The Dead Girl

Watched the Dead Girl recently, a movie I'd heard promising things about. It's probably the saddest story about character I couldn't be bothered to care about that I've seen in a while. It's not exactly what I'd call a good movie although it has an interesting narrative trick. Not so much one story as it is a series of vignettes all connected to the discovery of a dead body out in the countryside. Although those stories are linked thematically making for some kind of meta-plot arc that's actually somewhat moving even though you know exactly where it's going to end up. Which is, dramatically speaking, like a baseball bat to the gut. The last one, featuring the titular dead girl in the last hours of her life is especially hard to watch. Because you know what's coming, like the light at the end of tunnel with rumbling train tracks. Any hope of happiness, any hope of redemption is snatched away from the characters in the greatest traditions of a tragedy. They go up, up, up and then crash and burn thanks to their own actions, their own mistakes. You know it. You can't help but know it, and it doesn't matter because the plot isn't the important thing, it's the character moments in getting there. But, I don't know, maybe I watched it when I was too numb emotionally from dealing with my own overflowing bowl of crap because I was just too ground down by the gritty, bleak tone to actually care about the bad things happening.

Just way too downbeat and needed at least one story cutting against the motiff of life being an unending torrent of shit raining down on you, I guess. And, no, the one with the girl's mother rescuing her granddaughter from a life of drugs and illiteracy and icky brown people doesn't count because that wasn't really her story. It was the hooker's, the dead girl's lover who had a chance to escape that life and turned it down in the end. While the mother was like some unholy personification of liberal guilt, attempting to pave over the errors of the past by passing out cash and sympathy.

No, I think the movie's ultimately a failure unless its goal was to depress the crap out of me. What I found interesting, though, was how it was structured. As I said, it's a series of five vignettes each featuring someone who's been touched somehow, affected by the death of this girl (With, of course, a capper about the girl herself before she died.). Which I found intriguing because I couldn't see how you could fit that into the standard box of a three-act structure yet it seems like a decent enough way of constructing a movie. A little trick that I'm going to salt away in hope of using it myself one day, if I'm so lucky.

One thing I noticed was how those vignettes were joined together by what I'll call intertextual cuts. You know what I mean, they did it constantly on shows like Buffy. Someone will say something like, “Boy, things couldn't get any worse” and the next scene will unveil the new big bad and his plan to make things go from bad to worse. A mechanic like that, I'm not sure what it's really called but intertextual works well enough for my addled mind. I mention it, though, because I don't really like them. They've become trite and overused. A cheap way of scoring post-modern points. But here, they're not used as ironic psuedo-metatextual jokes but, instead, as junction points in the flow of the narrative. An item or an overheard phase will assume new meaning, new importance in the following scene. Almost dream-like as it's the same the same way that you can be floating along in a dream and see an orange and suddenly your dream becomes about that orange. Just not quite as disjointed or poorly explained.

Again, the execution is a lot less interesting than the concept for me. Because I'm fascinated by the possibilities even as I'm disappointed at the results on display. Still, I'd rather watch an ambitious movie that falls a little short of its mark than one that revels in its mediocrity. Much more instructive.

But, the single thing that bothered me most about the movie? Brittany Murphey. I really bought her as a strung out prostitute and all I have to say about that is what happened to my sweet little Tai from Clueless? Still freaks me out whenever I see the not-so-divine Miss Murphey in a role these days.