Rubber

Dir: Quentin Dupieux

2010

****

Rubber is a satirical slasher-style horror from the man that brought us Flat Eric and every bit as good as that sounds. As you would expect from Quentin Dupieux’s music and music videos, Rubber is a strange but stylish satire that takes an overused format and replaces just one component. The film is double-layered in a unique existential manner. A group of people in a California desert are gathered to watch a "film". A sheriff, Chad (Stephen Spinella), points out that many moments in cinema happen for "no reason", that life is full of this "no reason", and that "this film" (presumably a dual reference to both the "film" to be watched by the assembled group and Rubber itself) is an homage to "no reason". Chad is both inside and outside the diegesis, sometimes participating in the narrative action and sometimes commenting on it. An accountant (Jack Plotnick) then passes out binoculars to the group and rides off on a bicycle. The spectators then start looking through their binoculars into the distance, waiting for the "film" to start. Throughout the film, this group of people return in order to gauge their reactions to what has taken place so far. The main feature itself takes place in the late 1990s, somewhere in a California desert. For no apparent reason, a car tire, named Robert, suddenly comes to life. At first, he learns how to stand upright and then how to roll. He comes across a plastic water bottle and, after hesitating, crushes it. He then comes across a scorpion, and crushes it. Finally comes across a glass beer bottle but is unable to crush it by rolling over it. However, Robert discovers he can psychokinetically causes the bottle to fracture. He tests his newfound powers on a tin can and a rabbit, making them both explode. Robert then sees a woman (Roxane Mesquida) drive by and attempts to use his powers on her. However, he only succeeds in making her car stall. As the tire begins to roll towards her stalled car, a truck comes by and runs him over. This breaks the connection, allowing the woman's car to start again and she continues on her way. The tire explodes a pied crow, then finds the man that had been driving the truck which ran him over and blows up his head. Arriving in a nearby desert town, Robert comes across the woman from before. She is staying in a motel and, after watching her shower through an open door, the tire goes into the room next to hers. After the motel maid finds the tire showering and throws it out of the room, Robert re-enters the room and blows up her head. Chad, the local sheriff who we see in the opening of the movie, shows up to investigate the murders. For the in-movie audience, two days have passed and most of them are starving; the accountant wakes them up and presents them with a roast turkey. Shortly thereafter, they begin suffering intense abdominal pain. Back in the story proper, Chad is interrogating the motel owner, only to stop abruptly when an alarm goes off. He announces the poison (from the turkey) has had time to do its work, and tries to urge the other characters to go home, since the audience is dead and the movie can now be over. The accountant then informs Chad that one of the audience, a wheelchair-bound man, had not eaten the poisoned food and so the movie has not ended. Embarrassed, Chad must continue the plot and returns to his interrogation. Chad witnesses Robert kill the motel owner (who has mistreated it) and leads the cops on a "tire hunt". Meanwhile, the accountant tries to poison the man in the wheelchair with more food, but eats it himself and dies. Robert comes across a group of people burning a large pile of tires, then the film jumps to three days later showing the results of his killing spree. The cops find the tire watching an auto racing program in a house, having killed the occupants. Chad rigs a mannequin (resembling the woman Robert is interested in) with dynamite, intending for the tire to blow the mannequin's head up, thereby also blowing himself up. However, when Robert destroys the mannequin's head, the dynamite does not explode. The man in the wheelchair mocks Chad for his failed plan, enraging Chad enough to unceremoniously end the film by simply shooting Robert with a shotgun off-screen, after which he tosses the remains to the man in the wheelchair, who continues to criticize him for the anticlimax. Almost immediately Robert emerges from the house reborn as a Tricycle, prompting the man in the wheelchair to protest to Chad that the film isn't over. Failing that, he protests to Robert that he is an audience member and can't be killed, which the Tricycle proves wrong by exploding his head. Robert begins rolling down the road recruiting an army of tires along the way, eventually rolling to Hollywood, where the film concludes. Dupieux (aka Mr. Oizo) pokes fun at the formulaic mainstream Hollywood horror while also embracing the nonsensical wonder of the comedy horror, essentially having his cake and also eating it. He is clearly having a dig at Hollywood but he is also clearly having much fun doing it. You could argue that the Troma studios have already done this but in some respects they are on the other side of the spectrum. Troma take extremes and emphasis the ridiculous of Hollywood while Dupieux plays by all of the rules and just changes one aspect to make it ridiculous, while also observing it from a distance. Many villains/killers in horror films are absurd but are all taken seriously, so taking something as simple and non-threatening like a tire is one big surrealist leap but without it seeming too extreme. The clever marketing helped loads. It is fair to say that the joke went over the heads of many, as post-modernist irony generally does (satire is dead), but it is a one-trick story, you either love it or you don’t and even if you do understand it, it still has to keep your attention for 90 minutes. Either way, love it or hate it, you can’t deny it’s originality. I personally think it’s a modern masterpiece, about as quirky as it gets and something so ridiculous I can’t help but love it.