I Watch Knight of Cups

Dorothy Parker said, "Los Angeles is seventy-two suburbs in search of a city." Dorothy Parker does not appear in this movie, but there is plenty of driving, as befitting the suburbs. There are sprawling Gatsby-esque parties in sprawling Gatsby-esque mansions. There is a visual march instead of a story. It has a manifesto feel to it: Life has no plot, it says, it has emotion. The world is whatever you are feeling at the moment. You are a passenger looking at something beautiful, but you don't want to get out of the car.

This is a drive-by movie.

This is a movie about the banality of the banality of beauty.

Rick (Christian Bale) is a screenwriter drifting through this limbo world. One movie poster portrays him floating upside down over Los Angeles palm trees, as if the Hanged Man from the Tarot pack has been melded with a latter-day Hollywood version of William Blake, a character seeking the palace of wisdom through the path of excess. In any event, this is a Song of Experience, about those who are lost in folly's endless maze.

The title Knight of Cups might refer to the Tarot card. The card shows us a knight on a horse holding a cup. If you think about it, like you might be expected to, everything feels fraught with symbolic weight. I could tell you the movie feels like it was conceived during a midnight Tarot reading, written the next morning, shot the following day. I could tell you what the Knight of Cups card represents. I could tell you it invokes two opposing forces, depending on whether the card is drawn in the upright or reversed positions. I could tell you one reading leads to good shit and one leads to bad shit. I could tell you lots of things.

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Ben Kingsley, although he does not appear in Knight of Cups, provides some of the film's voice-over narration. Following this strange convention, I wouldn't mind standing in for Kingsley and trying out my own alternative voice-over or commentary track for the DVD. Here goes:

This is what it feels like when you want out of your life, but it's the only life you've got and you don't want to put in the real work required to build a different one. Is there a way to get out while still staying in? Plan A, live your life saying as little as possible, keep a bemused expression on your face. Don't talk but look like you're about to say something, don't think but look like you're thinking, don't feel but act like you feel everything. Do what you always do as long as it's on cruise control. You've already written the script yesterday, last week, last year. Just walk through it today. Perhaps Plans B and C linger somewhere on the periphery. Perhaps you just have to walk towards them.

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Is this movie's main character an alternative version of the filmmaker, a speculative self who gave in to Hollywood's sirens? Some friend in distress? Or the viewer's video-game avatar in a watered-down and sanitized vision of cinematic Babylon, with its off-the-shelf, suspiciously clean depravity and celebrity cameo aesthetic?

Whatever the case may be, you have to look like Christian Bale. Because your real job here, dear viewer, is not to identify, but to gawk. You could try to project yourself into a body on the screen, but that body is far prettier than your body.

If your body was prettier would your suffering be prettier too?

When your director is an experimental sentimentalist, when the camera walks an unfamiliar walk through all-too-familiar tropes, you don't talk much, the camera shoots you from every conceivable angle and all you have to do is become a beautiful character who solves his existential crisis by having fun, meaningless sex with a lot of beautiful women until he finds the right beautiful woman to...