Courtesy of onlinemovieshut.com
The media are a weird entity. They run on money, power and buzz — the latter being the most important factor when pertaining to the independent arts.
If an artist has buzz, it almost doesn’t matter what they’re saying or doing. It can be perceived as high art, as long as the right people are the ones watching or listening. It happened with Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All, the rap group who brought ultraviolence, misogyny and homophobia back into hip-hop. But they had buzz, so the media kept fanning the flame, giving them credibility and awards. Some media don’t even have to see the film — they just are informed of its buzzworthy status, and pass it on.
This effect is currently at work with Evan Glodell’s Bellflower – a film awash in a blitz of buzz and indie credibility, full of misogyny and a breed of ultraviolence that rivals A Clockwork Orange in terms of pure disgust.
The plot follows Woodrow (Evan Glodell), a free-floating twenty-something who spends his time with his friend Aiden (Tyler Dawson) building apocalyptic vehicles for their Mad Max-inspired gang, “Mother Medusa.” Eventually, Woodrow finds Milly (Jessie Wiseman), who he falls in love with. They eventually don’t work out — then the film takes a turn to a truly frightening and disgusting place that showcases the worst qualities of the human condition.
(I don’t want to ruin the film for anyone who wishes to watch it, so here is a warning that there will be slight SPOILERS ahead.)
Those qualities include horrific rape, murder, suicide, displays of masculinity, misogyny and sadism — none of which make this film any more artistic, credible or buzzworthy.
Peter Travers of Rolling Stone (whom I usually trust) mentions none of this ultraviolence when he named Bellflower one of his “dozen must-see summer movies”:
Here’s a truly experimental film, a real flamethrower that explodes with the energy of fearless young talent. Writer-director Evan Glodell even built the hi-def camera that recorded the film’s hallucinatory images. Bellflower, about two friends — Glodell and Tyler Dawson — who dream of creating their own Mad Max apocalypse, practically jumps off the screen.
Travers is referring to the fact the Glodell and his DP Joel Hodge built HD cameras with old Russian parts — creating truly impressive images and by far the best qualities that the film possesses.
At indieWIRE, the buzz of the film allows them to glance over aspects of the plot that any other non-buzz film would be crucified for, such as a cop-out ending. Listen to how Eric Kohn phrases his explanation of the ending to do so:
In its third act, a prolonged sequence grows increasingly disturbing to the point where it appears the filmmaker has lost his way. But once it returns to an earlier point in the story, Glodell reveals his full strategy: He’s daring viewers to handle a ludicrous twist before proving that he’s smarter than that.
How come when Bellflower cops out on its ending, it’s Glodell “daring viewers to handle a ludicrous twist before proving he’s smarter than that” and when Jennifer Lynch did it in Boxing Helena it was something reprehensible enough to discourage her from making movies for 15 years?
Entertainment Weekly promotes the film based on it’s buzz, and basically admits to not seeing it. Read between the lines:
Boy meets girl in Bellflower, an indie drama and twisted love story from first-time writer-director Evan Glodell that hits cinemas August 5. Boy also helps construct first a flamethrower and then a souped-up, fire-spurting, Mad Max-style car in preparation for the post-apocalypse. “I saw The Road Warrior when I was really young and would fantasize about the apocalypse,” admits Glodell, who also stars in the Sundance-screened film.
The result is a movie that is as visually and psychologically intense as it is hard to sum up — although you can get some flavor of Glodell’s baby by checking out the new Bellflower trailer below.
I don’t mean to detract from the fact that Glodell (whom we did an interview with here) created a film on almost no-budget with homemade camera rigs and built his own flamethrower and cars to fill the film with. These parts of the film are impressive, and I don’t mean to take that away from Bellflower. I just can’t stand the fact that the buzz of the film has allowed it to reach a large audience with almost no criticism in regard to the ultraviolence the film spills over with.
It seems that this type of ultraviolence and misogyny is deemed okay by the media, because it is violence aimed towards an educated upper class, unlike, say, Grand Theft Auto which is geared towards anyone with a video game console. This subject is explored by Maggie Nelson in The Art of Cruelty (you can read Laura Kipnis’ great review for the New York Times Book Review here), who points out that works of violent art geared towards a presumably more educated class is construed as more artistic while those geared towards lower, presumably uneducated classes are not.
In the end, Bellflower is being heralded as a triumph in independent filmmaking, something wholly original and worthy of pride. However, regardless of it’s originality, it is a sickening film to watch and is filmed to the brim in a breed of ultraviolence that needs to be examined critically and not just raved upon.
