Parable commences as a parody of a certain kind of American buddy-bonding action film which quickly spirals into pure black farce. A Bush stand-in, with cowboy hat is thrown out of the house by his wife/girlfriend and can’t have her car. He is next hitch-hiking on a rural road where another man, who has lost his license for drunk driving, asks him to drive him somewhere; they fight and then bond. Play pool, drink beer. They drive though the vastness of Nebraska. They rob and kill a man. The cowboy hat rapes and kills his redneck buddy.
Rupture.
A bucolic farm; a strange man, his captive woman; insinuations of sex. At a point she escapes and is found and brought, it would seem willingly, back. The cowboy hat arrives, is serviced by the girl and is then strangled to death. His body is tossed in a farm shed in which materialize bodies from Abu Ghraib.
There is no point in a synopsis of this work, which is more a tone poem about America now, a place in which the mythic past sits uncomfortably with the fakery which it was and is, and for the present which it has produced, a grotesque mockery of “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”
2008 | Digital Video | Color | Sound | 72 minutes
Producer, Director, Cinematographer: Jon Jost
Editing and Sound Recording: Marcella Di Palo Jost with J. Jost
With: Stephen Taylor, Rachael Le Valley, Ryan Harper Gray, Tyler Messner, Kim Matthews, John Grasmick
Shown at: Split Film Festival 2009, Croatia, and Maverick Film Festival 2010, San Jose, CA
Vimeo VOD
Reviews:
· by Dennis Grunes
Jon Jost’s films have always tended toward parable. Now this is the case again with Parable, the jewel of his Fuck Bush (He Fucked Us) Trilogy. (This overarching title is mine.) Homecoming (2004) homed in on the aftermath of a returning dead soldier; Over Here (2007), of a returning living soldier. Now Jost turns to the Bush-Cheney & Co. assault on individual rights and freedom, its devastation of these, and the linkage between this war at home, on the American citizenry, with the illusory nature of American hopes and promises predating Bush 43. Jost’s parable is a perfect one: crystal-clear, yet elusive, mysterious, irreducible, unfathomable. It was videographed in Lincoln in, as Jost puts it, “the Time of Bush.”
Like his Last Chants for a Slow Dance (1977), one of whose violent aspects it brilliantly revives, the film proceeds by set-pieces, some of which are fashioned from Nature outdoors. A long one has two men supposedly in the front seat of a car, the supposed road rapidly visible in retreat through the back window. In reality the scene is artificial; facing us, the men’s images are scrunched and thinly outlined in black. Jim, who has just abandoned his wife, is driving the other man’s car. (The owner/passenger’s license has been suspended for drunk driving.) As country-western music plays on the radio, Jim extols the virtue of American freedom, identifying with it the road of possibilities before them. But this road is excluded from the frame; and even if were it visible, it would not be real, but illusory. The men themselves are reduced by the comic strip captions that reveal what they are thinking, each about the other and in response to what the other is saying. While Jim loved going to church as a boy, the owner/passenger did not. With sore irony this disparity binds them as they both end up singing the hymn “I’m in the Lord’s Army.” Jim, sentimentally, still is; his companion “ain’t marchin’ anymore.” Recall Tennyson’s poem “The Two Voices”? Could not these two chaps represent competing aspects of a single personality?
After Jim anally rapes and then shoots his companion in the brain point-blank, two other characters appear in the country. Their relationship, that of master/owner and slave, reminds one of Roman Polanski’s great The Fat and the Lean (1961). The androgynous slave—mime Rachael Levalley gives a haunting performance—has his/her ankle bound by rope. (Sometimes an upper torso shot makes the slave-in-motion seem perfectly free; but he/she isn’t.) Updating the myth of Sisyphus, the owner is continually (though not continuously) unraveling a vast, serpentine pile of rope. When he is shown first engaged in this activity, we cannot see the rope; what we see is his upper body rhythmically “at it,” his screen-right shoulder undulating in and out of sunlight. In a later, parallel scene, the owner, indoors, appears to be having sex with someone whose moans we hear but who isn’t included in the frame. No; the owner is once again unraveling rope, while the moans emanate from the slave, who is masturbating in his/her space of confinement outdoors. The poor slave pays a terrible price for getting the owner all hot and bothered. We hear the sound of a cleaver as it is being sharpened in the bathroom as the slave stands upright in the tub.
A recurrent visual refrain is the owner’s eye through a peep-hole, looking in on the slave. The surveillance is creepy and frightening—but also, somehow, sad. I was reminded of Redon’s Cyclops. (At one point the owner at work at his pile of rope is shot through a tight-meshed screen, making him also appear to be a prisoner.) Another recurrent visual refrain is a tree or trees luminously alive in a breeze. This symbol of freedom in certain contexts ironically reflects on the lack of freedom that humans experience. Jim eventually reappears and comes to a bad end. (The slave’s.)
Jost’s film concludes with a postscript indicting Bush and Cheney and other members of their administration. The collision between the preceding poetic parable and this straight shot of prose generates tremendous feeling.
An American masterpiece.
Unknown reviewer at San Jose FF:
Parable is an incredible film which obviously had a great deal of thought put into it and in return gives the viewer a lot to think about. Should you go see it? Well.
Directed by Jon Jost, whose films are referred to as “tone poems”, Parable is a symbolic commentary on the Bush administration and was made before GWB left office. There is not much dialog and it can be very confusing if you are not taking it for what it is – a symbolic commentary. There are scenes with a man in a chair silently trying to unjumble a knotted rope. Scenes with a man in a red shirt who is tied by a rope to a woman in a blue dress. And there are some very violent scenes strewn throughout. The first five minutes of the film are so slow I think they are just meant to weed out any non-serious partakers. This film forces the viewer to pay attention and to think, so much so that it will be difficult for the average festival-goer to sit still for it.
In fact, there were over 100 people in the audience when it started. At the 45 minute mark half the audience had left. By the time the Q&A began there were 17 people left to ask questions, but ask they did. Those 17 left were thrilled that they had stayed through the whole film and felt rewarded for having done so. The Q&A with actor Stephen Taylor was one of the best I have attended as everyone left was so excited about what they had just seen. In return, Taylor knew the director well (Jost was out of the country with another film) and was able to explain and talk about a great deal more than he had anticipated.
The truth is, this is an amazing film, but it is for a much smaller segment of the film festival audience. You must be prepared to think hard and to decipher the symbolism if you are going to watch this film, but go into the theater with that mindset you will be greatly rewarded.
Marjorie Mikesen:
“I was surprised you’re having a spot of trouble festing “Parable.” I should have sent comments a long time ago, but I think it is a masterpiece! You captured that sick feeling in the stomach that the Bush years have given us, but in a totally original way. The bathtub-whetting-the-knife scene is a “one-off” disturbing segment that probably gives viewers the feel and taste of torture more than any procedurally accurate, expected version. And the main character’s autoeroticism shown by his rocking actions and fiddling with the tangled, knotted mess in his lap — well! That certainly captures the kind of political and moral mess we’ve been in. I was also taken by your comments that you’d filmed it with Thomas Hart Benton’s style in mind. I got the Wyeth connection, but the Benton association gives it even more power. I truly hope Parable finds the audience it deserves.”
Filmmaker’s reflections:
Parable works on a visual and visceral level for which a synoptic summary is impossible. It is a reflection of The Time of Bush in America, a squalid period of corruption equal to our county’s worst, or, as if possible, even the worst. The film tackles this era with a melange of genres typical of our culture, a culture which distills in reality down to cartoons and in which a trajectory from domestic melodrama leads axiomatically to Abu Ghraib. Parable is history as farce, an American tragedy limned by the Flintstones and Simpsons, where seriousness has been subsumed by “reality TV,” and the populace has been reduced to zombie-like consumers busy eating themselves.
Parable is a tone-poem of The Time of Bush, a quantum warp in Americana, steeped in the tonal reality of the era, but harking back to earlier times, with painterly references to Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, and Wyeth, and embracing cinematic touch points from neo-realism to cartoons to documentary to magic realism. If you let it, Parable will mess your head. Just like the last 8 years.
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