Detention (2011)

 

Director: Joseph Kahn

Screenplay: Joseph Kahn and Mark Palermo

Cast: Josh Hutcherson as Clapton Davis; Shanley Caswell as Riley Jones; Spencer Locke as Ione Foster; Aaron David Johnson as Sander Sanderson; Walter Perez as Elliot Fink; Dane Cook as Principal Karl Verge; Erica Shaffer as Sloan Foster

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

You have the arms of an anaemic spider monkey.

The follow up to Joseph Kahn's debut Torque (2004) as a feature filmmaker, a post Fast and the Furious motorbike action film from a director originally prolific in music videos, drops a gauntlet down immediately in terms of whether you can appreciate its tone or hate it. From the first scene of a high school girl talking to the viewer in a very reference heavy, but bluntly vapid, dialogue with masses of text and on-screen graphics morphing on the foreground, the film immediately stands out as something very different from the post-nineties slasher films which were already being meta-textual. Detention now is a film from an entire different era of culture too, but by 2011 when it was first released, it existed in context to how Scream (1996) and its self awareness for the slasher genre had already become nineties chic alongside the boy bands and the fashion of the era. Knowing this later film, despite being about a slasher killer, is going to involve a time travelling taxidermied bear and going to 1992, Detention manages to be both irrelevant and bouncing off the rubber walls.

Greg Araki with his nineties films could frustrate people, from The Doom Generation (1995) and Nowhere (1997), with their irrelevant mashing of sci-fi, teen sex and abrupt gore, and if anything, Araki's naive nihilism of his characters was at least sincere. Aptly, he released Kaboom (2010) which contrasts Detention. Kaboom was an older director reflecting on his obsessions in the then-modern day in a wacky apocalyptic cult scenario, whilst Detention is a film made by Kahn, who started his career in music videos in 1995, reflecting on two decades worth of pop culture, the nineties and the 2000s, he was a part of building himself, all in a mass of post-ironic prodding in the template of slasher films and teen films in general. From a man who worked with the likes of Korn, Destiny's Child, Wu-Tang Clan, Mariah Carey, literally figures who were popular in these two decades among others, his sadly sparse filmography is contrasted by all the music videos he worked on in-between them. Kahn (born in South Korea and moving to the United States as a child¹) is someone who is clearly proud of his work in glossy movies but also deliberately prods and mocks the pop culture too². With this, he is taking an entire generation of young adult culture, and the one before it, and transforming it into an abrupt, multi-text mirror back towards this past.

At Grizzly Lake High, a killer dressing up as a fictional prom queen slasher villain, a mix of Prom Night parodying the Saw films known as Cinderhella, is picking off high school students. What this is from this springboard is less a full slasher film in the usual plot tropes, but drawing from the pop culture of the 2000s and 1990s through this context, the film centred around the lone, alienated female student Riley Jones (Shanly Caswell) who has nothing to live for to the point her fellow high school students gladly walk over her prone body on the hallway floor without realising her presence. Around her is every stereotype of high school culture, including herself, from the jock to the nerd, melded with vast areas of filmic culture, from high school dramas to, of all things, Cronenberg body horror, pulled together by Riley’s relationship with failing outsider Clapton Jones (Josh Hutcherson) and a serial killer who has literally jumped out from a slasher film series in the story’s world. From there, stereotypes are bent plastically into shapes unexpected, and referencing multiple pop items at the same time, going through the countless sub-chapters on even minor characters which disrupt the film with stories-within-stories which do not even have direct connections to the Cinderhella killer. It becomes apparent that, while there is a clear plot line with an ending, Detention is as much a purposely abstract movie, and gleefully so, whose tangents are meaningful in how out-of-place and silly they can get.

The film will put people off. Immediately it is clear this is a film with heavy levels of referencing that have become of the time it was made, the dialogue intentionally arch to the point it could cause the film to feel pretentious and obnoxious to others in conjunction with its tone and visual barrages. However unlike another work, say the animated television series Family Guy which made its bread and butter a lot of references to old pop culture with thin bare stories wrapped around them, Detention still has a core that is both cute with its referential jokes but have a clear, razor tongue in them, the erratic bombardment of music references, film homage and quips reflective of the age we live in. Even the stereotypes themselves, both meant to reflect the ordinary lives of real teenagers and abstract archetypes, is part of this, whether it is parodying (in a film-within-a-film) when they are cast with thirty year olds, or that there is even a reference to a seminal eighties film about teenagers, The Breakfast Club (1985), in having the titular detention also happen on a Saturday in the school library. The film has many visual gags, but especially with the many passages of text onscreen, this was an early film figuring out how to depict an age of Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, iPhones, and many decades worth of the internet from the nineties onwards to take into considering in culture and cinema. With the countless forms of media on many tiny or large screens, the rapid fire nature of Detention visually is a picture of what all this would look like if it was fully part of our lives as breathing is.

The overriding nature of pop and geek culture both good and bad – hipsters, retro fads, cult films etc. – has reached almost everywhere in Western society, and this ironically was already riding on jokes about the nineties making a comeback in fads, something that prominently would start to be mined into the next decades in mainstream culture themselves. The film avoids making itself merely a parade of references by showing how pop culture can fade and become old quickly, even for the next people a few years later, and is also regurgitated, coming in with the subplot of Ione Foster (Spencer Locke), who fixation on the early nineties in trends is explicitly part of a curious Freaky Friday scenario in one of the many strange tangents in a world where anything can happen. Even the tangent about half fly-boys, the Cronenberg parody, would have gotten David Cronenberg's approval as it leads to them growing up with a literal television on their hand, which is not really a reference to pop culture saturation, more of a strange joke, but really feels apt for a film about culture itself. This stays to the late 2000s and the early to mid nineties in terms of the jokes, but looking at my own upbringing even in Britain, I think of all those nu-metal and pop punk bands I heard on Kerrang TV over here. I think of how they have flooded the second hand stores now with their albums between the likes of Dido and Coldplay, representatives in terms of popular radio hits, let alone NME magazine and the crest of indie rock they promoted which has moved along into the mid 2000s. An inspired highlight is a reverse timeline from the film’s main setting to 1992, depicting the music and fads from 50 Cent to Hole along the way, a 360 degree repeating camera spin, helped by simple optical effects, that depicts the changing trends of culture.

It helps that the film is so amused in its oddness, that despite being conventionally made when stripped of its flourishes, in terms of structure and still having to resolve itself in some form, it is still immensely weird. The time travel, the cultural references from both decades the film is set in, and the collage created plot threads, lead to some bizarre and absurd ideas made more prominent by how they can be casually done. This feels less intentionally strange in a hollow way, something you could have accused other films from this era of parodies and pastiches, but something when this has plot details which could have made whole movie narratives. A sequence involving a film-within-a-film-within-a-film-within-the-film-I-watched, work prints-within-work prints downloaded off the internet, even a porn parody, was the scene back when I first watched the film which won me over to Detention, even if the use of Ron Jeremy, a porn star who became famous for cameos in the mainstream between the nineties to this point, has not aged well due to real life (and horrifying) criminal convictions.  This sequence, the bravado it has, is inspired for how absurd it is, adding to the complete disregard for solid dimensional reality to the film. It made me realise the film should be embraced as a non-narrative blitz on its material references as well, following what Airplane! (1980) was after with its amount and frequency of jokes on-screen, pushed to the stage of anti-narrative cinema with its silly walks and bloody pie shots to the viewer’s face.

It still is a genre film which needs to end with a resolution, and any flaws the film has is that it has to lead to a conventional conclusion rather than what Greg Araki could pull off, let alone the fact that, despite actual nudity here and some surprising gory sequences, Araki's films were far more transgressive. Proudly anarchic, proudly bisexual (and horny in general), and proudly subversive, Araki's films for all their pretensions really struck the tone right for how weird the strangeness of the nineties were. Kahn's film here is more openly a parody of these characters, with a distance kept, and it still has to be ironic even if mocking "post-irony", something Araki's films did not do at all even to the point of alienating an audience more than Detention could do in how sincere its characters' angst was meant to be. Credit to Kahn though, despite this, he still makes something good here, and that Kahn’s director credit, looking like alphabet spaghetti, is puked out into a urinal bowl by a character shows a self mocking from the get-go that emphasises people made this production with a sense of fun and with a reason to its parodies. That opening credit sequence along, before you get to anything else, also presents so much more creativity on screen than many parodies I remember from this time.

By this point, in mind one dialogue sequence is a digression into the legacy of Scream in Detention, the famous slasher franchise had came back this year with Scream 4 (2011), after a long period of that series not being continued and as an old franchise being rebooted. Even the slasher films in its wake of divisive receptions were nostalgic by this point. The meta text here could not be a mere parody of straight faced slashers unless it had managed to reinvent the wheel again, as the original Scream had both done this.  Here we have Detention fully breaking down the films of the past, even making jokes about the idea of post-irony with a mocking glance, and then having Patrick Swayze and Steven Seagal have a metaphorical fist fight. This eventually becomes a film that has broken so many rules of logic it clearly does not care as long as it entertains and still pokes itself savagely in recognition of the silliness of it all. It is telling, when it comes to its film-within-a-film, Cinderhella, Kahn is parodying the Saw franchise, and the "torture porn" genre films, Saw from 2004 to 2010, before a huge gap in time, releasing films each October each year for a time as horror trends themselves had changed.

Detention sadly has become an obscure film, one of many that came to DVD and are ready to find a cult audience - call it the cult era of just before Netflix became the streaming service and still rented out discs - and sadly in Detention's case for Britain, it came out in a generic looking DVD and, unless you were aware of what it was or stumbled across it by accident, it became the kind of film you may thankfully get for a couple of British quid still but gets lost among all the many copies of big blockbusters also found on the charity shop shelves. Jokes about how long it took Avatar (2009), which gets name checked here, to actually get a sequel aside, even that film by now on DVD fills the same shelves too, and both feel like time capsules of their eras, both becoming the type of films Detention if it had been made in the 2020s would have parodied in terms of a characters obsessed with the early 2010s in music and fashion.  As someone who grew up in the early 2000s as a teenager, the days of rap metal on Kerrang, the seeds of hipsterism and the shiny little monoliths known as the iPods about to invade music culture, all jostling in my mind as I write this and in said mind as countless other memories from the period, this is a film that speaks to my generation as well as the young audience of 2011 it was intended for. Nowadays, with some of the references likely to go over a new audience's head, even some of the jokes in this back then feel deliberately obscure or obfuscating references people would have gotten on purpose, such as the guy in a Sigur Rós t-shirt trying to steal peoples' iPods whilst listening to Aerosmith. As a film along tackling the 1990s, which I grew up in as a child, with its pre-Millennial panic and post-modernism Ouroboros eating its own tail, Detention could have only been this much of a mess on purpose to tackle it. Far from perfect, as a horror film which is secretly a parody of pop culture, it does so much to admire.

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1) The Bio on Joseph Kahn's own site.

2) Joseph Kahn, the infamous director of Taylor Swift’s music videos, tells the ugly truth, written by Wesley Yin for the Washington Post, published on August 5th 2016.