Reinventing References: Jesus Shows You The Way To The Highway
A computer screen flashes wildly. Despite that the year is apparently 2043, it makes modem dial-up noises before displaying the title of the movie we’re about to see as an arcade-style title screen. A technician sits in front of two vintage Apple Macintosh SE computers and a number of ancient looking mainframes and switchboards. She prepares for a game of computer chess with an 80’s Nintendo layout that allows players to play as Stalin, Ronald Reagan or Pope John Paul II. She’s a monitor for CIA agents who lay on lawn chairs and go on national security missions in a virtual reality simulation called Psychobook.
She pulls a bulky VR headset off an agent’s head to find that the agent’s eyes have been gouged out. The military superior who attributes the catastrophe to a Russian virus and orders her to keep a lid on the crisis is addressed as “Commandant.” What actual country is this? Why the antiquated tech in 2043? Two other CIA agents are summoned on a push button landline to an assignment interfacing with the Russian Virus inside Psychobook. One of the agents, Gagano, played by an actor who appears to suffer in real life from a congenital disorder that has stunted his growth, sits in a paneled war room out of a spy movie from the 70’s and reads a book of pizza recipes. Everyone’s voices are dubbed hilariously badly.
Inside Psychobook, the avatar bodies for the agents wear paper masks with the faces of Richard Pryor and Robert Redford whose mouths move up and down when they speak. Their herky-jerky movements look like the product of stop-motion animation using human bodies. They’re given instructions by a tiny holograph of an elderly British man in a tuxedo. Posing as pest exterminators, they’re ambushed by another avatar wearing a mask of someone I can’t identify and then he’s zapped by a laser from a satellite in space. We see the human avatar of the Irish-accented Russian Virus - wearing a Stalin mask and decked out in the requisite long button coat and fur hat - who then wreaks havoc on the outside world, changing all the rotating holographic ads hovering over skyscrapers in the real world to Russian stuff.
Gagano goes home to a blond teutonic wife who must be twice his size and after throwing his back out trying to have shower sex with her, tells her he’s retiring. They plan to start a combination pizza restaurant and kickboxing studio. He glances at the TV, which is showing a porno that turns out to be a serialized program starring a barefooted, out of shape Batman, snorting cocaine and wearing the absolute worst knock off of Adam West’s costume, its chest logo obscured by the largest and most clumsily rendered pixels you’ve ever seen. Turns out it’s the same costume worn at all times by the president of a territory called Beta-Ethiopia and he appears as a villain later in the film. He’s first glimpsed in a hokey, propagandistic TV ad where he beats up drug pushers hanging out in front of a waterfall with Shaolin Kung Fu. The fights have all the same cheesy punch-landing noises from every chop-socky kung fu movie in the 70’s. “ROUND ONE,” is announced by an omniscient voice before the start of every martial arts fight scene in the movie, as if the whole thing were a game of Street Fighter.
I’m trying to describe the just first ten minutes of Miguel Llansó’s extraordinary Jesus Shows You The Way To The Highway, an off-the-rails spoof with its arcane references so cleverly integrated into its overall strategy, they reach a kind of grace. Truthfully, I can’t be sure the account I just gave is complete or even entirely accurate. The stylistic innovations, pop-culture references and political jabs at the clownish leaders come at us so fast, they form a delirium of anti-authority, grindhouse agitprop.
The machinations of 60’s and 70’s spy thrillers and adventure serials, with their heady dose of Cold War paranoia form the basis for the story. A lot of attention is given to retro telephones, paneled conference rooms and dilapidated beachside structures with peeling mustard yellow and pea green paint jobs. The color scheme, jumpsuits and the whimsical arrangements of anachronistic props and professions have a Wes Anderson flavor to them. There is a dry, deadpan delivery to the distinctively European humor that recalls much of director Aki Kaurismaki’s output. The glorious camera tricks of Kung Fu movies like extreme zooms and pans are reimagined with President Batman’s Beta-Ethiopian combattants, who look a bit like The Storms in Big Trouble In Little China. The brief moments of hyperbolic violence or cheap nudity recall the 70’s grindhouse productions gushed over by Fangoria and Tarantino-addled camp fans. An agent is named Palmer Eldritch, after the hero of the Phillip K. Dick novel, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, itself a psychonautic, reality-bending trip. In fact, a few plot elements and twists display more than a hint of Total Recall, taken from Dick’s classic story, We Can Remember It For You Wholesale. Have I mentioned the 50’s B-movie human-fly enforcer creatures that travel through portals and have laser shooting annenae? Or the obsession with 80’s video game music? Oh and wait till you see surfer Jesus show up to save the day; dark-haired, shirtless and leather-panted like Chris Angel. And there’s still much more. I haven’t actually spoiled a thing.
Why? For the reason that decoding all of these things as a laundry list of one-to-one metaphors is not the point because it doesn’t add up to a “Eureka!” moment about what Jesus Shows.... is saying. This is the movie’s masterstroke. It mocks leaders and power and state propaganda, yes, but why set all the mockery within this kind of abstraction?
Maybe it all comes alive because we’re seeing these references and throwback effects in this goofy world put to the use of sharp satire. They’re largely disposable and inconsequential but their sum once they’re housed under one roof mocks the immature nature of the societies that so desperately cling to them. These junk food entertainments of western pop-culture, repurposed in this way, highlight the insipid and banal nature of the reality to which our authoritarian states and owning classes are trying to bend us. The movie samples a host of undemanding entertainments (kung-fu movies, superhero fiction, adventure serials, video games, cartoons, pornography, cheesy 50’s creature features) and uses the easy pleasures they provide as a loftier target for its social satire.
Maybe it's seeing the multiplying effect of all these cultural items appropriated for the political purposes of outsiders and nonconformists (from their vantage point) that gives us an intuition of how our views on the issues facing the world at large have been informed by the same old regurgitated trash. Anything that comes from the mouths of authority figures has to be hackwork a priori, right? The film (I think) is about the incompetence and childishness of big political power and their war games. But it draws upon decades of pop-culture media crap for its own satirical weaponry, either because that’s what’s best suited to the task or because perhaps no other more naturally occurring folk mythology in western society has survived to do this.
It hurts to think that every myth humanity tells about itself to itself has become the stuff of Tinseltown blockbuster hokum and that that hokum has stolen our shared consciousness. Our cultural memory now consists of flashy products, media fantasies and the rhetoric of their corporate expounders. Many younger people think of themselves as “Brands,” referring to digital outlets for self expression as “content,” relating cultural transactions as if they were TV promoters. In our media-saturated culture, people seem unable to relate to real world events if they can’t be viewed as some sort of entertainment. What do we say when some publicly known figure or business entity stops doing what we believe it was intended to do? We say it’s “lost the plot.”
Maybe the movie is saying our heads are so full of Capitalist programming and pop-culture detritus, we can’t recognize our oppressors anymore. Or maybe it’s saying that the idea of all these mysteriously reconstituted images and pathologies piled on top of each other mirrors the way the media speak to us, lumping together and reducing serious, complicated issues to oversimplified and cliched sound bites. Until they begin to take on a sort of mute presence that is now beyond meaning. If major political issues and wars between nations are to be covered by the media and sold to the public as if they were sporting events or Hollywood action movies, exploiting our lowest impulses as they do, shouldn’t using the raw materials of those things be the best way of mocking the paltry way they’re used to relate complicated problems in the adult world?
the TV-trapped Gagano and the gender-switching American double agent
The point I’m making came to me in a single moment in Jesus Shows You The Way To The Highway, when Gagano, trapped inside a portable TV facing another TV - a oddly sad development in such a ludic film - peers out from in front of the screen’s stationless snow pattern to watch this PSA from 1973:
It may be in this way that Jesus Shows.... reveals its true genius. We think we’re seeing something where a litany of cheesy movie tropes and cultural in-jokes are necessary for understanding what the movie is saying about power. But, as it eludes conventional storytelling, it seems it’s doing the opposite. Its mockery of power is what makes the emptiness of all those cultural items (and their hold over our consciousness) look so empty. It’s a prism through which we see the background containing all of those facile cultural products and their damage more sharply. The amount of real-estate all those material comforts and low entertainments take up in our heads being that damage.
This might be the ultimate diagnosis of the ideological despair of late-Capitalism: the inability of people to recognize their own history, their own reality. When placed in a world like the absurd future in this movie, a world in which they have nothing to convey and no historical world to signal, they point to a society deeply lacking in the ability to be honest with itself. The truth always is much less sexy than a movie plot: Citizens become trapped in a chaotic, nonlinear time frame of perpetualized precarity, in which fantasy and life are inseparable, with pop-culture esoterica as a spiritual escape hatch. Maybe culture isn’t the radical force for social change we think it is. Maybe culture is just a smokescreen that disguises the absences of shared agency against oppression or any actual concrete strategies for changing the world. Maybe it’s why the eventual blow to the prides of such smug societies, in the form of a loss of their substance of meaning, is felt so much worse in so-called “developed” nations.
And then it occurs to the audience that the vibrant, pop-infused realities in which culturally-savvy characters in other movies live serve little purpose beyond the minor sensation of recognition that allows those audience members to feel culturally hip, as if they were show business insiders sitting at the cool kids lunch table. When characters face off like one-on-one arcade games in an item like Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, its only justification seems to be novelty. In that movie, those kinds of embellishments ring shallow, like a superficial means of characterization. Or a facile way for shopworn material to convey relevance or urgency. They’re essentially bubblegum. Not only are many of the catch-the-reference games most movies play shallow, they sometimes become totally impractical in the universes of the movies they’re used in.
For me, the most egregious example can probably be found in The Matrix. There’s a moment when the ship's operator, Tank, is uploading Jiu-Jitsu programs into Keanu Reeves' head. He comes out of his first seconds-long lesson and eagerly asks for more. Tank says to himself, “Hey Mikey, I think he likes it!”; a reference to a TV commercial for Life Cereal from the late 80’s. Except that we’ve already learned that this character, unlike Reeves, wasn’t brought up in The Matrix (where he would have seen the commercial) before being unplugged from it. There are no plugs on his body. He was born naturally after the apocalypse inside the last human city called Zion, near the Earth’s core where it's still warm (remember all this?). So there’s no way that character would know that cereal commercial. Unless Morphius’ ship has some kind of pop-culture training program though it’s hard to imagine what use that would be to the rebels in their war against the malevolent cyberintelligence that created The Matrix. So in the context of the rules the material is establishing, this kind of flourish is completely impractical and unnecessary. It’s simply just there to relieve and flatter the audience, as a lazy strategy of characterization run amok.
”Hey Mikey, I think his cultural IQ is out of step with our high-concept narrative!”
With a passing resemblance to the central concept in The Matrix (though far more poignant), Llansó’s second feature builds on the ideas and themes explored in his brilliant feature debut, Crumbs (2015), and it’s in watching that film together with this one that a truly profound critique of Capitalist psychology becomes noticeable as a threadline.
Crumbs takes place in a ruined world, following an apocalyptic series of events that left very few inhabitants. Generations have passed. Tadesse plays a would-be hero who lives in what used to be a bowling alley and prays to a shrine adorned with unopened bottles of Coca Cola and a picture of Michael Jordan. He wanders around desolate landscapes picking up trinkets for his girlfriend to incorporate into her artwork. He seeks an old projectionist dressed like Santa Claus hiding in a run down amusement park in the middle of nowhere. In this Afro-Futurist reality, people trek to visit a kind of historian Pawnbroker and sell him these trinkets that are the material consumer goods of the pre-apocalyptic era - a Ninja Turtle figurine, a plastic Transformers sword, a Michael Jackson record. We see these objects floating in outer space like the Star Child at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, as gifts to an alien spaceship hovering over the Earth. A kind of intergalactic junk dealer. Each item is ascribed with a bogus mythos contextualized by the conditions of the current world, or what’s left of it. The Pawnbroker is a kind of shaman con artist who’s clearly ripping people off. But the role he’s imitating seems inspired by Joseph Campbell’s ideas about the cosmological role mythology plays in understanding our origins. He’s reconstructing a kind of alternative history on the basis of fragmentary myths, the same kind which the Daniel Tadesse characters in Crumbs and Jesus Shows....structure their identities.
This use of the forgotten materials of the past as character’s way of delineating their reality is a recurring technique Llansó employs throughout his work as a mise en abyme, interrogating the process of storytelling and mythmaking by building his art with found objects, repurposed artifacts and reappropriated influences. Mass produced mall products in Crumbs and lowbrow entertainments in Jesus Shows.... They speak of a history from which Llansó’s characters are disengaged, segregated, out of step. The way in which those inconsequential pop-culture products are continuously having their provenance reinvented is what gives that history its weight. The German philosopher Walter Benjamin said that we experience history - as historical beings - not engaged in cultural things as they move, but upon seeing the waste of culture, as it’s retaken by nature. The inertia of these items, their planned obsolescence helps us intuit what the long view of history actually means. This must be what gives post-apocalyptic fiction its power.
With these items broken from their endless cycle of functioning, an artist like Llansó can repurpose them to allow something new to emerge. In showing the process by which these rather inconsequential pop items are repurposed throughout history and bent to fit the politics of the day, we see their use as tools for fashioning the larger Story of Our Existence. Ironically, they become incorporated into the oral tradition handed down from generation to generation for getting a bearing on the times. The tragedy it seems, is that cheap, corporate-made mall products reeking of Southern California plastic have replaced more organic, homespun folklore as conduits for telling this story. Llansó’s great jab at humanity is that these are the things people seem able and willing to remember best.
I recently attended a production of “Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play,” at the Theater Wit here in Chicago. The play takes place in the near future after a series of catastrophic events resulted in a total loss of electric power all over the world. What exactly happened is vaguely hinted at by a group of survivors huddled around a fire as in the first act, we watch them recalling a classic episode of The Simpsons. They remember the gags and plot strands of the show better than the details of the collapse of the real world. Set further and then much further in the future, the two subsequent acts feature a troupe of performers who are one of many now staging old Simpsons episodes with whatever props and materials they have on hand in exchange for power and supplies. Since there’s no electricity, the desperate performers have to reconstruct the shows from memory, so the potency of cultural recollection becomes a currency necessary for this particular survival. The last act sees a baroque Simpsons production of the same episode, incorporating tropes from other mythologies and pop legends, presenting something so far away from its original incarnation and meaning as to be of no preservational value. Instead, it’s an object of exchange and worship, finding an enduring, iconographic power in its repurposing and recontextualizing of a supposedly disposable piece of 20th century Western pop culture.
From a Chicago production of the Anne Washburn play, Mr. Burns, which could be called an artistic cousin to Miguel Llansó’s work
It’s a piece brimming with tantalizing socio-political underpinnings and it bears a striking resemblance to Llansó’s work in this sense. That’s why it doesn’t surprise me that Llansó’s background as a philosophy student likely helped him distill all these elements without losing focus. With a Masters degree in African studies, he got a job at the Spanish Embassy of Ethiopia in 2008 during which time he’d met Tadesse and went on to cast him in his short subjects, Where Is My Dog? (2010), Chigger Ale (2012) and then Crumbs. Their latest collaboration, Jesus Shows You The Way To The Highway adds Llansó’s current resident nation of Estonia to the Spanish-Ethiopian co-production and one gets a good sense that the mixture of cultures and ethnic makeups informs Llansó’s borderless approach to casting, genres, cultural and cinematic influences and sense of humor. He changes styles - jaunting from grainy 16mm to digital and back again at random - as suddenly as he changes a character's milieu. Amazingly, the territorial rootlessness of his stew somehow never makes the film feel untethered. It instead achieves the daunting trick of using old materials to create something that feels fresh, a feat which few filmmakers are able to pull off without showing off or pandering.
As Agent Gagano, Daniel Tadesse and Llansó are a perfect team. I can’t picture a Llansó creation in which Tadesse’s serious, contemplative stare and determined physicality wouldn't be perfectly suited. Sure enough, I learned Tadesse, who produced Llansó’s films with his wife, is a veteran stage actor from Addis Abbaba who appeared in at least twelve feature films shot in Ethiopia. Llansó’s off-kilter worlds seem tailor-made for him. It’s clear the scripts were written with Tadesse in mind and one senses a very deep collaborative energy in the results. There’s a quiet fortitude in the way Tadesse negotiates space, as if suggesting an withdrawn inner world carried along by his intense expression. He gazes out on an external world that has exiled and alienated him and expresses - more often without words in Llansó’s films - a kind of doleful resignation. He’s a fascinating camera subject and the fact that we don’t see more individuals like him starring in movies should give film studios all over the world a lot to answer for.
Daniel Tadesse in director Llansó’s Crumbs (2015)
A question that could be asked by Finnegan’s Wake is “What was language?” Joyce’s much-dissected text could be said to treat language as if it were something in the past, something apart from the stream of consciousness in the writing itself. In a similar fashion, Jesus Shows You The Way To The Highway may be asking, “What WAS pop culture?” The movie is an anti-establishment funhouse ride through the last fifty years of escapist entertainment; a spy thriller one minute, a Shaw Brothers production the next, a 90’s tokusatsu TV show after that. It’s all seen through an Afro-Futurist framework that adds yet another layer to a project that never feels like a disconnected stream of references but rather a projected mockery of any number of Manichean views of the world shared by a consuming population. A coked-up fantasy overturning the stuffed trash can of media nonsense from the collective imaginarium overseen by those Capitalistic societies entrenched in the process of running themselves down by entropy. The discovery of this off-the-rails, genius factory is like the opening of a treasure chest: full of signals and signposts for navigating a world in which, tragically, myth and reality are acting at drastic and embarrassing cross purposes.
Writer/Director Miguel Llansó as Jesus.
Jesus Shows You The Way To The Highway is currently available for streaming on Amazon Prime Video and for purchase on the distributor’s website (arrowfilms.com) on blu-ray. The package includes a copy of Crumbs and other short films by the director. A region-free blu-ray player is required.
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