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Reason and Road Kill
Director Quentin Dupieux challenges the horror
genre with Rubber
W
hy would you make an artsy,
cult-aspiring pseudo-horror fl ick
about a homicidal tire with a
fetish for dark-haired girls and a desire to
off anyone in its path through the use of
psychokinetic powers? (Yeah, a tire, as in that
thing attached to the axle of your car/truck/
bike/whatever). The answer: No reason. It
is precisely this lack of logic that director
Quentin Dupieux — known to electronic
music fans as producer Mr. Oizo — brings to
the forefront of the movie Rubber.
Rubber opens with Lieutenant Chad
(Stephen Spinella) immediately breaking
the fourth wall, holding a glass of water in
the desert and explaining to the audience
that all great fi lms have an element of
complete arbitrariness to them. In this
soliloquy, Spinella cites fi lms that are
indeed great, yet he tongue-in-cheek
applies the label of arbitrary to portions of
those movies that have a deliberate logic to
them. Then Spinella pours out the glass of
water he never drank from, and the opening
credits roll. This conscious decision to
highlight the absurd pretty much sets the
tone for Dupieux’s movie.
Rubber isn’t a movie that is supposed
to make any sense at all. Halfway through
it, I got the feeling it doesn’t even really
want to be considered good but rather
memorable. And in a world where every
new shitty horror fl ick is just another drop
in the bloodbath, perhaps memorable is
more important than logical or good.
I am by no means knocking the quality
of Rubber as a work of visual art. The fi lm
has moments of stunning cinematography;
there are long scenes of the murderous tire
cruising through the desert and taking out
wildlife as well as soda pop bottles with its,
uh, mind. Yeah, so the tire kills its victims
by summoning a psychokinetic force that
causes its rubber to tremble and fl ux until,
eventually, said victim explodes. While
rabbits and crows and other wildlife simply
blow up entirely in bloody and graphic
fashion, human victims just get their heads
blown off. Yup, exploding heads. Killer
tire. Not to ruin it for you, but eventually
a killer tricycle makes an appearance also.
Rubber takes its own cinematic self-
awareness to another level right from the
get-go, as the viewer is introduced to an
anonymous cast of viewers. This eclectic
mix of people, standing in the middle of
a barren desert landscape where the fi lm
begins, are given binoculars by a strange
facilitator (a gangly looking white man in
a suit) who shows up out of nowhere and
instructs the viewers to start watching. The
viewers watch the killer tire dispatch its
victims and respond to one another with a
desensitized tone of disbelief.
Then night falls, and these same
viewers go to sleep, having been seemingly
neglected by their facilitator and left to fend
for themselves in the middle of the desert.
They wake, hungry, and continue watching
the tire kill through their binoculars. At
one point in the movie, the suit-wearing
facilitator shows up again and tosses them
a turkey laced with poison, killing the
starving viewers. Only one survives — the
one who didn’t eat the turkey. Could this
be a comment on the passive consumption
of movie watchers? An artsy quasi-Dadaist
post-grad-school fl ick trying to make a
statement about the nature of viewing
horror fi lms? Or just a few more corpses
in the desert adding to the body count of an
already killtacular tour de force?
Who knows? I don’t. But there is
ew
defi nitely reason to go see it.
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MONDAY - SATURDAY
lunch 11:00am-2:30pm
dinner 5:00pm-9:30pm
SUNDAY
cated in
Lo
5:00pm-9:30pm
(closed Sunday 5/29)
541-654-0608
Rubber plays one day only, 9:15pm Thursday, May 19, at the
Bijou Art Cinemas; for more info visit www.bijou-cinemas.com
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