Image copyright © by Marcus Trahan

Rubber

(France, Angola, 2010)

Out in the desert, a car pulls up from a long ways off. The trunk opens and a man in a sheriff’s suit get out and starts lecturing us about movies. A bus pulls up and a lot of people get out, then sit in chairs, bitching about various things. This will be the “audience.” Finally, an old tire out in the sand shivers and stands upright. It crushes various things, comes to a coke bottle it can’t crush, and begins to vibrate. The bottle shatters. Soon a rabbit shatters, and a man’s head. At this point we drove to Goodyear and had this flat tire replaced. Some critics liked this as a sly satire of splatter movies, some didn’t, about fifty-fifty. Myself, the only thing that interested me was wondering how they got that tire to roll and stop where they wanted it to with no visible means of support, and a super-low budget that probably precluded any CGI. Somebody was clever. Not the screenwriter.