By Jude Jones
Our Managing Editor Jude Jones was kindly invited to the first instalment of MUBI Fest Manchester from 12-13 July 2024, hosted by MUBI and DAZED Digital at Aviva Studios. As part of the festival, there was a special screening of Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross’s Gasoline Rainbow (2023), a coming-of-age film following five teens along America’s West Coast, followed by a Q&A with the directors. In this review, Jude explores the film’s themes of youth, apocalypse, and the power of joy.
We’re living through the end of the world.
It’s a dreary fact, but one that we’re all catching onto. In 2022, the British curator Shumon Basar coined the term “endcore” to name a certain aesthetisication of this end-point: that Balenciaga A/W22 ready-to-wear collection where models waded black bin bags through a blistering snow storm to comment on the Russian invasion of Ukraine; the bleak nihilism of Charlie Kaufman’s Netflix-released I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020), with its mirror to hopelessness and longing; the multiverse fantasia of Daniel Kwan’s record-breaking Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022), with its promise of parallel, possibly-better other-worlds.
But, if we’ve by now began realising the hopeless prospect that our present tense is the dawn of the end, how do we plan on living through it?
Gasoline Rainbow (2023) is but another film thinking through the end of the world within this “end-core” zeitgeist. The first fiction film by American documentary-making duo the Ross Brothers – Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross– this road-trip flick follows a group of five just-graduated high schoolers on an odyssey from drab middle America to the beacon-like West Coast. Along the way, they hear whispers of “The Party at the End of the World”, a backwoods squat rave somewhere just outside Portland that they select as their final destination. However, when they arrive they find only blue lights, police sirens and megaphoned warnings to clear out: the End of the World will have to happen some other time.
The easy, well-worn premise of the coming-of-age film is given new vitality by the Ross brothers’ documentary-informed approach. Rather than writing a meticulous screenplay and script for seasoned actors to follow, the pair scouted a ragtag group of friends from a carpark and ferried them on a road trip across the States, only going so far as to map their route and stage a selection of pivotal scenes to push the plot forwards. The rest, like in previous endeavour Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (2020), was left to in-the-moment improv. It’s very Nouvelle Vague, almost painfully indie.
This is not a documentary though, as the brothers stress to tell. But what this experimental approach affords is a degree of rawness, consecrated by and between blurred lines, that straightforward fiction risks holding back. In snobbish literary circles this has been called autofiction: writing about one’s life while staging it as invention to dissolve the thin, silk-like line between autobiography and pure story. It’s the device that Christine Angot used to confide about her father’s sexual abuse of her in Incest (1999), which Hervé Guibert used to confess his HIV status in To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (1990). Christine becomes “Christine”; Hervé, “Hervé”; and so, in Gasoline Rainbow, Micah Bunch becomes “Micah”, Nichole Dukes becomes “Nichole”, and so on and so forth. Actors and characters dissolve into one.
What these means as this technique is translated from page to camera then is a newfound intimacy with the people we meet on-screen. And the results are heart-wrenching. When listen to “Nathaly” (Nathaly Garcia) tearily tell a middle-aged stranger in a midwestern dive bar that her father was deported to Mexico, we are not listening to hollow script. This moment was genuine, tell the Ross brothers, a sincere rumination on and reminder of the human consequences of the Trump presidency and its closed-border wet dreams. (In the after-show Q&A, the Ross brothers say that Nathaly was able to go to Mexico to visit her father after filming wrapped, to a happy round of applause).
Similarly, when “Micah” whispers to the audience in introspective voiceover that he is planning on joining the military once their trip is done because he doesn’t know what other future he has, there is a difficult-to-diagnose tragedy that churns in the viewer’s stomach. The boy we have seen revelling in utter freedom on the West Coast’s dusty backroads now resolves himself to a life of regimentation inside the monstrous jaws of the American military machine for survival’s pure, if not ironic, sake. Again, human tragedy belies this on-screen moment.
Gasoline Rainbow is then, in simpler words, a film about living through the end, whose architecture is structured by the ennui of late-stage capitalism, the neo-fascist spectre haunting the West, the anxieties of being young in a seemingly futureless world. The idea of coming-of-age is thus turned on its head: what does it mean to come-of-age in an age of end?
The film remains realist on this front. Yet in doing so, it eschews wincing nihilist in the vein of certain anti-coming-of-age-films that exist, at least partially, within its same zeitgeist: a little Harmony Korine’s Gummo (1998) here, a little Gregg Araki’s The Doom Generation (1995) there. The Ross Brothers call their approach instead a type of magical realism, films that are hopeful, “probably too hopeful”, and that offer the possibility of something more.
This means that rather than a somber resignation to the state of the world, Gasoline Rainbow shows us ways of trying to live through and with it: having fun, being with your friends, and hopefully chasing a party that never comes. I’m reminded of a blogpost I read in lockdown on the political, life-giving power of joy: “And how do we nurture hope? One way is through joy in the present. It’s one thing to be able to envision a better future, but it’s another to have a momentary flash of it course through our bodies.”
And of a recently viral Tweet riding the “brat girl summer” wave, too: “There is such a deep melancholy to being a 365 party girl during the collapse of an empire.” Joy affords us fleeting moments of escape from the melancholy and collapse, refreshing pangs of ecstasy as we chew the cud of a crumbling world while keeping us vitally in touch with all its sadness and suffering. Hence the Ross Brothers’s confession at the start of the Q&A that the film is structured on a semi-religious veneration of the fleeting, the psychological afterlife of their childhood spent in Catholic New Orleans.
Realism and awareness must be mixed with joy and with hope, otherwise we risk paralysing ourselves to the world’s weary cruelties, as if staring unprotected into the Medusa’s eyes. “The End of the World will always happen another time,” whispers Nichole to her friends when they find the party shut down, and this is a mantra of which I think we should sometimes take more heed. We need to do our best, but we also need to do our best to keep ourselves open to life-sustaining pleasure, to party, and to joy. We need never mutually exclude the two.
This piece was written with special thanks to the team at MUBI UK, especially Lisa Richards, for the invitation. Gasoline Rainbow is available to stream exclusively on MUBI. All images are courtesy of MUBI and the artist.
Jude Jones (@jude_j0nes2002) is the Managing Editor at GAY45 and specialises in writing on fashion, music, and art.
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