Fear and Loathing in Los Angeles: Under the Silver Lake

    Under the Silver Lake is a movie which certainly wastes no time letting you know that this is Andrew Garfield’s horny, paranoid, wild ride. The first moments of Garfield’s character Sam are of him casually and then more formally creeping on women. Sam is a vaguely defined out-of-work creative hopeful living in LA, and the main plot, such as it is, revolves around him trying to find a woman named Sarah that he almost had sex with and then didn’t. But really Under the Silver Lake is about the problem of being a guy who can only understand himself through the things he likes, and Sarah, and the several other women he almost has sex with and then doesn’t that crop up, and even the one that he does, are all just more of those things.

Garfield’s performance is commendable here, as the movie would be nothing without him. He gives so much range and humor to this gross creep that makes him fun to watch, and this gross creep is in so far over his head that it’s still within me to feel a little bad for him. In general, the movie’s comedic sensibility is perfect at breaking the tension and propelling the momentum when things are at their most grotesque. The gag where Sam ends up with a Spider-Man comic stuck to his hand could go into any Andrew Garfield movie but I loved it here.

    Sam’s apartment is covered in movie posters and stacked full of comic books and DVDs. His presumably more consistent relationship introduced at the beginning of the movie with another unnamed woman features her showing up in her bit-part costumes for them to have sex and then Sam ignoring her. Some kids vandalize his nice car and he mercilessly beats the shit out of them. His single creative exertion is emulating a song on guitar to try to crack a code. The saturated, technicolor palette and tense score airlifted out of a Hitchcock movie are simply how Sam sees the world.

    This view leaves him wanting, so he searches for The Hidden Meaning of it All in codes and patterns and coincidences. Tracking Vanna White’s eye movement habits leads to following strangers to parties leads to hunting down a gimmick indie band that’s blowing up leads to Sam falling down a delirious rabbit hole of hazy extravagance. In shaking down every acquaintance, sex worker, and indie artist in LA, Sam discovers the horrible truth. All art is made by one weird old guy that Sam murders, and worse, Sarah joined a suicide cult as a sister bride to a super-rich LA luminary (Sam feels) just to escape him. Also a bunch of urban myth cryptids are real and want to kill him for knowing the real deal.

    The thing is, Sam’s one moment of emotional growth where he says goodbye to Sarah and wishes her well in her new short-term occupation isn’t enough. Near the beginning of the movie, Sam mentions frequently that skunks are all over LA and gets sprayed by one. By the end, he still reeks of it, even though his girlfriend said she’d be back when he smells better. Everyone he runs into comments on the smell, either to him or indirectly. Instead of trying harder to wash it off he finds someone who likes it while his old life slips away. The final shot is Sam looking at his life falling apart through the window with the same kind of distant fantasy-longing he reserved for random women at the beginning of the movie. No clandestine knowledge could stop him from getting evicted, or his friends from leaving, or even help him figure out what his neighbor’s parrot is saying. Where Under the Silver Lake really gets punchy is in its portrayal of the fact that Sam being right doesn’t make him any less of a huge fucking loser. The banal mysteries of how to be a normal person with normal relationships prove to be meaningfully valuable and still completely inscrutable to him. Even though he escaped alive, under the silver lake Sam drowned.