Rubber (2010)

I planned which movies on Tubi I was going to watch a while back, but by the time you read this, this one will no longer be available on the service. That’s always a possibility whenever you’re talking about streaming movies—there’s a non-zero chance that some or most of the movies I’ve written about in this subseries will be removed some day. Oh well! Here it is anyway!

Rubber is one of those movies I read about back in my cult movie website reader days, the kind of high concept film festival debut that got talked about a lot, even if it was only about the trailer (this is a similar context to how I first heard about Incident at Loch Ness.) It’s the exact kind of intentionally ridiculous premise that put daily news recaps and early social media in a tizzy: a killer tire! How droll! The sheer amount of slight guffaws at the basic idea of Rubber easily overwhelmed the contingent asking “How does this sustain a feature-length running time?” If there was one thing I remember from that era of film discussion, it’s that it sometimes felt like something that existed primarily as an elevator pitch was all some genre fans really wanted (see: Snakes on a Plane, Hobo With a Shotgun), and not many actually ended up really talking about the movie itself.

The movie itself was directed by Quentin Dupieux, AKA French electronica musician (are there any other kinds?) Mr. Oizo, which means that you should certainly expect an synth-centric soundtrack (co-composed by Gaspard Auge, half of popular electronic music duo Justice) as well as a movie that has the look of music videos of the late 2000s/early 2010s, with all the heavy colour saturation that implies. Much like the last movie I watched, this is set primarily in the deserts of the southwestern US, but unlike the last movie, it opens with the local sheriff looking directly to the camera (after spending some time driving over several carefully-placed chairs on the road) and going on a short screed about how most films have elements that are there for “no reason”, announcing up front what the ostensible thesis of the movie is going to be. The camera then pans and shows that he was talking to a group of people, but the point is still made—and to some, having this sort of fourth-wall breaking self-justification right up front is maybe a warning sign that we’re getting into too-clever-by-half material. Oh, but it goes much further: the group (which contains a real test audience crowd, including annoying nerds, teenage girls, and a sassy black woman) have been sent into the middle of the desert to watch the events unfold as if it were a movie. This is established well before the killer tire shows up, making sure you know the meta-meta-narrative (we’re watching people watch a movie which is also real life) is what’s really important here.

In these early goings, the tire portions feel like a separate short movie—because, in a way, they are. The tire (which I guess is named Robert in some materials) rises up from a desert landfill and slowly teaches itself how to move around, with treacly music underscoring how innocent it seems. This ends in a few minutes, as the tire encounters a scorpion and demonstrates its sadistic streak by maliciously crushing it. It’s all escalation from there—it sees a hare and uses its apparent psychokinetic abilities (we cut to the audience watching it, having an argument about whether the term is psychokinetic or telekinetic) to make its head explode. When it gets out onto the highway (exploding a raven along the way), it spots an attractive woman in a convertible and follows her (because that’s what monsters do), only to be hit by a truck. The tire gets up, follows the truck to a gas station, and then makes the driver’s head explode. This is the thing it does through the rest of the movie.

The middle portion takes place in a motel, where the woman, the tire, and a nebbishy guy who appeared in the prologue are all present (there is also a kid and his douchebag father, but those characters really don’t matter much except for some very minor gags, and also betray the European origins of the writer/director by having the father use the term “rubbish” not once, but multiple times)—when we cut back to the audience, we see that they have been watching these things go on for a while, slept out in the desert, and were not given adequate food or water supplies. The nebbishy guy, who is apparently being guided by someone he calls “master”, brings the group a turkey dinner (we see him prepare to slaughter the turkey in his motel room), which we later learn was poisoned, killing everyone in the group except a man in a wheelchair played by Wings Hauser, who we all know as the villainous Arklon from Beastmaster 2: Through the Portal of Time. After the tire spends some time watching TV, taking a shower, diving into the pool, and exploding some other people’s heads, the sheriff appears again with his squad to investigate, but the sheriff himself is not actually engaged with it because he assumes that everyone in the audience being dead means that the movie is over. He proves this by getting one of the other officers to shoot him multiple times, to no effect. He then learns that there’s still one person in the audience still watching, meaning that the movie is still going, although he remains unaffected by multiple bullet wounds? How the multiple layers of reality actually interact or function is not clear or consistent, but I guess they already told us not to care about that.

The gags that come closest to working are the ones that play off the unreality or take it to cartoony extremes: for example, when the sheriff, after witnessing a head explosion, pulls a note out of his pocket and woodenly reads “Oh God, the kid was right. The killer is a tire”; or, later in the movie, when the sheriff and the woman from earlier attempt to destroy the tire with a mannequin rigged with explosives, something straight out of Loony Tunes. The stuff with the audience is never all that interesting or funny, and is only marginally improved when Wings Hauser gets more involved with the main action by going down to the sheriff’s van during the explosive mannequin scene and complains that it’s taking too long, which is factually correct (he then criticizes the sheriff killing the tire with a shotgun for being an anti-climatic.) I mean, some of the shots of the tire doing cute things like sitting in a chair watching NASCAR are amusing enough images, but that’s about it, and as you could guess you can’t actually make a whole movie of just those alternated with repeated scenes of one-note gore effects. You’d think the “no reason” philosophy would allow Rubber to go completely off-the-wall, but those sorts of leaps are rarely taken. If the postmodern stuff had been pushed to more ridiculous heights, I think there would be more to latch onto, but I think the movie thinks its intentionally silly premise is funny enough that it doesn’t need to try harder.

In the end, the tire is reincarnated as a tricycle (which Hauser states so bluntly, it becomes another one of Rubber‘s almost funny jokes) and rolls down the highway, bringing numerous other abandoned tires to life and eventually revealing that they’ve travelled to…get ready for it…Hollywood! This is all essentially a standalone music video played before the credits, and if it were simply that, it would probably be considered an entertaining trifle some people would have shared on Youtube back in 2010. Like I said before, the basic visual premise is really the major point of appeal for something like this.

Going back to that prologue, and Dupieux’s actual take on the film as “an homage to the ‘no reason’…that most powerful element of style”, I think the emphasis really is on the “style.” Style is really all Rubber has going for—and it’s a style that’s 2010 as hell, at that—but doesn’t really offer much of anything else. No, I don’t need an explanation (in-story, or maybe even metatextual) for the things that go on, but it sure is nice if I’m given a reason why I should be paying attention at all, some sort of idea or implication to think about. It spends so much time on the quasi-movie-within-a-movie part of the story, which doesn’t end up saying much of anything other than maybe that some moviegoers are sure annoying, and the “weird” ideas or images in it aren’t even particularly weird or shocking. It feels more like a dare than anything, to make a monster out of the dumbest thing possible, but also one that feels the need to preemptively justify itself in a way that also nullifies any interesting thing it could be doing. It’s smart enough to know that most movies are full of arbitrary moments and decisions, but not smart enough to do much with that realization. But, hey, at least it’s not that long.