The Rubber Gun: a meta-level Montreal masterpiece, Plus Pump Up the Volume, Cronenberg, Lewis Furey and more

It's been awhile since a movie has pleased me and confused me to so such an equal degree, like maybe not since the first time I saw Blow Up or The Passenger...? Films that are puzzleboxes, but in a kind of inspiring, exciting, "what-did-I-just-see" way, that leave you genuinely thoughtful for a time?

Some puzzleboxes just piss you off. The form has been cheapened over the years: too many bad, lazy puzzlebox movies -- puzzles for their own sake.  The cinema of the day is far too much Christopher Nolan, not enough Antonioni. 

The Rubber Gun -- made (in English) in Montreal in the 1970s, and screening this Tuesday at the Cinematheque, when you approach it thematically, is a fascinating puzzlebox indeed, enough so that I guess if you really want to be puzzled by it, skip the bolded chunks below.

SPOILERS (proceed only if you know the film, or don't care). You can safely skip bolded sections and read the rest (look for the words "End Spoiler Alert" below) if spoilers are an issue. 

The Rubber Gun, ends (for the most part) with the character named Alan Moyle (played by actor/ writer/ director Alan Moyle), handing a book to the character Stephen Lack (played by -- you'll sense a pattern here -- Canadian actor/ writer/ artist Stephen Lack). 

The volume, hardbound in black, is, in fact, Moyle's doctoral thesis, and Lack and his friends are its subject. Lack is not impressed that Moyle has documented their activities as drug-dealing, drug-using, thrivingly-decadent countercultural hipsters, whose inner circle Moyle has infiltrated. Moyle has argued, contrary to the widely-held belief that drug use is destructive, that Lack's group has been "vitalized by drug use," and he's penetrated them both metaphorically and perhaps literally (there is talk of gay sex at a couple points in the film, but it's never shown, just as there are no graphic closeups of people shooting up; on some level, the film is most respectful of its subjects, which makes sense, since they're all basically playing themselves -- not that the film exactly makes them look good). 

However sympathetic Moyle's representations -- the fictional ones, in the thesis -- may be, Lack thinks they may still have played a role in his subjects' downfall (a few of them are in jail by the end of the film, though you'd hope all caper elements are pure fiction). Mostly Lack feels betrayed: What made Moyle feel he had the right to proceed so dishonestly, to pretend to befriend them so he could write about them...?

You know the book The Journalist and the Murderer, right?

END SPOILER ALERT

Really, I feel like I'm only doing you a favour by giving this much away, because the film is going to leave you with questions regardless. You might want to get a head start on thinking about them. But don't spend too much time on the paradox that the non-fictional thesis in the film is actually the film's fiction, while the fictional meta-narrative is, on some level, the documentary. That way lies madness: "the statement on the other side of this paper is false."

SPOILER ALERT #2

Coming back to that thesis statement, that book that Moyle presents Lack with: Moyle expects him to be pleased -- naively, almost on the level of "look, pa, I wrote about about you!" -- but instead, Lack feels  offended, even indignant. "You've got me down, there it is, two-dimensional, Steve Lack, in a package!" he shouts at him, adding, "I don't trust you because you sit and write me down in little paragraphs and you think because you've approximated me you're doing me a favour. That's not true!" 

As a writer -- an approximator of others -- I can see what he's talking about: it is too easy to assume you understand the complexities of someone you are interacting with, too easy to get carried away. One should not presume they "know" people they are writing about. Other people are not characters in a story told by you.  

In any event, Lack directs Moyle to take his thesis and leave. There's a bit more to the film than that, but for all intents and purposes, this is the climax--one of the more anticlimactic ones out there, really, in terms of providing catharsis or resolution in terms of "action," but perfect if you think of the thesis as a metaphor for the film itself, and thus the only real way it could be "unmade"--because Moyle is also the filmmaker, not just the character, and he's basically being told to stop. The tension of the film throughout is less one of "What will happen to these characters," but rather, if you're watching it with eye for theme, a question of what it will all amount to, and whether you'll have the wit to make sense of it. 

END SPOILER ALERT #2

So if I understand it, The Rubber Gun is a sort of parable about representation, setting it on the shelf, even if the angle it fits at is someone oblique, with self-reflexive classics like David Holzman's Diary, The Connection, or maybe the works of filmmaker Peter Watkins (whose fictional feature Punishment Park, with Watkins playing the filmmaker making a documentary film of the same name, was so realistic it was taken by some for a genuine documentary in Europe). It must have been during my period of vocal enthusiasm for such films that Adrian Mack recommended it to me, years ago, when I was writing for The Nerve...? The Rubber Gun appears to be a meta-level examination of the process of making art, of the responsibilities of the artist, and of the relationship of art to the real. A deep film if you are deep, like, even if you don't necessarily have to go there to get off on it... 

Because it's not all mindfuck. There is also, as I say, a small caper thriller and some badly-dressed 1970s cops, whose facial hair and clothing is utterly ridiculous; the chief one among them accidentally evokes Alan "Goorwitz" Garfield, circa Busting. Mack calls this character "the porkiest of the pigs." Intertextual moustache alert!

Regardless of how many people in this film are playing themselves, we presume that these are not real cops: it would be asking a lot (though I would be impressed).

There's also an energetic, smart (-assed) depiction of the Montreal art scene of the mid-1970s, with dialogue that is both quasi-scripted (because people flub a few lines, which means that lines existed at some point) and (at times) probably (mostly) totally improvised. There's a certain guerilla verve to the filmmaking, on the streets and stations of Montreal. Lewis Furey does the soundtrack, though that song seems to be about the movie (not sure it's actually one of the ones in it). It's engaging -- he's not someone I've listened to. A bit Sparks-y, I kinda like it.  

And the performances are pretty compelling: nowhere have people ever played themselves so well. 

It's also going to scratch an itch or two for certain kind of cinephile, because it connects to a couple of other films. Fans of Cronenberg's Scanners might have always wondered (sorry!) if Stephen Lack can act. Like, is Cameron Vale a performance so perfectly believable that you think Lack might just be playing himself: is the man just a terrible actor who is really just like that -- a flattened, incomplete, uncomfortably affectless bum? 

If these questions interest you enough that you just want to see what Lack is like in a very different role, you may want to consider the next section as a 

SPOILER: Surprise! Lack is terrific in this, which retroactively makes me realize that he's great in Scanners, too. Phew! Because if he's playing himself in The Rubber Gun, he's sure playing someone else in Scanners. 

Actually that might be how the film came up between Mack and I, too.

Another interesting aspect of the film: some of you might recognize the name of Alan Moyle (a Canadian filmmaker who doesn't get his due? Perhaps an interesting idea for a film retrospective? Just saying). Many of us I suspect, know him from multiple viewings of Pump Up the Volume back in 1990 (or the years thereafter). Certainly that was my first knowing association with his name -- caught that film a few times theatrically, then again on video. I liked New Waterford Girl, too, but Pump Up the Volume is a childhood favourite I am a bit terrified to revisit, in case it hasn't aged well. I saw it so many times in my early 20s that I can still remember lines of dialogue (or at least, one: "I can smell a lie like a fart in a car.")

Have not done Empire Records or The Gun in Betty Lou's Handbag, either. Should I? Mostly I want to see Times Square -- that soundtrack was important to me, was definitely how I first heard Patti Smith, the Cure, the Ruts, and maybe even "Life During Wartime," but I've never seen the film. And, like, what is Weirdsville? 

Oh, and he's also Marilyn Chambers' last victim in Rabid, too, the one who comes back and kills her. So Moyle and Lack both have Cronenberg connections, from around the same time period... 

The Rubber Gun certainly deserves its Canadian cult status. Thanks to Adrian Mack for calling it to my attention;  Robert Dayton is a fan, too, we gather. Glad I finally caught it. And there's another Vancouver connection that no one seems to be writing about just yet (no spoilers!). Maybe it's a story I can dig into someday? 

Meantime, read Adrian's article, if you haven't yet. He likens the film to "some of Warhol’s seedier efforts, although considerably more watchable." And there are fewer penises on view (I'm assuming he means Flesh, Heat, and Trash here -- films, actually by Paul Morrissey -- but then, I haven't seen a lot of Warhol-qua-Warhol, and he might have. Which films do you mean, man?). 

The Rubber Gun screens this Tuesday at the Cinematheque. Don't miss it.  THIS IS NOT A CURRENT POSTER but man it is cool -- it's for the restoration's Toronto premiere, a couple months ago. And look, Robert's on it!