Spun (2003)

Spun arrives from 2002 with the posture of a film that has already given up on us. Jonas Åkerlund, a music video director making his feature debut, shot it in twenty-two days and based it on the real Eugene, Oregon misadventures of screenwriter William De Los Santos, who lived the meth circuit he depicts. The result is three days of squalor, duct tape, veterinary emergencies and a meth lab that eventually detonates along with its operator. Nobody learns anything. Nobody is redeemed. Roger Ebert admired the picture's effortless wickedness; Time Out London called it smug amoralism. Both are correct, which is the film's entire defense.

As a document of social consciousness, the film is nearly barren. Its ensemble is diverse in the casual manner of a casting call, with John Leguizamo, Nicholas Gonzalez and China Chow moving through the drug economy without a word about identity or systemic anything. A lesbian neighbor rescues the bound stripper, Alexis Arquette appears as a moustache cop, and the studio database dutifully files the whole business under its gay tag, though none of it carries thematic weight. The camera regards women as furniture or as hallucination. There is no feminist critique here, no racial reckoning, no environmental conscience, no economic indictment of the trade that ruins everyone in it. The film's attitude toward bodies is exploitative and grim, and its attitude toward addiction is that addiction is a way to destroy yourself, not an identity to be affirmed.

The film's one virtue is a refusal to preach, and that refusal keeps its lecturing register near the floor. Spun observes, smirks, and declines to tell us what to think. Critics at the time found this hollow. In the current climate, hollowness of this kind reads almost as a period artifact, a relic from an era when a filmmaker could assemble a gallery of the damned and simply leave them there. We are not instructed. We are not improved. We are merely spun, and then released.