A script that has been tumbling around in my head for a couple of months (and has yet to find its way to the page in any form) is calling me to use found footage techniques. It’s funny to me because I am someone that had to stare at the ceiling for most of The Blair Witch Project… not because I was scared but because I was motion sick. I’ve always been embarrassingly sensitive this way. But the call still comes, so I’ve been researching and watching the best found footage movies out there. Thanks to Reddit (it’s always Reddit, isn’t it?) I came to Chronicle (2012, 84 minutes).
For some of you, I’ve already elicited a pretty strong response from just the title alone. For me? I had no idea that watching this under 90-minute movie would lead me to difficult-to-read sexual abuse allegations and questioning, once again, if we can truly separate art from the artist. (While I won’t be getting into explicit or specific content, let this serve as a trigger warning for sexual abuse.) I’ll be honest and say I wanted to skip this post, I’d rather pretend I never saw it at all, but my uncomfortability became reason enough to press on. These are the things I should explore.
Chronicle is a great reminder that I can have total blind spots when it comes to some movies. Released in 2012, Chronicle shocked just about everyone by making $126.6 million against its $15 million budget. And even though I was on a big Dane DeHaan kick at the time (The Place Beyond the Pines came out a month after this and I was deeply obsessed), I hadn’t heard of it. I was dating someone wrapped up in French New Wave at the time (...) and so I can guarantee most superhero flicks weren’t on date night short lists.
Chronicle follows Andrew Detmer (DeHaan), a bullied-at-school, tormented-at-home teenager who decides to start filming every second of his life as a defense mechanism. His cousin Matt (Alex Russell), our stoner-philosopher, reluctantly hangs out with Andrew and ultimately introduces him to Steve (Michael B. Jordan) a kind, popular jock running for class president. Soon after we’re introduced to all three guys, they stumble onto an object found deep inside a crater where they are exposed to something that gives them all telekinetic powers.
Even though the movie clocks in at 84 minutes, it never feels short, and I mean this in the best way possible. The characters are fleshed out simply, but completely, early on. So much so that by the 15-minute mark they have their powers and we’re off to the races on a fun superhero origin story. That is… until we start to see cracks in the friendships and Andrew’s lifelong emotional damage just boiling below the surface of everything he does. Sure, he becomes close with Matt and Steve, but is it enough to undo years of loneliness, grief for his dying mother, and abuse from his father? Chronicle says absolutely not.
Here come the spoilers.
As the boys become more and more powerful, especially Andrew, we become uneasy. As viewers we know what can happen when power is wielded without guidance. For the Chronicle guys there is no Zordon, Professor X or Splinter, they only have each other. Though I do appreciate how Matt serves as our philosopher guide for the entire movie. The use of a stoner for morality framing is excellent. But even so, he’s still just a kid. And without a wise leader who is familiar with what they encountered and how it has affected (or infected) them, they stumble on like high school kids do. Only the stakes are high and continue to get higher. It’s then, and soon after Steve dies, that we all realize… this isn’t a superhero origin story. This is a villain’s origin story.
This “twist” which I am not sure is even the right word, is such a great shift in reality and trust for the audience. We want Andrew to win, we want him to rise up above his challenges and become a hero. But he can not and does not. I’m sure I speak for a lot of people when I say, it’s kind of disappointing that Matt is the last man standing. Sure, it’s a beautiful story arc for a former nihilist to become a superhero. But goddamn, Dane DeHaan is so engaging.
Chronicle was a beautiful flash in the pan. It exceeded expectations, solidified Jordan and DeHaan just before their real big breaks (Fruitvale Station and The Place Beyond the Pines, respectively), and set creators Josh Trank and Max Landis on what should have been a path to success. Which didn’t happen, even though it could have been so easy. Both Trank and Landis are white, male, nepo babies. Trank’s father is an Oscar-winning documentarian and I think we’re all aware of who John Landis is. And if you didn’t know, John has his own sordid past involving the deaths of three people (two of whom were children). Trank, a childhood friend of Max Landis, went to him with the idea for Chronicle. Ultimately Landis would make enough changes to the script to be credited as the writer, while Trank served as director.
Trank was young but with the success of Chronicle became very sought after, and quickly landed work as the director of the Fantastic Four reboot Fant4stic. It famously bombed and currently has a 9% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Exact details of “what went wrong” are hard to come by and piece together but overall it sounds like the studio got too involved in the creative process (lol) and Trank had a temper and didn’t like being told what to do. What I’m going to chalk this up to is that while he was talented, Trank was too inexperienced to handle the pressures of a big budget superhero film, it broke him, and the movie tanked. Studios are always getting in the way but Trank’s eyes were perhaps bigger than his stomach. I do wish he had taken on something smaller (and of his own creation) for his sophomore film. He may be a nepo baby, but there’s talent there.
This brings me to Max Landis.
The allegations against Landis run deep on their own, but add in the plentiful problematic tweets and interviews he has done over the years and you’ll find yourself simply swimming in frightening details. The original article that broke this story wide open is still available to read on The Daily Beast, and I highly suggest you go read it when you have some time to spare. It details out the allegations of 8 separate women, all of whom were emotionally, physically, or sexually abused by Landis over the course of several years. While Landis denies any wrongdoing, all one has to do is take a look at this Jezebel interview to understand he is more than capable of it. At one point it reads: “Landis casually mentions that he cheated on a girl who he ‘also gave a crippling social anxiety, self-loathing, body dysmorphia, eating disorder to.’ Oops!”
Knowing that Landis is most likely a serial predator capable of some truly heinous acts, how should we view his work? And by work I mean mostly Chronicle, because similar to Trank his other work has not been well received (have any of you seen Bright or American Ultra? Neither have I.) But it’s worth looking at because he has three movies in production or development as I write this: Decon, Pepe Le Pew, and a remake of one of my most beloved movies of all time, An American Werewolf in London. (What’s extra creepy here is that one of Landis’ former girlfriends states in the Daily Beast article: “‘He jokingly called me a ‘paint cat’ in reference to the ill-fated feline who tries desperately to escape the clutches of Pepe Le Pew.’” Dude has an obsession. With Pepe Le Pew??)
I will clarify that Landis has never been charged with anything, but in a 2021 Medium post wrote, “I will never repeat the kind of behavior that led to me being publicly shamed. Don’t misread any of this: the shaming is a consequence of my actions and choices.” The post also goes on to say, “I am not canceled. It’s impossible for me to be canceled, because the centerpiece of what I do, storytelling, my life’s passion and the thing that connects me most to myself and other people, will always have a platform in the modern world.” Uhhhhh, k. Certainly this is close to an admission of guilt, but one that he sees as not requiring justice in a legal sense.
So. Back to the movies. It seems that I cannot separate art from the artist. The way I look at it is that my viewership benefits creators (fortunately and unfortunately). Films are not just weighed by craft but also by commerciality and the more eyeballs you get the better chance you have of getting work that will reach even more eyeballs. I desperately want to be able to separate the two. But the fingerprints are there. That all said, movies are not created by just one person, they are the combined efforts and artistic outlooks of many. In this case, I appreciate Trank’s incredible found footage work and I do feel that it should be discussed and celebrated. I appreciate the talent of DeHaan and Jordan, and find their performances in Chronicle to be very, very worthy of your time. Do we need to forget and avoid the work of these artists because the wrongdoing of another has tainted it? I am not so sure.
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There’s a lot to think about here and I would love to hear from each and every one of you. Can you separate art from the artist? Do you attempt to?
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Now I feel you at the very least owe us a follow up review of FANT4STIC. For science.
I still haven’t seen PINES. I remember Ryan Gosling on a motorcycle? Also, is A PLACE BEYOND THE PINES not about Fire Island?