Sounds of Silence

Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park

Cinema is inherently voyeuristic: we, the viewers, are always on the outside, peering at something to which we should not be privy, while on the inside, the characters who occupy the world we watch seem unaware of our presence.

In the case of most Hollywood blockbusters, it is easy to forget that we are voyeurs, because our window offers us a view of the impossible—places we could never possibly be: inside a jet fighter, or amidst a zombie army, or bumbling through a romance with a witty supermodel, or in a galaxy far far away.

Gus Van Sant's recent spate of vérité-style films offer instead a glimpse into places we might have been, if only we were so unlucky: lost in the desert without food or water (Gerry), hiding under a table in the library of Columbine High School (Elephant), or living out the final week in the under-furnished mansion of a reluctant rock'n'roll hero, before his suicide (Last Days).1

Add to this list one more place we don't want to revisit any time soon: the mind of a teenager—in particular, the dreamy, lyrical, emotionally-detached mind of a skateboarding teenager named Alex, growing up in a broken home in Portland, struggling with belonging, and involved in an unfortunate and grisly incident one night at Paranoid Park. The film recounts the events before and after that incident, but it jumbles the order, skews the point of view, slows things down, speeds things up, repeats a scene several times but reveals something new each time. "I'm writing this a little out of order," says Alex of his own pencil-scribbled narration. "Sorry. I didn't do so well in creative writing."

Van Sant, an American auteur who is best known for his (excellent but entirely conventional) Good Will Hunting, has since been diligently reminding us that the medium of film is one of sound and image and time, more than one of plot or character or dialogue. The most memorable moments of his recent films are the ones in which nothing is said and not very much seems to happen: the crunch of feet on the desert gravel; an ad hoc song plucked out on an acoustic guitar, performed for no one; the silent grainy home-movie footage of one skater after another, jumping off a ramp and reaching—Icarus-like—for the sky. These scenes may seem wistful, or indulgent, or narcissistic2; but then, the most memorable moments of our own lives are probably the same.

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1. Van Sant calls these three his "Death Trilogy," and indeed, they are beautiful, elegiac, fictional snuff films.

2. Marshall McLuhan suggests that Narcissus would never have become so enamored of his own reflection if he had understood it for what it was ("Narcissus as Narcosis"). Instead, perhaps he was enraptured at the discovery of one so similar to himself, and could not avert his eyes. The same might be said for Van Sant's long, longing gazes upon his subjects.