“I shot the movie in 1993,” rasps the unseen director George Sluizer with a Herzog-like Germanic twang, his haggard voice emanating from the screen as it zooms slowly in on a still photograph: Sluizer’s arm is linked casually, almost absent-mindedly, with that of his star River Phoenix, who looks off into the distance (it is unclear whether he knows the camera is there). They are shooting Dark Blood (2012), a morose neo-Western whose production would be forever halted by Phoenix’s sudden and tragic overdose outside a nightclub in West Hollywood. “When I got severely ill myself,” he continues, “I had the urge to put the material we had shot together while I still could. If I may make a comparison, we had a chair with two legs, and I wanted to add the third leg—to edit and preserve what we had achieved. The fourth leg will always be missing, but the chair would then be able to stand upright.” The uniquely shrill and stubbornly unpleasant film that follows, released in its incomplete, cobbled-together form in 2012, is not only haunted by the real life death of its star, but also attempts to dramatize and thematize the inescapable, and ultimately inarticulable, pall that unnatural death can cast—over people, over a landscape, over a nation’s psyche, and over the mechanics of cinema itself.
Dark Blood’s two-pronged opening salvo sees Phoenix’s wax figure of an antagonist—referred to only as “Boy”—howling up at the moon, an action loyally mimicked by the dog who will remain at his heels throughout the runtime. We cut to a gliding movement across the reflective surface of a Bentley in the hot sun, the mismatched terrain mapped and distorted across the shimmering black paint and dusted windows. The car belongs to Buffy and Harry Fletcher (Judy Davis, Jonathan Pryce), a Hollywood couple (ex-showgirl and out-of-work actor, of course) wending their way through the desert toward the promise of a well-paying gig for Harry. Needless to say: they are hopelessly out of place. Car troubles send them first to a rundown motel manned by a nameless woman (Karen Black), and then leaves them stranded miles from civilization, pulled inexorably toward the waiting arms of the lonesome and lustful Boy.
Throughout the film, Sluizer patches over more and more cracks, intruding and commentating, purveying and transforming the unfilmed details through his use of voice-over and freeze-frames/stills—the latter as needed, and the former very often redundant or superfluous. The most jarring and sensuous case of this occurs during Boy and Buffy’s first encounter on his doorstep. She has limped through the night (her injury relayed through voiceover as well), drawn toward the light of his shack in the distance, and collapses into Boy’s embrace as soon as he opens the door. As their bodies touch, the frame pauses, and the film’s strumming leitmotif accompanies Sluizer’s description and enactment. “‘I’d better take a look’ says Boy.” Cut to a close-up of Buffy’s head on his shoulder. “He strokes her foot tenderly, she can feel the desire in his hands. Boy cleans the wound, spreads it apart with his fingers. It’s an intimate thing to open someone else’s flesh. A woman’s flesh.” What emerges is a thoroughly abstracted moment of intimacy; absent images of the mind and ear, suggested by Sluizer and then conjured by the audience, run counter to the snapshot in front of our eyes. Our mental projections afford a changeability and volatility to flesh that the camera’s fixed portrayal of frozen muscular sculptures cannot. This is contrasted by the scenes where the voiceover plays over moving images instead of stills; the commentary over moving images attaches an absent image to a live, present one, but the stills are dead to begin with. Sluizer’s description of them is an act of simultaneous mourning and exhumation –– less so of Phoenix himself than of the film that could’ve been, of the images his presence made possible.
Sluizer not only conveys the action, but adopts the lines and persona of Phoenix in several head-spinning sound-image combinations. Many actors are already puppets to the whims of their directors whether they know it or not, but here, Sluizer shows us the strings and removes all doubt. This puppetry does not entirely explain Phoenix’s bizarre, alien performance—which finds the missing link between Anthony Perkins and Vince Vaughn’s respective interpretations of Norman Bates—but it brings its ineffectiveness into focus. Boy’s mania is so flatly rendered by Sluizer on the page, and so stubbornly opaque in Phoenix’s translation of it, that he becomes a supporting player in his own story, which is largely given over to the writerly, semiotically loaded jabs the couple launch at each other relentlessly (“Checking your image?” “What’s left of it,” and so on). The most curious and troubling aspect of Boy’s conception is the fact that he is one-eighth Hopi Native. This not only sheds new light on the movie’s title, which refers to the colonial policy of blood quantum, but also on the young man’s sexual obsession with Buffy, which brings to mind the miscegenation panic that gave The Searchers (1956) its thematic spine. Coupled with Sluizer’s relentless fixation on the collapse of indigenous civilizations and the rippling effects of those genocides in the region (later pummeled into ruin by years of atom bomb tests), Dark Blood’s intentions as a deconstructed Western become more clear, but they are further muddled by baffling touches like Boy’s voodoo-cave-cum-bomb-shelter, to which Buffy reacts, “You’re a very disturbing young man,” said with equal parts attraction and repulsion. He responds, “I’m just another creature.”
Boy’s anticipation of the end of the world complements the ways in which the film is haunted by the ghosts of departed cultures and loved ones. Karen Black’s motel warden waxes poetic about the tourist booms of yore, lamenting the life and community that were stamped out by the tests, and Boy is in constant thrall to the memory of his dead wife—the film was already loaded with these structuring absences before the real-world tragedy that lent it its most crucial one, and it attempts to vocalize all of them. Dark Blood is suspended in limbo between the after effects of one form of mass death and the looming presence of a future one, fully (and painfully) aware of its place in a never-ending chain of atrocities that do not fit the frame. The death of one beloved film star seems like chump change compared to the cultural weight of the strings that Sluizer is pulling, but his portrait of a post-colonial West is so symbolically rendered and removed from any tangible emotional reality, that it carries none of the immediacy of watching a dead man wither away in front of our eyes.
This immediacy is spectacularized in the similarly self-serving and self-ciphering Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009), one of Terry Gilliam’s most unpleasant and unwieldy endeavors in a career entirely comprising them. Its star Heath Ledger is introduced thirty minutes in, found under a bridge by doe-eyed teens Andrew Garfield and Lily Cole, swinging from a rope. His resuscitation (aided by a strategically placed metal tube that kept his trachea open) is linked to the Hanged Man tarot card, whose nebulous meanings and interpretations are retro-fitted onto our ever-changing process of identification with Ledger’s puckish, opaque charlatan Tony. It’s unclear whether Christopher Plummer and Tom Waits’ Faustian discourses on the nature of time, death, chance, and decay were already in the script when Ledger died suddenly from an accidental prescription drug overdose, but the film is blatantly trafficking in visual evocations of its lead actor’s demise.
The incremental reveal of Tony’s past wrongdoings (his company stole organs from children in the Global South to give to North American ones) is meted out through visits to the titular Imaginarium, a digital simulacra of whichever psyche enters it that functions as a moral testing site of punishment and enlightenment. The way Gilliam worked around his star’s death was to have a rotating cast of the most bankable contemporary heartthrobs (Johnny Depp, Jude Law, Colin Farrell) take his place whenever Tony enters this space. This sense of uncertainty gives the film its circular, ironic structure, building toward a triumphant switcheroo of the aforementioned tube for one that crumbles into dust, and we watch Tony swing from a rope once again. It’s a moment of ecstatic and thoroughly icky schadenfreude, only more murky and double-edged because the subject is Farrell’s stand-in rather than Ledger himself; the film dangles the possible death of Ledger’s character over the audience, using the actor’s friendly persona to throw us off the trail before pulling out every rug it’s placed surreptitiously beneath our feet—like a much more twisted version of what Hitchcock did with Cary Grant in Suspicion (1941). In essence, Gilliam’s thematic interests come at the expense of Ledger’s image, and, for the two hours one spends with the film, his legacy.
Swap out the names and you’ve got a pretty succinct summary of Dark Blood as well. Phoenix is visually matched to his dog in the opening, an association that sets the stage for his degradation into beastdom as the film’s looping events unravel. Harry and Boy’s final confrontation ends with an axe wound in the latter’s skull—“You’ve just split my head open,” stammers Boy, who remains conscious even after he finally collapses. “Give a boy his last wish,” he says to Buffy, “unbutton your blouse.” We then watch as a shuddering Phoenix cops one last feel, letting out a final gasp of pain and ecstasy as his life empties into her unsuspecting arms. Face pale and sallow, skin sunken into his cheekbones, mouth hanging open—a physical imprint of the instant of his passing, reduced completely and excruciatingly to his basest instincts. Just another creature, indeed. It’s one of the most hideous things I’ve ever seen in a motion picture, and frankly, I wish I could unsee it. Sluizer again attempts to comment on the effects of bearing witness to death in Dark Blood’s final scene. “Are you okay?” asks Harry as they drive away from Boy’s burning shack. “No,” says Buffy. Sluizer’s awareness of the weight that his images bear punctures his attempt to reframe the project as a tribute, as does the fact that Phoenix’s family refused to participate in any capacity. What he, and his unlikely peer Terry Gilliam, seem unaware of are the limitations of cinema to reconcile what it does not fabricate, to take the unknowable cosmic mass of a person’s life and do it justice in the margins of 1.85:1.
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