Nostalgia and influence in Under the Silver Lake

Under the Silver Lake is not the follow-up to It Follows I was anticipating. It has the pacing and ominous, languorous zooming of everyday objects and people that seem to be hallmarks of Mitchell’s style. There are moments in It Follows that make us feel like we’re in some horror nostalgia wet dream, no time and the 80s, 90s, 00s, and 10s at once. Seashell phones that don’t exist and have never existed.

Even though Mitchell starts to ground viewers in the visual language of Under the Silver Lake—colorful, flashing animal icons, cutting to the interior of a coffee shop window with graffiti’d “BEWARE THE DOG KILLER,” and then panning over past a man wearing a shirt with the same animal icons—he still makes us feel that this is the LA of now. Yet something is amiss, and only Sam (Andrew Garfield) can see it.

In a nutshell, the film is an existential noir, following Sam, a down-on-his-luck writer/something/whatever you do in LA, as he tries to unravel the mystery of his missing neighbor, Sarah (Riley Keough). He’s conspiracy-obsessed, desperate to find meaning in secret messages in songs and hidden patterns in the letters Vanna White turns in Wheel of Fortune. When Sam connects Sarah’s disappearance to the death of a local tycoon, he’s the one who can only crack the code and find her.

The film is absurdly comedic, laugh out loud funny with odes to Pynchon, DeLillo, Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, and The Big Lewbowski. When Sam follows a group of women from his apartment to Echo Park Lake and then to a hotel, a directorial nod to Scotty following Madeline in Vertigo and Chinatown in one, he’s driving a Black Mustang with a dick drawn on hood. Sam and an unnamed actress (Riki Lindholm) fuck while chatting about his Kurt Cobain poster over the bed while women’s tennis plays on a TV next to them. The Homeless King (David Yow) leads Sam through a park, explaining that “coyotes are blessed creatures. When you see a coyote, you don’t run away. You follow it. See where it takes you.” This, as a coyote is digging through the trash, selects a bag of Doritos, and takes it back into the woods. When Sam meets The Songwriter (Jeremy Bobb), a Man Behind the Curtain archetype with Randy Newman’s biting humor, The Songwriter explains that he wrote “Smells Like Teen Spirit” “somewhere between a blow job and an omelette. There’s no rebellion. There’s only me earning a paycheck.”

Mitchell has a fraught relationships with Los Angeles, damning the self-serving, ouroboros machine that even allowed this moving to be created. The “East LA” band, Jesus and the Brides of Dracula are first seen on the cover of LA Weekly, play at a fancy private hotel party where one of the members promotes her “secret solo show” at Hollywood Forever with cookies as tickets. A mogul throws a chess party in the Hollywood Hills filled with men who want to play chess with beautiful women, hiring “Shooting Star” escorts to fill the roles. As Sam wanders through another party, we overhear someone say, “I know she’s only 12, but honestly she really captures the zeitgeist.” So LA it fucking hurts.

At its core, Under the Silver Lake is a total schizophrenic love of film. References everywhere: Lynch, Hitchcock, Gilliam, Huston…the list could go on. But sometimes, influences can become a distraction. A forced attempt to look smart, well-read, to say, “I’ve seen the right films and want you to know I know my shit without saying it.”

Admittedly, I loved this about Under the Silver Lake. Upon first watch, I was trying to catch all the references that were turned on their heads but still reverent. But if don’t know the references, and I definitely couldn’t catch them all, the film may be alienating, confusing, or just simply unlikeable. Also, I was really high and I was convinced that the film was trying to visualize what was going on in Scotty Ferguson’s catatonic state in a contemporary setting. Don’t do drugs.

On my second, sober watch, I read the film as modern noir, informative our current obsession with serial killers and true crime. We want to make sense of bigger pictures and larger mysteries. We want a challenge, something dark, and when we don’t find it in an obvious way, maybe we create something out of nothing.

When Sam goes to visit his friend, an unnamed bar buddy played by Topher Grace in Victor Heights, it was two blocks from my old house in LA. I sent a screengrab of the location to my brother who lives in my old house. And here’s what he sent back. That scene, filmed probably not even two years ago, was at a place that no longer exists.

Maybe the point is this: nostalgia is fucked. When Andrew Garfield drives past the Intelligensia at Sunset Junction with Bernard Herrmann-esque score playing, it is funny. It’s not deep. There used to be something there, and now it’s fucking dead. As his bar buddy friend says as they’re playing Super Mario Bros., “We crave mystery because there’s none left.”

That, or maybe Mitchell just really, really hates living near the dog park in Silverlake.