Youth Without Youth: The Multifarious Psyche of Gus Van Sant and 'Paranoid Park'

by Sean Matthieu Weiner

Stutters suppress self-expression as time coasts like a thick chocolate shake in Gus Van Sant’s skater psycho-flick Paranoid Park (2007). Having unintentionally committed murder, Alex (newcomer Gabe Nevins) wanders his hometown of Portland in purgatorial guilt. With a nonlinear narrative winding onto itself and Alex’s apprehension inevitable, foreboding lingers constant. A shaken bottle of angst and phobia, our skateboard Raskolnikov sits quiet and blank as his insides screw and burst. His vacant gaze becomes the canvas of Van Sant’s latest work.

Recycling quietness from 2003’s Columbine allusion Elephant, Van Sant sets his sites on psychosis, again focusing into the teenage mind (a mélange of dirty angels and blasé devils).

The story, based on Blake Nelson’s youth novella, returns the director to Portland, a setting that has become a home to him and his work (Mala Noche, Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho). Van Sant’s homecoming evokes the experimental craftiness that established him as an indie pin-up, a trait that for a long time eluded him.

Park’s cast of lanky pubescents meander through high school, skate parks, and empty nests voicing their roles but never their thoughts. Challenged with these familiar kinds of mutes, Van Sant joins forces with cinematographers Christopher Doyle, Rain Kathy Li and invaluable sound designer Leslie Schatz. Doyle and Li blend the misty saturation of 35 mm with the bumps and grains of Super 8 and video, compiling an array of aesthetics that are magically grounded by Schatz’s ear. The goal of this multimedia cocktail: to ensnare Alex’s scattered conscience.

Skate videos have been legitimized, having influenced the do-it-yourself genre that began somewhere around Jonas Mekas and devolved towards the Jackass movies. Doyle and Li tap into this subcult genre, using the soul mates (board and camera) to employ their archetypal tracking shot with characters on and off decks. Lengthy tracking shots with manipulated motion increase the paranoia of our pasty protagonist while negating the spectator’s expectation of any real destination.

Aurally, Park is Hitchcock when anxious and Sirk when histrionic. Schatz’s sundry score mutates Beethoven with break beats and twists Gershwin to atonal screams. And all the while the audio selections never last long enough to determine whether diegetic, nondiegetic, or simply mental.

The words of teens cannot do justice to their emotions so they are systematically subtracted. While Alex calls it quits with budding flame Jennifer (Gossip Girl’s Taylor Momsen) La Gradisca e Il Principe of Fellini’s Amarcord swells and we watch her bubbly air deflate to scorn. Nino Rota’s venerated score expresses rejection more successfully than Jennifer’s unbridled tirade of “likes” and “whatevers.”

The resulting is a bold creation comprised of elements from teenager outlets (skating, ipod playlists, experiential checklists). Made of the things that mattered in youth; being a part of something and pointedly apart from others. While the specs change depending on the environment, the adolescent quest remains for the same thing, identity. Borrowing images and sounds from the skater collective, Park’s makers dignify their subjects with an accurate and perceptive miscellany of their own ethnic mediums and movements.

This recycling of the real is also illustrated in the ensemble. Cast from an open call on Myspace, Gabe Nevins (Alex) and fellow cast members’ performances are so jerky they might as well be read off cards. Italian neorealism’s casting of nonactors determined whether unrecognizable faces could capture a greater realism. Would the removal of celebrity and utilization of inexperience achieve something new? The floppy-haired cast of Park looks the part, since they are the part. But, it is Van Sant’s use of their inexperience, their delivery of lines, for example, that enhances the narrative by infusing it with awkwardness.

Neither, Van Sant (55 year-old, gay Kentuckian), Doyle (Aussie Arthouse Imager), Li (24 year-old Chinese phenom), or Schatz (sound vet) are these ‘skate… drunks.’ The triumph of Park is in the reemployment of parts of this authenticated subculture. The look, the sound, the actual members are all soldered to the story (written by a native Portlander). Not neorealism but akin, by drawing on veritable facets of skate culture a net is cast loosely over the teen psyche.

Is the adolescent identity resolved? No more than the plot is. Adolescence is identity in motion, and so the spectator can only hope to catch a glimpse of the familiar disorder. Adult characters in Park are placed in blurry backgrounds as if blocked by Charles Schulz. When brought into focus, parents are revealed ironically with indecisions and fashionable jeans. And when we finally see Alex’s father his sleeves of tats distract us from his bumbling about his divorce. Forcing the question, “Do we ever get it?”

Paranoid Park encapsulates a community of irresolute disciples. It just so happens that they are skaters. It also just so happens they are teenagers. They could have just as easily been any of us.