GREEN ROOM: Aaron's Favorite Movie Of The 2010s

    I don't have much to say about the trends of the 2010s nor any grievances to root out like botfly larvae, you got Jake and Luke for that and for Top 100 lists, for that matter. I have a list but I don't feel like posting it because, once I do, it'll be this concrete thing and as I continue to discover or rewatch movies, the concrete will crack and the rankings will crumble. But my #1 hasn't changed for two years and this is where I wanna put my energy instead of spreading it thin for an entire list of blurbs.

  Looking back on the last 10 years, Green Room is my favorite movie of the decade. Some others definitely came close but there's a very specific itch that only this movie can scratch. I've seen it eleventy times and it never gets old. Hangout movies are my jam and this one is invaded by a siege movie. This war of the subgenres is like if Dazed And Confused was directed by Walter Hill and that kind of drastic clash is so special to me. It works because its characters are so effortlessly authentic, even the villains are humanized, and the thrills are more heart-pumping than any other movie I saw.

  Spoilers obviously

  Violence scares me and thus fascinates me but it's so rarely portrayed with such stark realism. DePalma told Scorsese that the better you are at portraying violence, the more shit you'll get for it. Violence should be upsetting and in the tradition of Scorsese, DePalma, and, most recently, Zahler, Saulnier doesn't shy away from it, nor does he revel in it. He strikes the perfect balance. I said I've watched this eleventy times so I know it well enough to look away when shit gets traumatic. The Red Laces scene in particular is the hardest to watch because, yeah, Pat's arm is fucking gnarly but it's deeper than just that shot of nasty practical gore FX. When Sam has the gun pointed at Big Justin and pleads with him, "please don't do anything," it fucks me up. I'd feel the same as her in that situation because the only thing that scares me more than being killed is having to kill someone. Then when they lose the gun and Reese is trying to choke Justin to death, Amber quite literally cuts out the middle man...'s abdomen. Reese has been our self-appointed 'hero'/badass of the group, but after Amber's intestine-unzipping, he immediately starts weeping and whimpers a trembling "oh jesus..." as he slowly unfurls the newly dead Nazi from his grip. I can look away from the gore but these potent, harrowing reactions to it command my attention.

  To further tear down Reese's pseudo badassery: he makes one of the most understandably stupid decisions in the entire movie. He finds a way out and takes it, only to be be hacked to near-death immediately. When I first saw it I was anxiously doing the armchair encouragement of "go, go, go!" but once he met the waiting Nazi's machete, I thought "what an idiot," obviously projecting because: I would have done the same thing. It's the kind of impulsive decision that seems smart but we are all wont to make. I rarely see a thriller write this this well.

  In a movie that humanizes both sides of the fight, there's no real villain or hero, just acts of violence and retaliation. And when I say humanize, I don't mean sympathize, there's a difference. Saulnier puts in painstaking effort to give every white supremacist in the movie interiority. None of them feel like cardboard villain cut-outs. Hell, one of them is our anti-heroine.

  Let's talk about Amber.

  She's a racist, which is a nice slice of complexity since she's our strong female lead; although unlikable, she's incredibly compelling (one might say terrifying) and she's not a survivalist or some other hokey shit like that, she's just fueled by vengeance. You root for her but, at the end, she reminds you that she's wasn't there to be sentimental. When Pat says he finally knows his "desert island band," her "tell somebody who gives a shit" is just pure exhaustion because this is her revenge movie, everybody else is just dying in it. She isn't even introduced until the end of the first act and neither is the plot, which is on the periphery and never explicitly spelled out to us.

  So while Amber's story is going on, The Ain't Rights decide to troll their skinhead crowd by playing a cover of 'Nazi Punks, Fuck Off' by The Dead Kennedys. They brave the hurling of beer bottles and jeering; it's the reaction they wanted, after all. What Pat notices, that no one else does, is the long acid stare of Werm as he floats through the rest of the crowd and neither lose their tense connection until Werm fades from sight. Like Leonard Smalls was to Raising Arizona, Werm is a walking embodiment of evil, but unlike Smalls, he's not the capital-V Villain. Right before he leaves the venue he asks Pat what their second-to-last song was and, when Pat tells him, Werm compliments it as "fucking hard," then reveals that that was playing when he killed Emily. That exchange marks the end of their conflict; their music pissed him off so he used it against them. That's it. It's a typical standoff because Pat is the most 'innocent' of the group and Werm is the antithesis of that, but it's an incredibly atypical conclusion; Werm leaves the film entirely, save for a brief moment toward the end when we see him vacantly eating cereal. David doesn't defeat Goliath because there's no easily-defined karmic law at work. He was just there to spark a flame and leave it behind to grow into an inferno.

  My favorite moment is when Pat says to Darcy, "this is a nightmare," and, interestingly enough, Darcy replies "for us all" because, unlike Werm, Darcy has to endure shrapnel from the explosion too. The whole movie Darcy is supposed to be in control but he's falling apart like an alternate universe Walter White. No death would have mattered more than Werm's yet he lives on to act as harbinger for a continuum of violence - nothing is solved. The ending, though, with Pat and Amber dry-firing at the dog as it comes to lie down and die next to its owner, is a wildly unexpected bit of poignancy and sadness. There are plenty of interpretations one could draw about what this moment 'means' but, to me, it's just a logical conclusion that perfectly caps it all off. I don't need to find anything profound or meaningful about it.

  This is my favorite movie of the decade because you can't cut a leaner thriller. That's enough.