“When you were fifteen and rebelling, you were rebelling to my music,” says The Songwriter, one musician who has ghostwritten countless songs for labels to create hits for big-name bands. He taunts Sam, our protagonist, telling him that the anthems he grew up with are a product of an industry motivated by monetary gain. The messages hidden within the songs are secret, not meant for him, and do not carry themes – they lead to tunnels, and bunkers, and hidden aristocracies. These messages are only for a select few, to be used as a form of communication between elites.
Sam feels he has failed to live the life he always dreamed of, a life of passion and recognition that he was taught to aspire to by popular media. Instead, he lounges around in his poolside apartment, smoking, having meaningless sex, and spying on his neighbors. But a few things are a little off: the news reports celebrities missing, there’s a dog killer on the loose, and a mysterious girl-next-door moves out in the middle of the night, leaving only a box of junk in her wake. Sam is increasingly convinced that this is all part of some conspiracy, and attempts to uncover it by cracking codes and following femme-fatales through the vapid party scene of LA. What he finds is more disturbing and systemic than a vanishing girl – his innermost suspicions are confirmed, and nothing is as it seems. Everything, in fact, is a construction of the über-wealthy. The women Sam had previously ogled are actresses on the payroll of cultish producers; all his favorite movies, video games, and songs are tranquillizing measurements taken by the elites; the very cityscape is riddled with secret societies within secret societies, shielding and protecting each other in a labyrinthine pattern that seems to only exist to maintain itself.
Sam’s misogyny is also something worth touching on. It’s his Achilles’ heel, preventing him from uniting with his fellow oppressed and taking on their common enemy, making him easy to manipulate. His objectification of women leads to his failure to uncover a more traditionally dramatic truth. Had he not been chasing a woman, hitting on and spying on women along the way, being menaced by a personification of female autonomy, he may have been able to do whatever it was he set out for.
In the final act it is revealed that even religion is a controlled commodity. The wealthy few ascend to their heaven-above-heaven, and those who can’t afford to, simply don’t. In fact, those who can’t afford to don’t know it even exists. That heaven is, as it turns out, where Sam’s girl-next-door has gone: or rather, awaiting that heaven, in a bunker with a billionaire. By the time Sam finds her, it is too late. The bunker has been covered in concrete, like the concrete that paves the roads of our highly industrialized, segregated world, sealing its borders. There is no way in. There is no way out.
For Sam and his mystery, it is too late, in a way that feels familiar to the helpless too-late-ness of living in the twenty-first century. What can we do but have sex with each other, and make our art, and not pay our rent? When you tell a person that we are being controlled and manipulated by corrupt forces unseen, and he responds that you sound crazy, it can be difficult to discern whether he is blind or in on it.
Jaxon Safian's Film Reviews 