The Infamous Bomb ‘Southland Tales’ Is Enjoying A Surge Of Renewed Relevance — And Reappraisal

In many ways — politically, psychologically, spiritually — the George W. Bush presidency has come to look like something of a warm-up for the Trump years. There’s a line to be drawn from Dubya asking “is our children learning?” to the barrage of half-thought malapropisms that constitutes the Trumpian dialect. The existence of Schrodinger’s there-and-yet-not-there WMDs prepped us all for the era of fake news doublethink, just as the callous peace some made with mass casualties in the Middle East has now trickled down into selective apathy about widespread COVID-related fatalities. Pathologies and culture-spanning bad habits mutated into frightful, bizarre sociological patterns. Aggrieved conservatives left out of the governmental mainstream eventually found a home in the MAGA movement. Everything circled back around as a weirder, more concentrated version of itself.

It’s in this respect that the relevance of Southland Tales, once alternately touted and denounced as a garbled diagnosis of Dubya’s America, has been renewed with greater emphasis and clarity than it ever enjoyed upon initial premiere in 2006. Its spectacular failure has already ossified into showbiz legend, as a hotshot young auteur’s big-swing sophomore feature that debuted to howling boos at Cannes and then died a quiet death in approximately sixty Stateside cinemas upon its long-delayed theatrical release. A cult has since formed around the film, due in part to its mad ambition and unhinged world-building beckoning to curious, particular tastes. But the fandom’s expansion can also be attributed to the shrinking distance between writer-director Richard Kelly’s hysterical alternate United States and our day-to-day reality. 

A new Blu-ray reissue of the film commemorates the fifteenth anniversary of the calamitous Cannes opening, and makes the expanded cut shown there commercially available for the first time. The handsome home-video treatment stands as a testament to how far Southland Tales has risen in a select slice of the moviegoing public’s estimation, appreciated more and more as an exceptionally audacious work of ahead of its time. The ascent of Trumpism, now safely in the rearview as we all gain in perspective, has shown us just how far ahead. It would take no longer than a decade for Kelly’s maniacal prophecy of domestic unrest to come true with an eerie specificity. If a President Trump did not exist, he would have to be invented by one of this movie’s numerous batty subplots.

In an interview with Filmmaker last week, Kelly described his postmodern epic as “my only chance to make a sprawling Philip K. Dick/Robert Altman acid trip of a movie set in Los Angeles.” In the wake of Donnie Darko‘s unexpected success, he grabbed on to that opportunity with both hands, compressing as much plot and modern-day mythologizing into its nearly two-and-a-half hours as possible. (For everything that didn’t fit, he planned a series of graphic novel accompaniments and a big-screen follow-up doubling as prequel and sequel.) The deliberate overstuffed quality simulates Trumpism’s non-stop barrage of crises and bad news with better fidelity than any other film at its titanic scale, as studio-funded products generally shy away from such an alienation offensive made at the price of marketability and audience appeal. Basic comprehension becomes difficult when information is constantly being thrown at you, producing the same overwhelming effect that the Trump administration generated on a daily basis. That ambience of exhausting confusion is an asset that felt like a flaw to some viewers, its dizzying fatigue vindicated by the unending mental strain of the last four years.

The composite parts of the byzantine script speak to our present, too, Kelly’s seer-like clarity bordering on freaky. Presumably scrawled on a 120-foot taped-together scroll like On the Road, it joins the fates of a disparate ensemble of characters as the apocalypse hurtles towards the post-WWIII Los Angeles of tomorrow. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson went ingeniously against type as the finger-fluttering Boxer Santaros, a celebrity-turned-Republican-strongman animated by fear. He’s a charismatic boob with no idea of what is actually going on even though he’s at the center of a vast cataclysm, pushed uncomprehending from one plot point to the next as he wrestles with an amnesia impeding his mental facility. He’s married to the daughter (Mandy Moore) of a Senator named after Robert Frost, one of many poetic allusions that serve mostly to confound understanding in practice. Frost (Holmes Osborne) and his totalitarian surveillance state stand a great deal of embarrassment if it comes out that Santaros has been consorting with Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar), a porn star/pop star/energy drink mogul/talk show host with kompromat on the Oval Office. Also of concern is the screenplay they’ve authored together, which foretells the end of the world. 

Also in the mix is Seann William Scott as Ronald and Roland Taverner, a pair of twins both entangled with a far-left radical terrorist cell known as the neo-Marxists. (Their ranks and the cast at large include a peculiar number of SNL alumni and improv comedians, from Amy Poehler to Nora Dunn to Jon Lovitz to Will Sasso to Cheri Oteri.) As a veteran keeping his PTSD at bay with an opiate called Fluid Karma, Justin Timberlake monitors the goings-on from a sniper’s perch on Venice Beach, nearly unrecognizable as himself until an impromptu lip-sync routine to the Killers’ “All These Things That I’ve Done.” Wallace Shawn figures prominently into matters as energy magnate Baron von Westphalen, who shall use the perpetual waves of the ocean to make him and his retinue (featuring Bai Ling and a double amputee Kevin Smith!) the most powerful people alive. 

Anything can happen, seemingly, and most things do. There’s race-fueled police violence and conspiracy theorizing and an instant-classic Krysta Now single called “Teen Horniness Is Not a Crime.” At one point, a faux car commercial employs computer-animation to make two Hummers hump like lions on the savannah. The climax of the film takes place aboard a gigantic zeppelin. Seldom does the cost of a ticket buy a person this much movie, on sheer volume alone.

The cumulative effect of the many strange, irreconcilable things happening all around the audience is an atmosphere of surreality that closely corresponds to our new normal. Every day, headlines demand that we accept something that sounds like satire as breaking news, the latest being “Wall Street Hedge Funders Brought To Knees By GameStop Fans On Reddit.” So many cherished memories of the Trump term, whether as broad as his vendetta against windmills as “a killing field for birds” or as unsettlingly spot-on as the Stormy Daniels affair, inspire this same hallucinatory feeling that’s nonetheless all too real. The siege of the Capitol by a coalition of aggressive insurrectionists in goofy costumes proved how matter-of-factly the dystopian can coexist alongside the hilarious to generate brain-melting dissonances. 

Kelly was attuned to this garish absurdism long before we had no choice but to deliriously cackle our way through it. In one subplot, an employee at the star-spangled Big Brother uses the tech to stalk Boxer Santaros, under the delusion that he’s actually his character Jericho Cane, a name taken from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character in End of Days. Her obsession nearly undermines the fabric of democracy, an outlandish turn at which no one would blink an eye these days. While still capable of being shocked, we’ve lost the capacity to be surprised. Southland Tales anticipated that form of submission, under which the average American can get through the week only by allowing the nightmare burlesque of societal breakdown to wash over them. The knotty, sprawling text is best ingested by letting it happen to you.

For the growing number of the film’s disciples, loose bits of dialogue stick in the brain like a soothsayer’s warning and pop back up to fit the situation. Krysta Now assesses America as “a bisexual nation living in denial, all because of a bunch of nerds who got off a boat in the 15th century and decided that sex was something to be ashamed of,” a nugget which leapt to mind in light of the New York Times’ recent feature titled “Everyone Is Gay on TikTok.” In her other immortal soundbite, she declares that “scientists are saying the future is going to be far more futuristic than they originally predicted,” her tautology turning with time into zen wisdom about the hazards of runaway progress. She’s the key zeitgeist-captor in an L.A. full of them, even if the spirit of the time wasn’t yet hers to capture. The demented fall-of-the-empire attitude prevalent today consumed her and her fellow avatars of the next era as literal occurrence, not as mood. It’s the chief difference between their America and ours, that the Armageddon we can feel creeping up on us actually arrives in a flash of blinding white light. 

The big thing Kelly got wrong was the sense of conclusion, that these were the final wheezing breaths of the Republic. This isn’t the way the world ends, to contradict the Eliot reference invoked by various characters as a koan’s soothing refrain. No bangs, no whimpers. It just keeps going like this.

Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevassse) is a film and television critic living in Brooklyn. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Nylon, Vulture, The A.V. Club, Vox, and plenty of other semi-reputable publications. His favorite film is Boogie Nights.

Where to watch Southland Tales