WTF is Redoubt?

Redoubt is “pretty-far-out-there-contemporary” artist and filmmaker, Matthew Barney’s, latest film. If you’ve heard of him,¹ cool. If you haven’t, you can easily look him up.² Anyway, reviews of movies are usually either simple descriptions of those movies, or are artfully written critiques meant solely to inflate the ego of the review’s author, so I’m reviewing a review of Redoubt instead.

A Review of a Review: Redoubt

I saw Redoubt at Austin Film Society³ on Saturday, January 4, 2020. I read as many reviews of Redoubt as I could,⁴ and decided this review had more plot holes than Jojo Rabbit, a wonderful film, but c’mon, none of it actually happened that way.

In this review⁵ of Redoubt the reviewer approaches the film from the point of view of an avant-garde skeptic, who sees the spectacle as nothing more than a bunch of super-expensive smoke and mirrors on display at a super-famous art gallery in Beijing that you’ve never heard of; but is a person who also knows what’s up with Barney, and is super-bummed there aren’t any naked people in Redoubt.

Tl;dr — If you like arthouse films, watch Redoubt and make up your own mind. And if you like arthouse films, hopefully your fondness for them isn’t as shallow as folks who watch arthouse films just for boobs.

The Review

Note: Quoted text is pulled directly from the review; bolded text indicates which sections I’m directly referencing in my commentary.

Ovid’s telling of the story of Diana and Actaeon, which supposedly inspired Matthew Barney’s new feature-length work, Redoubt, is one of those myths of mortal trespass that artists can’t resist, perhaps because on some level they would like to imagine themselves as doing something worthy of cruel punishment by the gods.

Briefly Considered: It wasn’t a “supposed” inspiration, it was a documented inspiration. And being drawn to mortal trespasses is only an artists’ thing? There’s a lot of anthropological psychology we could go into here, but we won’t.

No such gruesome death or transformation occurs in Redoubt, though there is a camo-clad goddess (Anette Wachter, a prizewinning sharpshooter) and a forest ranger who dabbles in engraving and gets on her bad side. The latter character, credited simply as the “Engraver,” is played by Barney himself. Standing in the snow, he scratches images of mountainsides (the film was shot on location in Idaho’s Sawtooth Range) into metal with a tool. Every now and then, he visits his friend, the Electroplater (K.J. Holmes), who lives off the grid in a trailer, to drink whiskey.

BC: So, all of this… I get over-simplificaiton for the sake of making a point, but narrative transposition and metaphor is probs lost on the reviewer.

Meanwhile, the goddess’ two attendants, the Calling Virgin (Eleanor Bauer, who also choreographed the film) and the Tracking Virgin (Laura Stokes), perform their slow, perplexing dance across the landscape. They do bathe, albeit not in the nude, and not in the presence of any human eyes — apart from those represented by Barney’s camera. Which probably means something, too.

BC: Lack of nudity reference #1. What’s also interesting here is that there is an attempt to (1) call-out important motifs and recurring symbolism, and (2) figure out what it might mean…. but (3) it’s apparently too hard to do all of that, esp when your job is to review a movie and not to try understanding that movie.⁶

Yet one can’t blame the shortcomings of Redoubt on the absence of its exhibit component [BC note: The reviewer previously referenced the exhibitions that typically accompany Barney’s film releases, mentioning that the exhibition for Redoubt is currently on display in Bejing]. It has become something of a cliché of writing about Barney’s work (and avant-garde film in general) to describe the films as being impossible to summarize. In fact, they are easy to summarize; things tend to happen in them slowly. The truth is that it is hard to summarize them without making them sound inane while also making the writer come off as an anti-art philistine.

BC: None of this is accurate. Summarizing Redoubt is actually quite simple: Redoubt is a look at humanity’s relationship with the natural world, told through an ancient mythological allegory (Diana and Actaeon) and from the perspective of a Western historical tradition.⁷ Perhaps more notable than any plot or narrative is the film’s use of dance, hunting, and acts of recording (copper plate etching) as symbols of ritual, myth making, and elemental sense-making to give the story a sense of timelessness.

I could go on but reviewing movies isn’t my job.

Their appeal [Matthew Barney films] is in the experience — in watching Barney create and unfold his perversely and impressively scaled rituals, with their intermingling of anatomy and geology, industrial history and myth, grotesque extremity and kitsch, viscera and jelly. None of which is to be found in Redoubt, a sedate (and by Barney standards, occasionally boring) film.

BC: All of that is in Redoubt!

It seems as though the artist, all too aware of his reputation for both pageantry and shock value, has decided to offer nothing of the kind. He certainly seems to be aware of his own age. The Cremaster movies usually disguised his good looks behind bizarre facial prosthetics; here, moving stiffly and wearing bifocals and a bushy Santa Claus beard, he appears at least a decade older than 52.

BC: Yeah, it’s a shame when people do something new; but calling Barney out for his age? You surely could have hit your word minimum by writing about almost anything else.

Barney’s best work has occasionally pulled off the feat of being enthralling and ridiculous at the same time, though Redoubt sometimes ends up being merely the latter; a sequence in which the Virgins perform a dance to clean Diana’s rifle using a rod threaded with a lock of the goddess’ hair comes to mind. Instead of having Diana disrobe by the waterside, Barney shows her field-stripping a Glock.

BC: That rifle cleaning dance was pretty wacky! Also, no nudity bummer #2.

Which isn’t to say that Redoubt (which is in many respects a landscape film) doesn’t have its moments of strange and sparse beauty, assisted by a score by Barney’s regular musical collaborator, Jonathan Bepler. But in creating a less self-indulgent film, Barney ironically draws more attention to his cyclical meanings — which have always been the least interesting thing about him as an artist.

BC: OK, the horse is dead. This reviewer didn’t like Redoubt.

But at least this reviewer hasn’t just reserved his bone-picking for the formerly more perverse, old man Barney. Who do you think he is? One of those anti-art philistines? No sir! He’s also picked the breaded and deep-fried bones of Morgan Spurlock,⁸ and the exploding, melodramatic bones of Roland Emmerich,⁹ just to name two. This guy has it out for everyone, and makes equally weak but flourishly-written cases for why each of the films he’s reviewed are bad.

Thank you for briefly considering this review of Redoubt with me.

[1] Or better yet! Seen one of his other movies, like The Cremaster Cycle, or River of Fundament.
[2] Matthew Barney on Wikipedia.
[3] Austin Film Society.
[4] I read 2 of the top 3 Google search result reviews: I read the New York Times, skipped this one from Variety, and decided the AV Club’s review was the gold I was looking for.
[5] Important: I’m intentionally not naming the author or source, though I’ve linked everything for folks to read. I spent far too much time reading all of this reviewer’s reviews on AV Club, and have respect for anyone publishing anything, anywhere. Don’t take offense to anything I’ve written here. Read my review as satire. Ok, back to jokes.
[6] It’s especially hard to discern symbolic meaning when there’s no nudity, amirite?
[7] While also referencing an indiginous perspective and tradition, as seen in the American Leigon hoop dancing scene.
[8] An excerpt I quite enjoyed: “Spurlock’s post-Super-Size-Me projects (including the likes of Where In The World Is Osama Bin Laden? and Mansome) have given his film work a deserved reputation for vacuousness, but the truth is that he is very much in his element when addressing superficialities — say, the marketing gimmickry of attaching meaningless labels like “cage-free” and “hormone-free” to chicken meat. (Broiler chickens, i.e. the ones farmed for their meat, are never raised in cages, and using growth hormones on them is illegal, not to mention pointless.) The restaurant itself (also called Holy Chicken) is a mildly amusing, sub-Banksy stunt, concocted with the help of a couple of ironically detached millennial marketing gurus.” — Wait a sec… are you an anti-art philistine? Is this throwing shade at Banksy, too? Aside from the clear disinterest in all (clothed) people, most movies (except for Dunkirk, see below), and all kinds of marketing/filmmaking gimmickry, everything else you write is so confusing!
[9] This is a well-written excerpt and is probably accurate for Midway, a movie that does look pretty bad: “While his blockbuster styling never approaches the artfulness or tension of Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (to name one relatively recent example of an extraordinary war movie¹⁰), Emmerich nonetheless has a better sense for breathtaking scale than most working Hollywood directors, and his depiction of naval warfare — a subject that usually reads better in history books than it plays on screen — feels appropriately huge, with defective torpedoes bouncing off lumbering warships and dive bombers careening through grids of anti-aircraft fire. Not that he ever figures out a way to make us care about their pilots or the winners.” — Nice burn.
[10] There’s one good movie out there after all!