed by supposedly “unnatural” sex acts (masturbating,
fisting, and so on – all invariably associated with the gesture of spitting!)
that defy the good old dictate of species reproduction. (Shades of shifty Noé,
especially, here.)
Yet, on a whole other level, Refn’s style utterly
overturns his content, revealing his moralistic obsessions to be also queasy
fascinations: the way he lovingly frames and films his most perversity-filled scenes
is itself akin to a kind of sleek, highbrow pornography (not in the graphic
hardcore way, but like many music videos) – and it’s as queer as fuck, with no
distinction in its voyeurism and fetishism between male and female bodies.
All these doubts and confusions aside, however, what
finally makes Too Old to Die Young an
authentic TV event is the way Refn shapes it. He differs from Lynch and Twin Peaks: The Return in one, important
respect: where Lynch attacks each scene as a separate entity and brings it
alive in a specific way, Refn is all about what David Bordwell calls stylistic parameters. That is, he sets up a
certain procedure – lateral tracking shots, slow pans, symmetrically arranged
frontal compositions, use of colour blur, extended duration, fixed “portrait”
images – and he sticks with it episode after episode, giving rise to an
extended pattern of echoes, comparisons and reversals between all 13 hours
worth of scenes. Like in the best moments of The Neon Demon, Refn sometimes creates, through his fanatically
fussy parametric choices, distinctive formal inventions – like
the fact that the faces of certain minor characters remain unseen or
unidentifiable.
Recent TV production has attempted many bold and risky
things, but no one – not even Fassbinder in Berlin
Alexanderplatz (1980) – has gone this far out on a limb with a house style
as intricate and sustained as Refn manages in Too Old to Die Young. That’s something, at the very least, to
admire.
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