Under the Silver Lake

UNDER THE SILVER LAKE   ***

David Robert Mitchell

2018

IDEA:  After his new, alluring neighbor inexplicably disappears, an L.A. slacker follows a series of cryptic bread crumbs to find her.

BLURB:  Saturated with circuitous chains of allusions and inter-textual quotes, the Los Angeles of Under the Silver Lake suggests the city as pastiche, as an oneiric urban space constructed from the phantoms of its cultural products. It’s a 21^st-century (un)reality as imagined by Andrew Garfield’s Sam, a sort of exemplary, semi-toxic millennial layabout whose media obsessions are all that’s holding together the tatters of his existence. Rootless, disaffected, and economically and sexually vexed, he latches onto arcane codes and patterns in a desperate bid to anchor his life and the fathomless culture around it to some semblance of meaning. David Robert Mitchell alternately confounds and affirms him: he shows Sam’s convoluted, paranoiac fixations on cryptology and conspiracy to be as crazed and ultimately otiose as they are, humorously drowning him in dead ends and absurd reveals, but he also shows that his paranoia is basically justified. Like John Carpenter’s They Live, one of Mitchell’s bountiful references, the joke of Under the Silver Lake is that the ideological mechanisms that underlie society don’t really need to be uncovered; however elaborately they may manifest themselves, they exist more or less out in the open, and we’re powerless to do anything with our knowledge other than bask in a vague sense of enlightenment. A monument to semiotic overload, Under the Silver Lake reflects a uniquely contemporary, contradictory condition of a hyper-mediated world: the feeling of being simultaneously bewildered and all-too aware.