Qt3 Movie Podcast: Dragged Across Concrete

Movies
1

Aptly named.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2019/04/23/qt3-movie-podcast-dragged-across-concrete/
2

I just listen to this from 6:57 to 7:38 on repeat.

3

Dammit, now I’m going to wind up watching this tonight so I can listen to the podcast in the morning.

4

12:50 to 14:58 is pretty epic as well.

5

Tommy Wirkola did not direct The Littlest Reich - Tom’s just racist against Scandinavians.

6

Yikes, I’ve been conflating him with this guy:

My apologies to Norway. At least now I feel a little bit better about What Happened to Monday.

-Tom

7

Sooo I have some problems with this movie. The first third really soured me on the characters and the message, and it lends itself to a reading that puts Zahler, as much as I love Bone Tomahawk, in a weird light. I was surprised, actually, that Dingus didn’t pick up on that:
In the first third, which is mostly characterization, we got our hero(es), mainly Gibson, saying that:

men today aren’t men ( “is this a guy or a girl singing this song” “Can’t tell.” “Not that there’s much of a difference these days” and the rest of that scene)

Our heroes and their boss-man are good ol’-fashioned men, who find cell phones annoying (them kids looking at their screens all day! Hrumph!), and “politics” just as much. Their lieutenant literally equates “being branded as racist” to “being accused of communism in the 50s”. Again, a persecution complex and playing the victim way too common for rightwingers/alt-right theses days.
Of course you get persecuted for making “possibly offensive remarks”(!) and “indelicate treatment of a minority who sells drugs to children”. Okay, so because the crime is shitty, police brutality should be okay. Cool. It’s suspicious that this fairly mild case of police brutality (a foot on a head) leads to 6 weeks suspension without pay, it feels constructed to reinforce the following statement of calling the news “the entertainment industry”. Zahler even goes so far as to give Vaughn the line “there’s certainly nothing hypocritical about the media handling every perceived intolerance with complete and utter intolerance”. That’s not even a dogwhistle, that’s a bullhorn repeating the rhetoric of the “intolerant left/sjw/pc culture” hypocrisy bs

black teens harassing the white girl (okay, granted, it’s a neighborhood/demographics issue, these things happen), buuut
* Gibson is forced to live there because he doesn’t earn enough - unjustly of course, because his methods have put away enough criminals to “fill [big parts of] the state prison”
* the reinforcement of his wife being “I didn’t think I was racist before we moved here”, which reads like a dogwhistle to me, it’s a common rightwinger rhetoric about the “black threat” or whatever that people who deny the claim that black people are inherently more criminal and hurt white people without repercussions are too sheltered to have experienced the truth.

Carpenter’s character is a mother who wants to stay at home, fulfilling the classic model of stay-at-home mom and a working dad. But the roles are reversed, and she basically gets killed for not staying at home with her child.
in the context of the rest of the movie, this strongly reads like “destroying traditional values” in terms of gender roles are dangerous, in this case lethal. She struggles with leaving her child, almost as if it is some “natural” drive to stay with it, and the natural order is disturbed. Consequence is death.

And essentially these guys die because they are suspended without pay, which is caused by “pc culture” and “politics” more than it is because they crossed a line. There’s too much in there for me to not read it like that.

And it’s a goddamn shame, because the rest of the movie is excellent, way better written (the above examples stood out as really clunky and on-the-nose), tense and brutal in a way that reinforces that.

I should maybe mention that I have not read anything about this movie before watching it, and just listened to the 'cast.

8

You make some great points, but the Dirty Harry movies and Death Wish are even more abrasive examples of what you’re describing, and I love those for the same reasons I enjoy reading Master & Commander novels where “we’re” the dicks.

And there’s enough murk here in the fallout from many of the characters’ decisions to make the opposite case. Mel’s racial bitterness makes him blow a more beneficial outcome with a guy of (relative) integrity. Hathaway’s a little nuts, and the bleakness of her fate is just as pointless as it is tragic; sometimes you do the right thing and still die. The brave and good get mown down in the first wave, so we wind up with a population top-heavy with the crafty and craven. We’re not given enough information about the green duffel bag to know one way or the other whether it was easily worth risking a neck stomp (although he could easily have done so indoors beyond prying eyes). The shooter gang sounds pretty white.

If dialog’s good, I just assume the writer’s smart. What, we burning our Hemingways and Ian Flemings now? C’mon. Savor the vintage. Stop eatin’ the cork.

9

I’d put Death Wish in a different (enjoyable) genre though. Dirty Harry is a good analogy, but that’s from a different era. To trot out a clichéd observation: movies are always influenced by the time they’re made in, and in this case it seems so odd. And I agree with you, it’s not as black and white (get it) as my post may have made it sound, especially since Henry is definitely the better man, and I might go so far as it is a valid reading to call him the actual “hero” of the story, if not necessarily the protagonist (how would you define that in this movie even, by screentime?)

And I think that otherwise the writing is great, as is the dialogue, even the comedic bits (“cigarette commercial”), which is why the scene in the lieutenant’s office and the lines I cited felt so stilted and out of place to me. I don’t mind antiheroes, moral ambiguity, even nihilism, but those instances feel almost too engineered.
If I were to engage it in best possible faith, I’d say that Zahler practically googled that rhetoric and threw that in there to have some current day bigotry that is not quite as blunt as slinging racial slurs (and I agree that the n-word scene near the end was really, really, clever), or deliberately to provoke readings such as mine.
I definitely wouldn’t call the movie or Zahler racist , and I disagree with the readings of Bone Tomahawk in this respect, for example, because it’s too myopic for my tastes.

Maybe this movie just isn’t my kind of murk, or I find myself unable to read it in the context of current movements and their tendrils in people’s lives. Either way I’m curious to see what’s next from Zahler.

PS did I misread the scene on the fire escape? I thought the crunching sound was just the guy’s nose breaking against the grate, not his neck? Yikes!

10

Shout out for the delightful bird song backing track on this podcast. I can really picture one of you sipping on a mimosa while recording.

11

I really liked this movie. Minus one or two scenes.

I’m with Dingus on predicting what would happen to a character who doesn’t want to go to work.

@Brooski, those are perfect time stamps. Kellywand does it again.