“Saw Bone Tomahawk, written by this dude, loved it. Saw Brawl in Cell Block 99, loved it more. So when I found out the same guy wrote some books, I decided to check one out.
It’s pretty great.
Violent as all hell, so if you don’t can’t handle some pretty hefty, descriptive, gut-wrenching stuff, this ain’t for you.
But if you liked the movies above, you’ll dig this.
~
There’s this thing going on with S. Craig Zahler right now, mostly because his newest movie, Dragged Across Concrete, cast Mel Gibson in a lead role.
This, combined with a few other elements of Zahler’s movies, seems to have put his work under a microscope. The lens: Is his work too politically incorrect?
Here is one critic’s take on Dragged Across Concrete:
“There’s no shortage of significant works of art in which characters voice repellent ideas and do repellent things that, however, are distinguished artistically from the artist’s own point of view. This isn’t one of them.”
I find this critique disingenuous. Because it purports to know and understand the creator’s real-life opinion on things based on what sounds like a lack of a director/writer somehow stepping up within the movie and saying, “Hey, I don’t necessarily agree with these characters.” Sure, you could make sure that the bad guy gets punished at the end. Which gives you a movie like Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. It’s fun and all, but jesus christ, could the bad military guy be any more bad military guy? As soon as you see him take a dino’s tooth, you know it’s going to end badly for him. Because that’s how those type of movies work. If the bad guy isn’t A) Clearly very bad and B) Thoroughly punished in cathartic fashion, then…we assume the director of that movie is endorsing the bad guy’s behavior?
In most feature films, the characters are punished and rewarded, in tiered hierarchy, based on they way they’ve behaved over the last two hours. The best person has the best outcome, the worst person has the worst. The slightly good guys have a favorable, but not life-changing, outcome.
It’s something I like about S. Craig Zahler’s work that I don’t like about the work of others. His stuff has a real life feel because no one is safe. A bad guy might get punished, and he might not. A good guy is very likely to get an undeserved punishment. It reflects real life. In real life, being a jerk doesn’t seem to correlate to dying in spectacular fashion that everyone else can feel good about. Nor does being a nice person mean you’ll be spared a gruesome death.
For the record, I very much disagree with the criticism above because my tastes run towards art that doesn’t tell the person experiencing it how to feel. I like leaving something and not necessarily knowing how I feel about it, and I don’t require that whoever made it explicitly tell me how I’m supposed to feel or how they intended I feel. I like filling that in myself. I think that means the story was more interesting, nuanced, and it felt more like an individual’s vision as opposed to a product cobbled together by a marketing department.
If you take a Marvel movie, you are very clearly supposed to feel a certain way at the ending. You are meant to feel one way at the end of Spider-Man: Homecoming, and another at the end of Infinity War. Not many people walk out unsure how they feel about Spider-Man dissolving into dust. Nor do they walk out wondering whether the makers of the film felt that Thanos was right, misunderstood, or trapped in a situation that was beyond his control. You know exactly how you feel about every aspect, and you can be very certain that everyone in the theater with you felt shades of the same. For the record, I mostly like Marvel movies, but not in the same way I like something like the book I’m sort of reviewing here.
With Zahler’s stuff, you are not told how to feel. You have to decide for yourself. Which I think baffles modern critics as they don’t have a defined personal feeling, but more than that, they don’t know whether to trust their personal feelings because they couldn’t get a bead on the creator of the piece, a crucial aspect of modern criticism. Does the creator see the world as presented in the movie? Do they feel the ways the characters felt? Are they presenting a racist character as bad? Are they presenting a hero as good in every possible way?
I suppose this is a long way of saying I admire someone who doesn’t make things to be liked personally. S. Craig Zahler is one of the best in terms of that. I genuinely think he’s okay making things that convince some people that he’s a bad person. I don’t even think he’s making things to be understood. I think he makes things because they’re interesting, compelling, and reflective of the world as it is as opposed to the world as he might (or might not) want it. “