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While commentators debate the fidelity of Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s 3,000-year-old epic The Odyssey, Alex Cox — the director of Repo Man and Sid and Nancy — braves a wily adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, from 1842.
It is Cox’s latest act of punk-rock effrontery, reworking Russian literary satire into his favorite genre — a farcical pop-cinema spaghetti Western. Cox himself portrays Strindler, a mysterious solitary Brit who treks through 1890s southwest Arizona territory, collecting the names of deceased Mexican-immigrant workers to cash in on their bosses’ tax liabilities.
Cox’s stunt (modeled after the scheme of Gogol’s protagonist Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov) not only flaunts literary tradition, it spoofs historical movies to reflect the current immigration/invasion crisis.
Whatever Nolan thought his work The Odyssey accomplished, Cox’s modern adaptation is consistent with his culturally savvy social commentary. Mixing genre parody, deadpan humor, and songs, Cox’s anarchic jamboree follows his 1987 Western burlesque Straight to Hell, which featured Joe Strummer, Courtney Love, Dennis Hopper, Grace Jones, and Elvis Costello, as well as Searchers 2.0, his 2007 faux John Ford homage.
Strindler is first seen walking through the strange, vast desert, like the forlorn Harry Dean Stanton in Paris, Texas, suggesting an anachronistic mythological figure whose appearance sparks the settlers to reveal themselves as dissatisfied, competitive types. These billiard players and card-shark gamblers invite Strindler to take part in sharing their disparate American dreams, plus their portion of Western heritage — including Diogenes searching for one honest man, a piano rendition of “Night on Bald Mountain,” and praise of “Melville’s great book about The Whale.” Strindler counters with his preference for a tome about the19th-century American insurgent William Walker (subject of Cox’s 1987 satirical polemic Walker, starring Ed Harris).
The insurgency of Dead Souls lies in Cox’s response to American history. Western aggression also inspires Cox’s own outsider’s awe — and it’s musical. When The Kid (Shayn Herndon) challenges the unarmed Strindler to a shootout, the tragic duel shifts the film into the year’s most wondrous sequence of spiritual nostalgia: Several town folk trade personalized verses of the ballad “Bang the Drum Slowly.” It’s wistful enough to stir a corpse.
What’s going on in Dead Souls is an old anarchist’s nostalgic fantasia, blending Western themes in the wake of contemporary politics that he can’t quite rationalize. Cox stretches Gogol’s dead-souls metaphor to include the world’s unidentified immigrants as well as the bureaucrats and politicians who exploit them.
Strindler befriends coachman Borracho (Zander Schloss, the first man disintegrated in Repo Man), who confesses his own old rebel’s dream: “There were these big mansions, rising way up high. Yet everywhere you looked, there were poor people sleeping on the streets, living in tents. It was like that all over the world.” Strindler surmises, “You experienced what the French call a cauchemar — a fever dream.” The film itself evokes what Vladimir Nabokov most admired about Dead Souls: “Gogolian gusto and wealth of weird detail.” (Nabokov insisted that Dead Souls was great art, not a political manifesto.)
A poignant animated sequence helps Cox achieve a narrative coherence that Rade Jude could not in Dracula, his own blended fantasia of East European political heritage. After that summation, Strindler is told “You’re a man of the future!” and he imagines military bureaucrats in a contemporary setting who tally the dead — an 1844 list of deceased serfs in Kiev; an 1890s record of buried Mexicans in Arizona; 20th-century Nicaraguan fatalities; and finally “Schindler’s list.”
Cox’s rude movie joke exposes the enigmatic Strindler, paralleling how Godard critiqued Spielberg’s recreation of Auschwitz — the maddening moral weight of political history. And now, political ethics have changed treacherously (from globalism to neo-socialism), proving that the Punk era’s innocent charm — as vulgar as the pre-Marxist era that Gogol described — is dead. “It’s an AI-centric project,” Strindler is enlightened. Smarter than Nolan, punk artist Cox disrupts the megalomania that comes with a Hollywood super-production. Inspired by Gogol, Cox says this will be his last film.
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