Animals do not know they are going to die and require no way to deal with that implacable fact. Humans, who know we will die, have been given the consolations of art, myth, hope, science, religion, philosophy, and even denial, even movies, to help us reconcile with that final fact. What I object to most of all in Chaos is not the sadism, the brutality, the torture, the nihilism, but the absence of any alternative to them. If the world has indeed become as evil as you think, then we need the redemptive power of artists, poets, philosophers, and theologians more than ever. Your answer, that the world is evil and therefore it is your responsibility to reflect it, is no answer at all, but a surrender.
Sincerely,
Roger Ebert
The Brown Bunny Saga
CANNES, France, May 21, 2003—Coming up for air like an exhausted swimmer, the Cannes Film Festival produced two splendid films on Wednesday morning, after a week of the most dismal entries in memory. Denys Arcand’s The Barbarian Invasion, from Quebec, and Errol Morris’s documentary The Fog of War, about Robert McNamara, are in their different ways both masterpieces about old men who find a kind of wisdom.
But that is not the headline. The news is that on Tuesday night, Cannes showed a film so shockingly bad that it created a scandal here on the Riviera not because of sex, violence, or politics, but simply because of its awfulness.
Those who saw Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny have been gathering ever since, with hushed voices and sad smiles, to discuss how wretched it was. Those who missed it hope to get tickets, for no other film has inspired such discussion. “The worst film in the history of the festival,” I told a TV crew posted outside the theater. I have not seen every film in the history of the festival, yet I feel my judgment will stand.
Imagine ninety tedious minutes of a man driving across America in a van. Imagine long shots through a windshield as it collects bug splats. Imagine not one but two scenes in which he stops for gas. Imagine a long shot on the Bonneville Salt Flats where he races his motorcycle until it disappears as a speck in the distance, followed by another shot in which a speck in the distance becomes his motorcycle. Imagine a film so unendurably boring that at one point, when he gets out of his van to change his shirt, there is applause.
And then, after half the audience has walked out and those who remain stay because they will never again see a film so amateurish, narcissistic, self-indulgent, and bloody-minded, imagine a scene where the hero’s lost girl reappears, performs fellatio in a hard-core scene, and then reveals the sad truth of their relationship.
Of Vincent Gallo, the film’s star, writer, producer, director, editor, and only begetter, it can be said that this talented actor must have been out of his mind to (a) make this film, and (b) allow it to be seen. Of Chloë Sevigny, who plays the girlfriend, Daisy, it must be said that she brings a truth and vulnerability to her scene that exists on a level far above the movie it is in.
If Gallo had thrown away all of the rest of the movie and made the Sevigny scene into a short film, he would have had something. That this film was admitted into Cannes as an Official Selection is inexplicable. By no standard, through no lens, in any interpretation, does it qualify for Cannes. The quip is: This is the most anti-American film at Cannes, because it is so anti-American to show it as an example of American filmmaking.
Interview with Vincent Gallo
August 29, 2004—Vincent Gallo and I have a history. In May 2003, I called his Brown Bunny the worst film in the history of the Cannes Film Festival. Then he put a hex on me to give me colon cancer. Now we’re about to meet for the first time.
It was a little tense in the Lake Street Screening Room, following the screening of the re-edited, shorter version of The Brown Bunny. I heard Gallo was in the elevator. I heard he was in the hallway. I heard he was around the corner. Then there he was. The atmosphere lightened after he explained he had never wished colon cancer on me in the first place. He was misquoted. He actually specified prostate cancer.
“You know how that happened?” he asked. “I have prostatitis. I go to this guy doctor in California. He doesn’t want to put me on antibiotics or whatever. But I get these things called a prostate massage.”
“Are you taking flaxseed?” I asked him.
“I know all my nutritional things,” he said. “I had been battling this prostatitis and a reporter who I didn’t know said, ‘I’m doing a story on Cannes and I want to know if you read what Roger Ebert said about your film.’ I said, yeah, I read all about it. ‘Well, do you have any comment?’ And I said something like, ‘Tell him I curse his prostate.’ I said it in a joking way. And she converted it into a curse on your colon. At that point, I had become the captain of black magic.”
“I don’t believe in hexes,” I said. “Besides, if I can’t take it, I shouldn’t dish it out.”
“Right.”
“Maybe by saying you made the worst film in Cannes history, I was asking for it.”
“But I thought your response was funny when you responded with the colonoscopy line.”
That was when I said the film of my colonoscopy was more entertaining than The Brown Bunny.
“I felt we were now on a humorous level,” he said, “so I apologized. To tell you the weirdest story, I started getting these letters from cultist people criticizing me for going back on what they thought was like a genius thing I did. There was this guy in L.A. who approached me in a club and he was like, ‘We’re really disappointed in you.’ And I asked why. And he said, ‘Because we heard that you removed the curse from Roger Ebert.’ I took one look at him and I thought, well, I did the right thing.”
“Anyway, your aim was bad,” I said, “because I had salivary cancer.”
We had not yet actually discussed the Worst Film in the History of the Cannes Film Festival, so I broke the ice: “I’ve got to tell you, it’s a different film now. I have to start over in the process of reviewing it because it’s not the film I saw at Cannes. I think it’s a better film.”
The Brown Bunny involves several days in the life of a motorcycle racer named Bud Clay, who loses a race and drives his van cross-country while bugs collect on the windshield and he has sad, elusive encounters with lonely women. At the end of his odyssey he seeks out his great former love, Daisy (Chloë Sevigny), and, like Gatsby, discovers that the light is out at the end of Daisy’s pier.
“Did you know the lead-up to Cannes?” Gallo asked. “Did you know why it was shown at Cannes? Did you know what state it was in?”
I said I’d heard he let it be shown even though he wasn’t finished with it.
That was the tip of the iceberg. Gallo’s explanation of the pre-Cannes adventures of The Brown Bunny ran to 1,487 words (I know because I transcribed the interview). The highlights include:
“I got involved in the film in a sacrificial way, beyond my normal self-abuse—like not eating, not sleeping, freaking out about unimportant things. Like, I had to use these Mitchell lenses, these Bausch & Lomb lenses, but I had to have them converted and it took a year. I was bringing all my good and bad habits into this project.”
“I had to postpone the racing sequences because I couldn’t train in time and I was having problems with the motorcycles and I wasn’t riding well.”