Rollercoaster tonight -- of Brendan Fletcher, Robin Wood, teen suicide and Playland

The Cinematheque, at 7pm tonight, is screening a remarkable, under-sung, shot-in-Vancouver drama: Rollercoaster, from 1999. No, this is not the 70's action film that the band Sparks appears in: Scott Smith's 1999 film deals with a group of troubled youth who break into an amusement park, and stars Brendan Fletcher, up there with Gabrielle Rose as one of the very finest Canadian actors to make pretty much no headway in Hollywood (okay, his role in Violent Night is pretty substantial, but he's kinda blink-and-you'll-miss-him in The Revenant, which is a shame, since he's obviously skilled with frontier adventures; just see Ginger Snaps Back, which makes far better use of him). Starring roles in Canadian films, supporting roles in American ones shot here -- it's kind of the way it goes.  

Fact is, I've followed his career much more closely than I ever intended. I even caught him in an adaptation of Equus, once -- not to mention seeing him in starring roles in multiple Uwe Boll films, most notably Rampage -- partially shot in a Maple Ridge bingo hall where I played bingo as a child with my Mom! Rollercoaster is one of his finest films, directed by Scott Smith from a story by Alex Kazemi. But oddly, despite it being shot at Playland -- the titular rollercoaster is the one all Vancouverites know -- the reason I saw the film was that it was amply praised by UK/ Ontario film critic Robin Wood. Yes, the same Robin Wood with a hate-on for Cronenberg. You can find the whole book online easily enough as a Google docs PDF, so I'm going to presume to quote liberally; the relevant section begins on page 327 of the expanded edition. Wood also riffs on the 1977 flick, which is not very good! 

Note: Stick is Fletcher's character, and Wood's warning about spoilers isn't that essential up until you get to the passage on location and cinematography. Unless you have decided to see the film already, and don't need to be sold on it, I would just soldier ahead, at least to that point. 

THE PARTY’S OVER: SCOTT SMITH’S Rollercoaster (from Robin Wood's Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan: the rest of this writeup will be a lengthy quote): 

Even in Canada, Canadian films (unless directed by David Cronenberg, or Atom Egoyan in his later works) are categorized instantly as “small,” and I think we should ask ourselves exactly what this conveys, and by what criterion smallness or bigness can be gauged. The answer is clear: “small” here has nothing whatever to do with subject matter, quality, or ambition; it has to do exclusively with money and is yet another proof of our insidious and all-pervasive corruption by capitalist values.

I wonder how many people reading this chapter have even heard of Rollercoaster (or, perhaps, are expecting a critical exploration of the 1977 Sensurround movie of the same title, a disaster film in every sense, in which case I shall disappoint them). Scott Smith’s film is, in the common usage, “small”: its budget was not exactly enormous, and I assume its cast of six (uniformly marvelous) actors were each paid somewhat less than the $10 million nowadays taken for granted by major Hollywood stars, though they give performances as good, if not better. And the film is “merely” about teenagers, our culture’s disenfranchised, disenchanted, and desperate members, and (more specifically) about teen suicide: a “small” subject? I have to suppose it is, for most people. We read brief references to it in the newspapers, but nothing is ever done so presumably no one cares, it not occurring to them that these same teenagers (the ones who survive) represent the future of our culture. But then, does anyone care about that either?

Rollercoaster is a great movie, but its pleasures and disturbances will be spoiled for you if you haven’t seen the film before you read what follows. It is available (although not all stores bother to stock it) on both VHS and DVD in a really splendid widescreen transfer. The DVD includes a very useful Director’s Commentary and an intermittently illuminating commentary by the teenage actors.

I missed Rollercoaster in the Toronto Film Festival (2000) but attended its theatrical opening on its first day. I was the only person in the auditorium. It ran, I believe, for one week. Since then I have watched the DVD five times, seeing more on each viewing, partly thanks to certain insights derived from the commentaries. The film is not in any obvious way “difficult,” but it is rich in significant detail (a gesture here, an expression there, a throwaway line of dialogue, a camera movement, a particular use of décor). I liked the film straight away, but I attribute my initial underestimation to precisely those preconceptions about Canadian cinema that I have attacked: I suppose my attitude could have been summed up as “very good for a small Canadian movie.” So I have not avoided contamination; consequently I missed things I should have picked up on from the start. My renewed interest in the film developed out of my engagement with the American high school comedies. While noting their total refusal to confront certain crucial problems involving teenagers today (gayness, teen suicide, the frequent connection between the two), I thought suddenly of Kitchen Party and Rollercoaster, to both of which these issues are central. (One must now add Ginger Snaps, which had not then appeared, but which takes as its starting point the projected joint suicide of two sisters. It seems to me inferior—less “thought through”—than the two earlier films.) The Hollywood films belong, as a group, quite blatantly to that favorite and essential capitalist strategy of “making us all think we’re happy”; the Canadian films are oppositional and, whatever the filmmakers’ conscious intentions, can stand as a critique of their jolly American relatives. The closest American equivalent is Larry Clark’s Kids, to which Rollercoaster seems to me vastly superior on every level.

Structure 

The film’s intricate overall structure is built upon a set of interlocking structures:

1 The 24-hour time scheme. The film starts in early morning, ends in the next early morning. The effect is not mere symmetry: the “next” morning is “the morning after,” when everything has changed, and where there are glimmers of fresh hope following tragedy.

2. Weather. Shooting restrictions for this ultra-low-budget (but by no means “small”) film, shot entirely on location and outdoors, were extremely tight. That one scene—and one scene only—takes place in the rain, with all its connotations of simultaneous sorrow and purification, was apparently (to judge from the commentaries) fortuitous. It just happens that it’s the film’s pivotal scene, to which everything leads up and from which everything follows.

3. Progression A. The rides in the amusement park (within or just outside which the entire film, up to the last shot, takes place). For the first third of the film everything is shut down, static, the kids climbing on a motionless rollercoaster; in the middle section (as things start moving dramatically) the machines are turned on; when night falls, the kids turn on all the lights, start all the rides, and the park becomes a wonderland, a celebration of life (albeit a partially ironic one, in which suicide is still an option).

4. Progression B. Dramatically, the film builds up to and then beyond two parallel crises (Chloe’s, Stick’s), the two linked by disclosure, the revelation of what was previously unspoken.

4. Paradox. The most likely of the characters to commit suicide is the one who emerges strengthened; the one who seems least likely is the one who goes through with it.

Source Smith reveals in his commentary that the source of the film was a true story. Four teenagers decided to commit suicide together, as life appeared to hold nothing for them. But, when it came to the point, they found they’d run out of beer. So they drove off to a liquor store, came back, drank all the beer . . . and committed suicide. This story is told in the film by Stick, in one of its many extraordinary shots. He is standing (long shot) on the highest reach of the stationary rollercoaster, addressing his suicidal friends (with one of whom he is, potentially at least, in love). In the background is a mountain, with clouds around its peak, strongly suggesting the smoke from a latent, but about to erupt, volcano. I have been haunted by that image ever since I took serious interest in the film—by its fusion of visual beauty, precariousness, and imminent disaster. There are many such beautiful moments in the film, marking it as the work of an artist with an instinctive understanding of cinema; if this single image stands out, it is because of its duration and the lack of movement, suggestive of a contemplative pause in the film’s otherwise swift forward momentum.

Location and Cinematography 

Having made the decision to shoot virtually the entire film within an out-of-season amusement park, Smith makes dazzlingly inventive use of its potential, both visual and dramatic. Nothing is faked, there are no back projections or studio sets, the camera is up there on the rides with the kids, whether the rollercoaster and the other machines are static or in motion. The contrast with current Hollywood “action” movies couldn’t be stronger, their computer-generated unreality mercilessly exposed. The meager reviews of the film I read (polite, condescending) showed no sign of recognition of the nature or quality of Smith’s achievement. The climactic sequences, where, at nightfall, the kids turn on all the amusement park lights in a celebration of life that is partly real, partly (in the context of darkness and imminent death) ironic and valedictory, are at once exhilarating and painful. The use throughout of the various machines and other amusement park décor is consistently intelligent, never merely “colorful,” always dramatically justified: the “Zipper” in which Ben is tricked and trapped, the bumper cars in which the characters’ diverse tensions are released, the rollercoaster from which Darrin will throw himself, the hidden video “eyes” that watch from various adornments.

Stick’s Progress

It is perhaps unfair to single out Brendan Fletcher’s performance from a cast that contains no weaknesses and, under Smith’s direction, plays faultlessly as an ensemble. (One gathers from the DVD’s cast commentary, in which all six actors join, that Smith got them involved as a group before shooting started, and that they have remained friends ever since.) But Fletcher has the showiest role and plays the character who undergoes the most development; if anyone can be said to dominate the film it is he.

The subtleties with which Stick’s progress is charted may not be apparent to the casual viewer, or perhaps to anyone on first viewing. Hollywood has habituated us to the careful spelling out of plot points, seldom allowing them to be made purely visually but indeed often underlining them in the dialogue. With Stick this is impossible: the gayness which he denies to himself as much as to the world can be “spoken” only through inadvertent physical behavior, and especially through his insistent physical contact with Darrin (Kett Turton), mainly a matter of those “playful” punches that easily pass for “normal” masculine behavior among teenage boys. (Smith points out in his commentary how he tried as often as possible to connect Stick and Darrin in two-shots, one of which he describes as the “lovers on the beach” shot). This inexplicitness serves an important function: the film becomes a cunning trap for homophobic teenagers in the audience, for whom Stick, throughout the film’s first two-thirds, is the most obvious identification figure, the most seemingly extrovert, the most active, the rowdiest. When the park attendant Ben (the film’s only adult character) traps Stick in the washroom and sexually molests him, it is possible to read, carelessly, Stick’s reactions merely as a sort of paralyzed horror, Ben thereby becoming, at that point, the film’s representative of homosexuality. The tables are then turned, the trap sprung, by Stick’s subsequent revelation (the beginning of his self-acceptance).

If, however, we attend to the details of Fletcher’s remarkable performance, the stages of Stick’s progress become clear: (1) his constant “playful” provocation, and constant awareness, of Darrin, never entirely rejected; (2) the extremely complex reaction to Ben’s molestation as rendered by the actor’s face, where horror mingles with desire (in the cast commentary the actors describe him as “torn”); (3) his pathetic attempt at self-denial in abruptly “feeling up” Chloe, in whom he has previously shown not the least sign of sexual interest; (4) his crucial speech to Justin (Darrin’s younger brother), when Justin describes Ben as a “fag” (“No. I’m a fag. He fucks kids”), in the scene Smith describes as the film’s “little window of hope”; and (6) the climactic revelation of his desire, in the game in which everyone has to lie, saying the opposite of the truth (“I hate you, Darrin. I fucking hate you”—Darrin understands perfectly and turns aside).

Does this contribute to Darrin’s suicide? As with Stick, Smith refuses to spell things out for us, but the context suggests the possibility, adding to the film’s poignance and complexity. Its underlying assumption seems to be that these teenagers (including the barely teenage Justin) are at an age where sexuality has not been finally “fixed,” where there is still the possibility of flux. Darrin’s fondness for Stick is evident throughout the film (to the point where one could almost substitute “attraction to” for “fondness for”). And Darrin has already had to face Chloe’s revelations (which parallel Stick’s): that she has been sexually promiscuous, that Darrin may not be the father of her child, and that in any case the child (the pretext for the joint suicide—Chloe’s “We’re not going to bring our baby into this world”) has already been aborted. The film’s sensitivity to the confusions and fears of teenagers struggling to make sense of a harsh and hostile environment and of their places within it strikes me as a rare and valuable quality, totally lacking in the corresponding American teen comedies.

The film’s delicacy and inexplicitness is summed up in the last scene, a single-take extreme long shot. Outside the amusement park at last, the four survivors drive off. Then the car pulls up, and we see Justin get out and set off on his own, up a steep bank to the main highway. The car drives on, leaving the foreground empty, but then backs up and stops again. Stick gets out and follows Justin. The boy (apparently about thirteen) has earlier shown a mature sensitivity toward Stick, responding to his “It will be hard on you without Darrin” with “It’ll be hard on you.” Clearly, Stick has replaced Darrin as “elder brother,” and his following Justin is an acknowledgment of responsibilty accepted; there is also the possibility that Justin may grow up gay, hinted at in his readiness to accept Stick. The “little window of hope” (which refers to the possibility of supportive, positive human relations within a cruel and uncaring world) has opened a little further.

[End quote; that was all Robin Wood -- like I say, the whole book is online, so why not quote liberally?]. Rollercoaster screens tonight at the Cinematheque at 7pm. Be there?