The End of Irony

This story appears in the May issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.

Kelly Reichardt's films meditate on the relationship between gender and genre. In Rivers of Grass (1994), a bored women's desire to be a fugitive in a road movie is stymied when she discovers that nobody is looking for her. In Night Moves (2014) a political thriller about environmental activists turns into a sinister revenge story as the protagonist becomes obsessed with controlling his female comrade. And in Certain Women (2016), winner of best film at London Film Festival, Reichardt uses the Western – evacuated of any male heroism – to study three lives of quiet desperation. Laura Dern is a lawyer whose client wants emotional care rather than legal advice, Michelle Williams is an unloved mother building a house for an ungrateful family, and Lily Gladstone is a solitary rancher with an unrequited love. As with all of Reichardt's films, it is the subtle articulation of images that make it a work of pure, revelatory cinema.

VICE: One image that stayed with me is when Lily Gladstone's character, having been denied her hesitant advances, falls asleep at the wheel of her car and drives off the road to a peaceful stop. It is such a cinematic moment that I wasn't surprised to find that it is not in the book of short stories the film is based on.

Kelly Reichardt: It's funny but I can't even remember what happens in the book [Maile Meloy's Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It]. I was once out in Montana scouting for my film Wendy and Lucy (2008). I got on an interstate and the road was just a sheet of ice. I couldn't get any traction and my car was sailing around. I can't even believe I made it to the next exit. In my mind I pictured that scene in Certain Women being surrounded by a tonne of snow but [in Montana] they'd had the least snowfall for a century that year. She was supposed to "glide out over the ice"! But then, without the ice, she just fell asleep and glided through the field and through the fence. The fence makes a really good sound when it breaks. With that scene [which is near the end], you're building and building throughout. It's her exhaustion and our exhaustion. It's really the emotion of the first two stories; everything up to that point is like holding a breath and then, finally, letting it out.

Women in your films often come up against the roles that cinema expects them to play.

The Western, in particular, has these boundaries set up for women. So the frame plays with that in a way that fits into the subtext. In the Laura Dern story in Certain Women, she's a lawyer but has a client who wants things beyond that – he wants a kind of nurturing from her as opposed to legal advice. No matter what they achieve
there are boundaries that exist in different ways. Whether it's the boundary of the family for Michelle Williams's character or class for Lily Gladstone, or the genre as a whole.

As a film teacher do you think about cinema history and convention when you do things like subvert genre?

I'm more nuts and bolts, since I teach production. I think about those things, but I'm not well versed at articulating them in anything besides film making itself. Westerns are really a series of heightened moments. So I put the focus on the less heightened moments, like the routine of daily chores or the monotony of a cross-country walk. Even in Certain Women, Michelle Williams's character wants to acquire this sandstone for her house—that's the "conquering" aspect of the traditional Western. But it's a subtle, smaller gain. It's like a haggle rather than a triumph. You can count on the audience being so well versed in the genre that any time you're not delivering to it, it feels like a subversive act. You can just count on them knowing what beats you're supposed to hit.

Where does your interest in class come from?

America likes films about the winners. The "haves" who, by the end of the movie, are going to have the one thing they don't, just so they can have it all. But I think that the tradition of B-movies, like the old Anthony Mann films, was always about the person locked out of the system. That was the original idea of independent cinema, whether it was Warhol or Jonas Mekas: you were seeing the lives of people whom you wouldn't otherwise see. Those are probably the things that first made an impression on me, coming first [from the cinema] of [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder.
Your characters often live economically precarious lives.

Is there something inherently cinematic about precarity?

Well, life is precarious, right? But things are really precarious for people who operate without a net. If you don't have health insurance your life is precarious. If you don't have citizenship right now your life is precarious. American mainstream film tends to make this villain-hero caricature, which gets replayed in political speech – which allows for all the fear mongering that goes on. I like these chances to show more complexity, the duality
of every situation.
Old Joy (2006) was read as a reaction to the lassitude induced by the Bush years. Will this new political era bleed into your work?

Oh my God, is it time to get sentimental about Bush? I don't know how to make anything about the "now times". Maybe it's the end of irony itself because everything's been pushed so far. Things will always find their way into your work. But I don't want to make a film for this exact moment. You hope things could have a relevancy beyond the year they come out. As for how to respond to the "now times", I don't have an answer for that.