Tideland is harsh and stripped-down compared to Terry Gilliam's earlier movies, that's for sure. I'm glad that Gilliam's magician cape has been lifted, though, because what stands revealed is a muscular Scorsesean torso underneath. His direction in Tideland is purposeful, sure-handed, as precise as a brain surgeon's scalpel, yet with the same sense of whelming confusion and malicious paranoia that he accomplished in the much less focused Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I've never understood what Heidegger was going on about with his phrase "Thrownness in the World" until I saw Tideland -- we are literally THROWN into young Jodelle Ferland's unsavory situation, having to puzzle it out right alongside her, with her own limited cognizance and hazy epistemological borderlines.
Tideland is composed of two three-person fugues -- Jeliza-Rose and her parents, then Jeliza-Rose, Dell and Dickens -- that has the singular distinction of not having one sane character. The most novel aspect of Tideland may be how Jeliza-Rose, Ferland's nine-year-old lead character, is portrayed not as an innocent, but as equal to the adults in her depravity and refusal to confront life outside her own head. In a way, she may be the least innocent of all -- when she seduces the adult, brain-damaged Dickens, you feel like he's the one being violated -- and it's not hard to imagine her being washed down the toilet bowl of the San Fernando Valley in a less whimsical sequel.
The film's lack of a point seems to be its point -- we're meant to experience a delusional state, not to judge it. Yet Gilliam suggests that this delusion is either about to become universal or has already set in without our knowing it. I've always said that what makes Kubrick or Polanski great horror directors are their atheism, and the same holds true in Tideland. Gilliam seems to be a humanist who considers us to be living on the unstable terra of religious zealots, like the witch Dell who sings about Jesus and the Second Coming. Yet she has learnt taxidermy so as to embalm everyone she's ever known in case they can be restored in the future -- which shows more faith in science than in Jesus.
I would say the Jewish people of today are a lot like Dell, as are the Christians who have been tricked into believing that Jesus is going to come back to the earthly Jerusalem -- the same one whose kingship he already rejected once -- sitting on the cannon of a tank. Gilliam may not be religious, and he may not believe in Jesus, God, or the devil and his unfunny jests, but he has an artist's instincts and clearly feels what's happening deep in his bones. Tideland may go down as the film that best captures the desperate souls of our time trapped in yet another farcical, manufactured apocalypse, where the promised millennium of peace becomes a millennium of torture, spiritual death and unfruitful, senseless madness -- not the kind of madness that you come out of with deeper understanding, but a madness that frays you like an old doll until there's nothing left inside or out.
The shot that has really stayed with me is one where Dickens and Jeliza-Rose climb to the top of a crater and see a construction crew building what looks an awful lot like pyramids. This ties in with Mel Gibson's comparison of America to a new Mayan civilization in Apocalypto -- a quiver is going through the world as people gradually realize that the age of reason has shown its true face: a new, all-powerful technological paganism that will make the ancient world and its sacrifices feel like pleasant childhood memories. There's also a running motif where Dickens obsessively lies in wait for a train that comes hurtling through the prarie, thinking in his addled mind that it's a shark.
MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD
At the end, when he blows it up with a clump of dynamite, you feel sorry for the passengers but also have to admire his conviction. After all, what was the invention that ushered in the Industrial Revolution and the Faustian technological web we live in today, where scientists are actually on the verge of completing an invisibility cloak ( which Plato would say truly marks the end of civilization )? You got it -- the steam locomotive. A good film to watch along with this one would be Jacques Tourneur's cult horror film Night of the Demon, one of the first films to show the intersecting point of black magic and technology. The demon of the title, who is always seen on railroad tracks, spraying sparks from its wooly head, looks, I suspect, a lot like what the black nightmare train looks like to Dickens.
Tideland is composed of two three-person fugues -- Jeliza-Rose and her parents, then Jeliza-Rose, Dell and Dickens -- that has the singular distinction of not having one sane character. The most novel aspect of Tideland may be how Jeliza-Rose, Ferland's nine-year-old lead character, is portrayed not as an innocent, but as equal to the adults in her depravity and refusal to confront life outside her own head. In a way, she may be the least innocent of all -- when she seduces the adult, brain-damaged Dickens, you feel like he's the one being violated -- and it's not hard to imagine her being washed down the toilet bowl of the San Fernando Valley in a less whimsical sequel.
The film's lack of a point seems to be its point -- we're meant to experience a delusional state, not to judge it. Yet Gilliam suggests that this delusion is either about to become universal or has already set in without our knowing it. I've always said that what makes Kubrick or Polanski great horror directors are their atheism, and the same holds true in Tideland. Gilliam seems to be a humanist who considers us to be living on the unstable terra of religious zealots, like the witch Dell who sings about Jesus and the Second Coming. Yet she has learnt taxidermy so as to embalm everyone she's ever known in case they can be restored in the future -- which shows more faith in science than in Jesus.
I would say the Jewish people of today are a lot like Dell, as are the Christians who have been tricked into believing that Jesus is going to come back to the earthly Jerusalem -- the same one whose kingship he already rejected once -- sitting on the cannon of a tank. Gilliam may not be religious, and he may not believe in Jesus, God, or the devil and his unfunny jests, but he has an artist's instincts and clearly feels what's happening deep in his bones. Tideland may go down as the film that best captures the desperate souls of our time trapped in yet another farcical, manufactured apocalypse, where the promised millennium of peace becomes a millennium of torture, spiritual death and unfruitful, senseless madness -- not the kind of madness that you come out of with deeper understanding, but a madness that frays you like an old doll until there's nothing left inside or out.
The shot that has really stayed with me is one where Dickens and Jeliza-Rose climb to the top of a crater and see a construction crew building what looks an awful lot like pyramids. This ties in with Mel Gibson's comparison of America to a new Mayan civilization in Apocalypto -- a quiver is going through the world as people gradually realize that the age of reason has shown its true face: a new, all-powerful technological paganism that will make the ancient world and its sacrifices feel like pleasant childhood memories. There's also a running motif where Dickens obsessively lies in wait for a train that comes hurtling through the prarie, thinking in his addled mind that it's a shark.
MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD
At the end, when he blows it up with a clump of dynamite, you feel sorry for the passengers but also have to admire his conviction. After all, what was the invention that ushered in the Industrial Revolution and the Faustian technological web we live in today, where scientists are actually on the verge of completing an invisibility cloak ( which Plato would say truly marks the end of civilization )? You got it -- the steam locomotive. A good film to watch along with this one would be Jacques Tourneur's cult horror film Night of the Demon, one of the first films to show the intersecting point of black magic and technology. The demon of the title, who is always seen on railroad tracks, spraying sparks from its wooly head, looks, I suspect, a lot like what the black nightmare train looks like to Dickens.
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