The Dirties (2013)
Directed by Matt Johnson
The line between reality and fiction starts to blur when two best friends start making a movie about getting revenge on bullies.
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Despite the copious references to Pulp Fiction, The Usual Suspects and Elephant, Johnson stresses that violent films don't create psychopaths, though they do provide reference points to the steps that will eventually tip them over the edge.
We meet them in the opening scene hard at work on their project, a violent revenge fantasy that’s equal parts Being John Malkovich and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, although it’s mostly Pulp Fiction, at least when it comes to language and violence.
Matt’s idea seems like a goof at first, an excuse to riff on Pulp Fiction and The Usual Suspects and screw around in his basement room on the computer.
Matt, who has a basement full of movie posters, has stuffed his debut auteur effort with swaths of dialogue from Pulp Fiction and obscurer references to films like Irreversible .
It’s also a film about the new breed of mass murderers, depicting Matt as a typical teen who’s been desensitized by shoot-’em-up videogames and movies, to the extent that he appropriates the dialogue and attitudes of Pulp Fiction and The Dark Knight Rises without considering their real-world implications.
Whereas Gus Van Sant’s Elephant tried to skirt the issue and present it in very black and white terms (although suggesting everything from bullying to homophobia to video games to incessant piano concertos), Johnson makes no qualms about suggesting that school corridor bullying is to blame.
The subject of bullying is convincingly depicted, and there's an attempt to grapple with the transition from class clown to killer, but this lacks the depth, emotional clout and (oddly enough) empathy of Gus Van Sant's altogether superior Elephant.
Imagine Gus Van Sant’s Elephant laced with meta-movie mischief and the result might resemble Canadian first-timer Matt Johnson’s promising but patchy provocation.
Gus Van Sant's "Elephant" might be the high water mark for artistic meditations on the conditions that lead to teen massacres, but Matt Johnson's "The Dirties" exists outside of those expectations.
And The Dirties is a suspense film, in the tradition of Targets , The Day Of The Jackal, and Day Night Day Night, tracking the anxious days of careful preparation leading up to a potential crime.