Southland Tales (2007)

Richard Kelly's Southland Tales arrives like a fever dream assembled from the wreckage of a dozen other, better-funded fever dreams. Set in an alternate 2008 where Texas has been vaporized by twin nuclear strikes and the resulting war has birthed both a reinstated draft and a mass surveillance apparatus, the film sprawls across Los Angeles with the confidence of a director who has never once been told no. It was booed at Cannes. It earned roughly the price of a used sedan. None of that has stopped it from acquiring devotees who speak of it the way others speak of scripture.

The film's political imagination runs hot. A German energy conglomerate called Treer harvests ocean currents to produce Fluid Karma, a miracle fuel that the elite celebrate aboard a zeppelin while the poor below riot in the streets. A Neo-Marxist underground schemes to expose state violence. The military-industrial complex, the infotainment industry, and celebrity politics all get folded into the same paranoid swirl. Kelly has ideas and he wants us to hear every one of them, which lends the picture an agitated, sermonizing quality even when its allegory refuses to cohere. The critique of corporate power and elite profiteering is genuine and sustained. The environmental register is present but incidental, a backdrop for conspiracy instead of a cause.

The ensemble is diverse by 2007 standards, with Dwayne Johnson, Bai Ling, and Wood Harris in prominent roles, though the film treats this as casting, not commentary. Sarah Michelle Gellar's porn-star-turned-reality-television-entrepreneur and Miranda Richardson's surveillance chief wield real power, but the movie is more interested in them as satirical grotesques than as arguments about gender. What the film does not contain is equally instructive. There is no LGBTQ+ thread, no body-positivity register, no engagement with neurodivergence despite its amnesia and doubled-identity motifs, and no revisionist reading of actual history, only speculative invention. It is a loud, messy, deeply unserious object that takes itself with total seriousness. We classify it accordingly. It remains, for better and worse, exactly one of a kind. Some films resist categorization. This one simply ignores the category and keeps talking.

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