U-Turn

by Mark G. So

When it comes to Oliver Stone movies, one generally knows what one's going to get, which makes it all the more remarkable that this picture marks an apparent turning point for Stone, a first sign of his much anticipated growing-up. The director has long been regarded as a big constructor of theories, a private eye trying to crack a "fossil record" of assorted media clips, sound bites, secret documents, and interviews to get down to The Truth, or at least, a compelling fictional Truth. He has typically told stories through assemblages of extant "evidence," piecing together "proofs" then selling them on us with his documentarian style; whether we're suckers or not for paying is a matter of constant debate. With U-Turn, however, Stone seemingly discovers what it is that Postmodern collage really does, among other things, as he begins finally to confront his modus operandi through his work.

U-Turn takes place almost entirely in the town of Superior, Arizona--broken-down, out in the middle of nowhere, home to all manner of "inbreds," eccentrics, and psychos. Or at least through the eyes of Bobby Cooper (Sean Penn), an interloper forced to make a pit stop in the sun-baked town when his car beaks down on his way to clearing his drug-money troubles in Vegas. Bobby is quite the "man with a past," but we are never shown anything specific about that past; just the present situation which it has produced--Bobby's current predicament and his attitude towards it. Put simply, he has a sizable quantity of cash on hand with which he must pay a debt, and once he has done so, he hopes to disappear into the paradisal California of beaches and sunshine.

Superior, Arizona, however, is not the sort of place to let visitors go before hooking a line into their wallets and shackling bonds with very long chains to their ankles. For Superior is a land of opportunists who use people for strictly economic and political gain. Until Bobby's arrival, there is something of a balance in Superior; its denizens, in all their conniving and trickery and locked timelessly within an insular socio-political webwork, each have attained more or less equal leverage against one another--each seemingly knows the "dark and dirty" about certain strategically important others, which prevents anyone from taking full advantage of anyone else for fear of blackmail. Offices, positions, titles, etc., in the world of Superior are entirely ironic, in that roles established in the name of such traditionally democratized institutions as "community" and "service" are contradicted directly by the opportunistic political reality behind them, and the people seem content with playing their roles as they are, according to a purely political reality--they consciously combine what we might once have held opposite as the image of the ideal against the de facto "corruption under the gilding" and perform them together, in a very Postmodern sense, as a single "way of the world." In Oliver Stone's mind, Superior is a picture of greater America, painted in the colors of what have conventionally been typified as "conspiracy," "incest," and "dirty politics"--the stuff of crime noir, only now the portrayal makes the case that to call it criminal would be outmoded. It's a vision that Stone consistently has avoided, choosing instead to stand on the side of old fashioned truth/falsity and individual character, but with U-Turn, he finds himself coping with its irrefutable reality of for the first time.

Enter Bobby, who has absolutely nothing on these people. With his shady baggage and his nihilistic outlook, he is quite the product of long-exhausted Modern stock: the Anti-Hero. He stumbles into town under the aegis of our sympathies, or at least Stone's, exuding a familiar dirty masculinity and "cool." We start out laughing at the Superians for their utter ignorance, and Bobby even gets to crack a few pointed wise ones at their expense. However, Bobby is the outsider. Little does he know at first what a tight strategic game he has wandered into. As he begins to perceive the politicality of everything around him, he grows anguished over having been drawn onto the playing field without having understood beforehand the stakes involved. For Stone sets Bobby up as the Last Self, in a story about Postmodernism's erasure of the Self. Bobby, last relic of High Modernity, finds hell in Superior. It is at the height of his torment that we lose our sympathy for him and instead come to laugh at him for so allowing himself to be led along by his heartstrings, for clinging to naive, romantic dreams of a "Promised Land," and for letting himself be had by the transparent. Bobby is a Holden Cawfield in search of intimacy and the Real, only out of his time, and thus unawares as to the depthlessness and complete politicality of such things. He gets suckered for all his material worth because he refuses to accept the ruse that is the shape of existence in Superior while it plays itself out all around him, through him, and ultimately, at his expense.

Bobby's misfortunes stemming specifically from his liaison with Grace McKenna (Jennifer Lopez)--femme fatale, daughter/wife of wealthy land boss Jake McKenna (Nick Nolte), and all-around town whore--is an intimate, often morbidly comic examination of the folly of an heroic (or anti-heroic) figure grasping, in all his outmodedness, at imaginary ideals, though in Bobby they happen to be the 'escape and live it up (for as long as possible)' ideals of a nihilist. It's this radically anti-political outlook that, unfortunately for Bobby, makes him the perfect "prey" for the relentless political mechanism that he so wrongly believes he is simply "driving through." Grace, in her multiplicitousness (she wears the suit that best serves her strategic interests, which in turn reflect the politics of the social terrain she inhabits), is the fulcrum about which our perspective turns as we gradually come to recognize that it is the attitudes of the initially sympathetic Bobby, and not the ways of those seemingly far-out, eccentric Superians, that are out of place. The (perhaps painful) honesty of Grace's various posturing, at one moment loving towards Bobby only to curse him the next--and sometimes both at once!--force a startling interrogation of everything presumed to be basic for Bobby's character--what is "love?" What is "escape?" Mere political constructs? Additionally, and certainly not least, there is the fact of so much havoc and death wrought as a direct result of Bobby's "passive" intervention, further indicating, to ridiculous heights of gore, the utter aberration of everything Bobby represents; the real shocker here is how smoothly Bobby is transformed from this oddly post-50s 'cool dude' into something not far removed from 19th c. French playwright Alfred Jarry's bumbling, nonsensical Ubu.

Just as our attitude towards Bobby and his growing problems begins to shift from sympathetic to mocking (though it could be argued that the anti-hero is too much of an outmoded trope these days to evoke any affect for us), so does Stone's. His trademark style of projecting psychological interiors through snippets of candid-looking video is refreshingly turned on its end, used here not to reveal a "true" view incongruous to deceitful appearances, but rather, to offer a visual history that conforms to appearances, changing along with the shifts in strategy made by the various Superian roles as they take their advantage of Bobby's naiveté. The effect is stunning; we suddenly are challenged to confront the validity of documentary-style presentation as objective view and to perceive it instead as a reflexive "mirror" surface, in which we see reflected back not our Selves but rather the cultural conditioning that comprises our ways of seeing. This solidifies the reflection upon our audience-world of the critique effected by Grace, and indeed, the whole of Superior, upon Bobby's character type, discussed in the previous paragraph.

When Bobby's anti-hero meets his predictable destiny, it somehow seems more than just the run-of-the-mill James Dean casualty. For U-Turn is Oliver Stone's swansong to the Self; he buries Him, bidding adieu to the Age of Anxiety. In the film's finale, there is one wonderful shot in which the camera's gaze leaves Bobby, the beaten and burned simpatico through who's eyes we have filtered the film hitherto, for good, spiraling upward to join the vultures looking down in glorious god-cam upon the stark Arizona landscape containing the Modern's brutal end. We at that moment are shown clearly, boldly, that this Last Self, which we had so clung to and had so wished to see escape adversity, never had anything to do with our seeing to begin with.

Regarding Ennio Morricone's score, 42 minutes of which is presented on Epic/Sony's soundtrack release (EK 68778 23 tracks 70:25) together with ten songs, the music does the best thing it possible could do--it underscores the film's manufactured Superian landscape and by-product characters as the pastiches that they are while maintaining a straight and honest approach at the same time. While this may at first also seem the easiest approach, it's actually quite a trick, as the depthless surface identity of each of the film's elements is constantly changing. This makes it difficult to score one scene one way without having it seem somehow ironic in the next. Morricone can't be scoring anything underlying, because that would countermand the film's emphasis upon a lack thereof; rather, he scores in the abstract, creating a certain weird ambiance around story elements, characters and such, that does not portray them in any particular light, but rather, ambiguously. The music tells us in familiar enough terms how everything in the film is constituted, bringing in all sorts of descriptive clichés that approximate a sense of the 'Chicano West,' as well as of numerous character tropes, but is by turn entirely unconcerned with, and unrelated to, the motives of any character at any given moment. This works incredibly well to unsettle our understanding of how film music portrays people and events--Morricone's score directs us to perceive reality as that which appears on the surface, and identity thus also as it happens to be performed in a given instance. In giving us musical explanations that never escape their cliched mode, nor ever comment on that mode, the score thus greatly enhances one of the film's main thrusts--that characters are constituted and driven solely according to the socio-political framework which they inhabit, and at all times are truly the "walking dead of culture."

Morricone employs a number of motifs and textural devices to identify characters and story elements, the most prominent theme being that for Grace. It is a four-note motif, strictly confined by its minimalist setting, scored generally for solo alto voice, some thin and airy brass, guitar, and low, moaning sonorities that sound like someone blowing over a wide PVC pipe and which remind me of the primitivistic guttural vocalizations from Morricone's Dollars scores. Grace's Theme is played slowly and evenly, precluding us from drawing any sense of femme fatale-ish menace from its repetition; it is also prevented from ever becoming a love theme due to its static casting. The only things we draw from it are obvious: the voice stands for the feminine, while its often orgasmic oohing denotes Grace's whorish sexuality (aided by the neon "glow" of sexy guitars and flirtatious brass). Being what it is, the music never confuses us by making Grace decidedly any one way, and thus never traps itself in such an irony as, for instance, playing a love theme over an extortion--the music is for Grace purely in the sense of her strategic role, which incorporates issues of sexuality and other identity politics; all sense of the character's personal would-be 'affect' is, importantly, left mute.

Material for the central character of Bobby is sort of a hodgepodge of "cool" textures, with a twisted jazzy piano, bass, electric guitar, wailing sax, and what is perhaps a zither playing--surprise!--another repeating four-note motif. We have our prototypical cool male anti-hero scoring, but again, nil in the way of any sympathy or intimacy, beyond the cliché. With this music, Morricone sets up from the start the point to which Oliver Stone eventually wants to lead us--that Bobby is a type beyond his time, deluded in thinking of himself as being in any way autonomous.

There are two wonderful cues in the film that are quite effective in realizing Stone's thrusts in musical terms. The first is the cue entitled "Hallucination Walk." It is a tiny cue (less than one minute in length), yet it offers deep insight into how we are told to view Bobby. Amidst its off-kilter barrage of various boom-boom percussion--a Morricone staple--and aleatoric string plucking, Grace's theme is articulated several times in different registers as tired moaning, signifying blatantly her role as a whore. Bobby sees her this way, too--we know this because we perceive her through his eyes in this scene--but falls for her anyway. However, his hallucinatory state serves as his alibi for the moment, and so we don't yet question his status as simpatico; but again, Morricone lays the groundwork here for a great subversion.

The other telling cue is unfortunately not on the CD. It consists of music underscoring Bobby's attainder of a train ticket to salvation, or so he thinks. The music can only be described as the kind of tropical paradise travelogue, with lots of warm, sunny, happy licks and a Latin drive, that one might find attached to a Club Med ad. In its shear commercialness, it signifies the temporary week-long escape that is the built-in safety valve of the capitalist scheme, and which also is the nostalgic, commodified replacement of everything Bobby thinks it is. Here, his naiveté is exposed decisively, and we are brought, through the deft scoring, to fully mock Bobby for his failure to see through the transparent.

The remainder of the score for the most part underscores setting, creating a twangy southwestern folk atmosphere that's deliciously Morriconean with its Spanish guitars, harmonicas, airy string effects, and yes, even Jew's Harp. Such utterly parodic music advances the notion that even setting terrains are manufactured components to a fierce political mechanism. We as viewers see through the guise immediately, thanks in great part to the music; Bobby to the very end is unable to, making him more out of place and ridiculous with every next scene. Finally, he is brutally engulfed by this postmodern reality, to great comic effect.

Overall, Ennio Morricone's U-Turn score is pleasantly in keeping with the composer's modern norm, scored for a typically off-the-wall ensemble thrown together under the aegis of the Accademia Musicale Italiana and expertly tailored to the film for which it was written. In many ways, this music is key in reinforcing many pivotal elements of Oliver Stone's U-Turn, and helps to make it one of the best films of the year.

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