The premiere of Harmony Korine’s Strip Club was an empty spectacle

Oliver Kapp/EDGLRD

Early on in Harmony Korine’s new experimental action film Pay Dr1ft, the murderous protagonist BO (Jordi Mollà) strangles a man to death in his swimming pool. Or maybe it will eventually happen. And come to think of it, that was probably a hot tub. You’ll have to forgive my confusion, as the film is defiantly non-linear, shot entirely in the glowing neon lights of infrared vision, and not grounded in any grounded reality: the moment he takes down this guy, BO unleashes a giant, Balrog-like kaiju. Which seems to breathe flame as it rises above him on the ocean horizon.

I should also mention that I was watching this fever dream in the champagne room of Crazy Girls, a topless bar in the lap (or thigh) of Hollywood, at the end of a historic half-week rainstorm that drenched most of Southern California. Everyone was soaked while standing in line for the first show, and inevitably, the place took on a whiff of wet dogs. It seemed only fitting for the depravity of a drugged-out movie being shown in a strip club. Dancers shook their asses on the main stage and in pole pits filled with cash. I thought about the journalistic ethics of tipping myself.

I think everyone has that friend who drags them into Korine’s latest joint, and then raves nonsense about it. I believe this because I’m that guy, and I can remember the smile on my face when I convinced my friends to see them Spring breakers They walked out of the theater complaining about what they had just been exposed to. No, man: it’s universal. It’s an atmosphere. You have to give up. Can’t they admit that any director who gave James Franco bends and made him suck a gun in a sex scene was unparalleled? Vision?

Therefore, in theory, Pay Dr1ft He will complete Florida’s missing trifecta in sauce (Beach bum Being the underrated middle installment) by taking us deeper into a world of outrageous luxury and unbridled madness. The first release from Korine’s new artistic collection EDGLRD – which spans video games, fashion and artificial intelligence – has certainly succeeded in tearing down the ground rules of cinema to make way for a Miami hellscape of brutal crime lords, fiery palm trees and bikinis. Women in cages. This is supposed to be an underworld by every definition: when BO utters aphorisms like “I was born to kill, that’s all I know,” you might as well take it as an expression of your subconscious desire for violence.

But the question for the viewer is whether these 80 minutes of radiant scenes, disconnected line readings, and ArabMuzik Electronica can draw you into the post-narrative flow. Crazy Girls made sense as a more immersive kind of theatre, the trappings of hedonism and mercenary economics everywhere you looked, yet the audience (dominated by young cinema bros) eventually had to stop talking, sit down, and react to the montage as they did. No traditional blockbuster. Even the dancers backed off, and in the VIP area, only those who needed to steady themselves after another shot of tequila touched the pole.

In other words, we don’t get the sensory overload you’d expect from this stunt, and you’ll probably have to show this thing at the Sphere in Las Vegas to elicit real awe and terror. Here, it was like an extended scene from grand theft auto It was brought to life in the form of a migraine aura, each pulse eliciting an exhausting “ah, here we go again” until you glanced at your phone and saw that hardly any time had passed. Sheer confusion may be an achievement in itself, but my constant (sorry) drifting away from the images hasn’t helped unlock any special insight.

Oddly enough, I was more invested in the connections between the dark psychedelic chorine and the cultural environment in which it was made. While it’s difficult to track down individual actors due to all the masks and thermal imaging (Travis Scott is recognizable thanks to his dreadlocks), I speculated with the guy next to me about whether one scene included a cameo from Snoop Dogg — whose profile, we agreed, is Totally special. Elsewhere, the gun shields worn by gang members were etched with the machine-learning model’s active scribbles, AI-generated patterns that seemed to hallucinate an illusory texture as the camera erased the original. Nothing on the level of HR Giger’s design, for example, but it’s certainly a better use case for this technology than Taylor Swift’s deep porn.

Throughout his career, Koren wanted films to be something else, looser, more brutal, more transgressive. This is how his films became cult artifacts, and why he adopted the moniker “edgelord” for his latest project. But his provocations and outsider status depend on dialogue with standard, classifiable films, which he finds boring. naturally Pay Dr1ft It breaks any available Hollywood mold, and is staunchly anti-commercial even as it remains based on objects of consumer surplus. However, her confrontational style is well suited to an exhibition in which people stop by and decide how much patience to give the work. One almost wonders whether, by resisting the banality of her industry, Korine has evolved into a traditional studio artist.

Once the credits rolled, the Crazy Girls came back to life for an afterparty complete with DJs wearing EDGLRD street clothes and devil masks. The butt shaking also resumed, as if the movie was nothing but a forced intermission in a night of debauchery. Someone handed me a cigarette, and I took two puffs, marveling at our freedom to smoke inside; Then no one would accept it from me, and I was left without an ashtray, finished it myself in a strange way, and quickly left the club in an absent-minded state, before the wine, trying to put into my mind any single detail of the anti-film I was supposed to imagine. for review.

Outside, the rain had ended, the air smelled clean, and that’s when I was struck by the paradoxical suggestions of “I just got soaked.” In one reading, the speaker says that something completely envelops them, or saturates their consciousness. In the other, the speaker conveys the opposite, that is, not being changed or affected by an experience that you forgot while it was happening. I will remember Pay Dr1ft As a statement, and the unusual circumstances in which I saw it delivered, but as for its actual content, I’m still drawing a blank.