Private Dicks: Under the Silver Lake and film noir
Under the Silver Lake is David Robert Mitchell's shaggy riff on the film noir, but it's hardly the first film to play with the codes of the private detective movie. Here are cinema's other feckless sleuths
David Robert Mitchell loves to play with genre. In his disarming debut film, The Myth of the American Sleepover, he tinkered with the familiar codes of the teen movie to create a coming-of-age story that’s altogether more elegiac and otherworldly than its crass forebearers. There was something ethereal too going on in his imaginative slasher It Follows, in which a group of suburban teens were haunted by a sexually transmitted ghoul.
The talented director’s new film, Under the Silver Lake, is his loopy riff on the private eye movie. An unkempt Andrew Garfield plays the feckless Sam, who wonders through the film in a confused daze. He has plenty to be concerned with – he’s jobless, about to be evicted, and he stinks of skunk (both the animal and the recreational drug) – but he’s focusing all his low wattage energy on discovering what happened to his hot neighbour. This obsession takes him down a wormhole into LA’s secret underworld where he encounters a dog serial-killer, an owl-faced female assassin and a string of subliminal messages more convoluted than clues in a Scooby-Doo episode.
Mitchell isn’t the first director to give the film noir a zesty revision. Robert Altman, like Mitchell, loved to make genre riffs. With 1973’s The Long Goodbye, Altman gave us the first great stoner noir, turning Raymond Chandler’s ice-cool private eye Philip Marlowe into a shambolic ne'er-do-well who can’t even take command of his cat, nevermind a case.
The Coen brothers took Altman’s vision of the aimless detective to its logical conclusion with the hilarious noir homage The Big Lebowski, where a counterculture burnout who’s dubbed himself The Dude (played to weary perfection by Jeff Bridges) finds himself at the centre of a loopy kidnapping plot. Dressed in shorts, sandals and crumpled cardi, The Dude remains adorably clueless as body parts start arriving in the mail and a Nazi electro band break down his door threatening to have their pet marmot bite off his johnson.
Talking of johnsons, Rian Johnson was more respectful to the genre with his debut feature Brick, which transports the lightning-fast lingo of Chandler and Hammett to the lunchrooms and hallways of high school. Joseph Gordon-Levitt played the weary beyond-his-years teen trying to find the whereabouts of his missing ex-girlfriend. Cold Weather, meanwhile, was Aaron Katz's fun marrying of the low-key rhythms of mumblecore with the gumshoe thriller, with most laughs coming from when these opposing sensibilities collided.
Perhaps the closest relative to Under the Silver Lake is the biting comedy series Search Party, in which a group of hopelessly self-centred millennials gets in over their heads when their similarly entitled friend from college goes missing on purpose, seeking attention. Like Under the Silver Lake's amateur detective, Search Party’s heroes are aimless narcissists looking for purpose; they’re awful people, but we can’t help rooting for these clueless sleuths to solve their labyrinthine mystery.
Under the Silver Lake screens at Glasgow Film Festival on 25 Feb, 8pm; 28 Feb, 1.15pm – both screenings at Glasgow Film Theatre