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MANIFESTO
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CHASING TRANE: THE JOHN
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BEGUILED [CC,DV] (R)
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BABY DRIVER [CC,DV] (R)
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DESPICABLE ME 3 [CC,DV] (PG) ★
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DESPICABLE ME 3 3D [CC,DV] (PG) ★
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HOUSE [CC,DV] (R)
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BABY DRIVER [CC,DV] (R)
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TRANSFORMERS: LAST KNIGHT [CC,DV] (PG-13) ★
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TRANSFORMERS: LAST KNIGHT 3D [CC,DV] (PG-13) ★
Fri. - Sat.(345 PM) 1005 PM
CARS 3 [CC,DV] (G)
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Fri. - Sat.(1230 PM) 630 PM
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WONDER WOMAN [CC,DV] (PG-13)
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June 29, 2017 • eugeneweekly.com
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DYSTOPIA BLUES
Survival at all costs is key in The Bad Batch
A
re there still interesting stories to be mined from the notion that we all do — or
would do — shitty things to survive? Umpteen seasons of The Walking Dead
harp on this note; dystopia as a trend is very much interested in what survival
is, what it looks like, what it takes. “Survival is insufficient” reads the Star
Trek-inspired tattoo in Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven.
There must be more than just surviving.
But what if there isn’t? That’s a question The Bad Batch might have asked, if it were
interested in such questions. Part prison movie, part dystopia and, altogether, a muddle of
frowns and numbing violence, The Bad Batch, directed by Ana Lily Amirpour, sits on the
opposite end of the spectrum from Amirpour’s debut, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.
Girl also borrowed from genres, creating a moody mashup of violent drifting and
connecting. But where Girl built characters, Batch coasts on tone, with middling results.
The tropes of dystopia, or of any genre, grow well worn over the years. Hyperspace
travel and intriguing alien species are no guarantee you’re going to make Star Wars;
harsh desert wastelands and misbehaving loners are no guarantee you’re heading down a
Mad Max road (or even a Tank Girl road).
As optimistic writers sometimes say, a story might have been told before, but only
you can tell your version of that story.
Amirpour’s version focuses on a young woman, Arlen (Suki Waterhouse), who for
unknown reasons gets sent to the empty desert that serves as a prison in an unspecified
future. She’s joined the bad batch, which presumably consists of all the people deemed
unfit to live in whatever is left of society.
We are likely meant to believe that being put into the bad batch has been a self-fulfill-
ing prophecy: The desert is full of cannibals (presumably out of necessity); a moderately
safe haven is a sort of breeding ground for a rather self-important man (Keanu Reeves
in full pornstache); Giovanni Ribisi and Jim Carrey wander and scavenge; Diego Luna
silently spins records, which he transports in a giant boom box that is one of the movie’s
rare delightful images.
Arlen wanders through this landscape, getting revenge and/or misdirecting her rage in
turn. She disrupts (to put it mildly) the family unit of Miami Man (Jason Momoa), with
whom she develops a connection built largely on their shared ability to squint attrac-
tively. There is a terrible rave (in the future all parties are terrible raves), a lot of violence
and even more worn-out cynicism.
What might it look like — what might a lot of our narratives about displacement and
the rejects of societies look like — if we imagined it was cool (“cool” in air quotes, like
“edgy”) to imagine empathy rather than a cynical squint? These stories are starting to
all sound the same: Person does terrible things to survive; we care about them anyway.
Amirpour gives us little reason to care (apart from Miami Man’s nice portraits of his
daughter, maybe) and so, instead, I wondered: What if a person tried not to do terrible
things? What if a lot of people thought that way? What if hope could be cool? What
would that look like? Why are the challenges in creating a less shitty outsider society so
much less interesting?
What if we’re not all assholes, in the end? (Broadway Metro)