'The Surfer:' A fun but flawed ode to ozploitation
Dissecting comfort into materialistic symbols
SPOILERS AHEAD! Read at your own risk…
Although it has been a mixed bag, the current phase of Nicholas Cage’s career has been a blast. His gravitation toward oddball indie flicks continued with The Surfer, directed by Lorcan Finnegan, which offered a tale of absurd class descendancy, a fall from grace inspired by the heat-scorched ozploitation flicks of the 1970s.
The Surfer (the official name of the character played by Cage) had all the white collar problems. He was enduring a divorce, had trouble connecting with his son, and both of these things would be fixed once he procured the funds to purchase his childhood home on an Australian beach he surfed in his youth. He arrived at the beach with the intent to surf with his son, not only to share these nostalgic waves with him but also because they would get the best view of their future home from their focal point on the sea. However, they were quickly halted by radical localism: “Don’t live here, don’t surf here!” the local beach bums yelled in their faces.
Despite the relevance of such a statement in a world in which gentrification threatens the sanctity of such locales, the film revealed layers of outdated ideologies which reinforced the bums’ chokehold on the community. First and foremost, these bums were all male disciples of Scally (Julian McMahon), whose philosophy of “one must suffer before one can surf” served as the basis for his surfing cult. Supported by a trust fund, Scally was a local celebrity. His family owned a large portion of the beachfront properties and contributed to the local community so that whenever a “problem” arose with the bums’ behavior, the locals brushed it off as “boys being boys.” After all, they kept the riff-raff out, as one local housewife noted.
Scally adopted Nietzschean suffering to provide a veneer of depth to his boy club, comparable to many other role models who prey on the gullibility of young men like Andrew Tate or, better yet, Jordan Peterson, whose contortion of classic philosophy and psychology seems intelligent enough to the average scroller who has no intent to fact-check him. Scally’s philosophy only reinforced toxic masculinity, turning him into a relevant critique on contemporary male role models and influencers, for not only did he have his beach buddies, he also had a large social media following.
Meanwhile, the Surfer experienced violent harassment from his disciples. Arriving in a nice car, wearing a nice suit and having every modern amenity of civilization, the Surfer’s material items (his surfboard, phone, car, watch, wedding ring, blazer, etc.) were quickly established as symbols of comfort that were, one by one, taken away from him by Scally’s young disciples. Meanwhile, a homeless man living in a broken-down Subaru in the parking lot was one of only two people who treated the Surfer with respect. This man held a grudge against Scally, who he claimed killed his son and stole his dog. As the film went along, the identities of the homeless man and the Surfer fused together, and Cage became the parking lot bum, living on recycled water and uncooked rats.
All the while, there was the symbol of the wave — a fine literary theme but a stronger visual one. The film opened on the tail end of the Surfer’s monologue about the wave being a metaphor for life, which he delivered to his son while they drove toward their future house. In his speech, he spoke of the time it takes for a wave to build up — sometimes even years — before its final moment of crashing catharsis on the shore. The symbol of the wave appeared numerous times throughout the film: Heat rippled off every surface, contrasted with the rippling effects of the wave superimposed on the Surfer’s profile; the mirror in the outdoor bathroom was so warped that it created a wave-like effect, so that the Surfer’s reflection was distorted; the converts to Scalley’s cult were branded with a wave symbol to embody both suffering and surfing in one sensational motion.
As a result, The Surfer took on a formalist tone, since the many moments of montage embodied the symbol of the wave along with other symbols, such as the Surfer’s material items and the theme of suffering. All of it was captured with heat-soaked photography and plenty of delicious close-ups — cinematic harmony which was offset by the film’s own lack of focus.
Although the formal qualities were enduring and gave the film an edge, there was a conflict at the core of its approach, one which prohibited it from going fully absurd. While it gravitated toward class descendancy, the narrative remained too rational and tethered. Despite its formal approach, it lacked a commitment to visual storytelling, and its most visual moments built a cinematic language for the film which never fully blossomed beyond symbolic enrichment and into narrative synchronicity.
While montage provided a semiotic backdrop, dialogue was the main expositional vehicle, and due to its rational devotion to modernity, it was too easily questionable. For example, why did the Surfer remain in the parking lot the entire time? Why did he refuse to go to a cafe in town to recuperate, charge his phone, get some gas, have some wifi and a phone signal to get his assets in order before purchasing the house? Why did he remain there, in the parking lot, where he was ridiculed, preyed upon and injured? There have been plenty of other films that have built realities of their own so that answers to these questions were impossible to demand as a viewer. However, The Surfer was not one of these films, for it was too dedicated to reality to be immune to such questioning.
Its rationalism made the film feel unfocused. A plethora of ideas, from toxic masculinity to localism, were introduced but hardly addressed. The film’s semantic lexicon was concerned with a detachment from reality via wave imagery, but this theme’s potential was largely untapped. Waves appeared at stages where the Surfer exhibited signs of either progression or regression rather than comparing his character arc to that of a wave. We watched the Surfer’s “cathartic crash against the shore,” but in a literary sense, not a cinematic one — the difference between the two both concerning the interaction between film and spectator. Although the themes did not meet their full potential, they nevertheless gave The Surfer an edge as a film which had more depth that today’s regular feature. However, the film’s abuse of dialogue caused an expectation for realism, causing a rift between the plot and the film’s cinematic language.
One of the film’s most egregious uses of dialogue was during its turning point. At some point, the Surfer was welcomed into Scally’s little club, and it was revealed that the entire thing was just a ruse. They didn’t steal his car, they took it to the mechanic to get it detailed. He would be able to buy the house after all; his realtor was part of the club. The cop was in on it. The barista at the cafe cart was in on it. Everything was fine. His phone, his wedding ring, his watch were all safe and waiting for him. This sudden shift in narrative, this sudden acceptance into Scally’s inner sanctum was abrupt and unnecessary.
Until this point in the film, it seemed to be ramping up toward the whole “and he was the homeless man in the parking lot the whole time!” kind of reveal. That wouldn’t have been a bad thing, but it also wouldn’t be anything new.1 After all, while the Surfer was embodying the existence of the Subaru bum, the homeless man who claimed Scally killed his son and dog or whatever just disappeared until the Surfer was accepted into the cult and completed his final act of initiation: dousing the Subaru in gasoline and burning it. Suddenly, the homeless man resurfaced, summoned by the screenwriter at the most opportune moment.
Earlier in the film, when the Surfer was wasting away in the parking lot, he noticed the homeless man hide a red plastic bag in the bathroom. Later, when he was living in the Subaru, the Surfer found a bullet in the car. Connecting the dots, he remembered the baggie, and it inevitably contained a revolver. This never amounted to anything, at least not for the Surfer. Despite being relentlessly harassed by Scally’s disciples to the point of socio-economic destruction, the Surfer only did one thing with the gun: Tested it on a tree before returning it to its hiding place.
It’s not bad to defy expectations, but come on. When the homeless man reappeared, he grabbed the gun and marched right down to the beach, confronting Scally and his men. Finally paddling out onto the waves, the Surfer and his son were at last able to see the house, but they instead looked at the beach to watch the homeless man execute Scally before taking his own life. This view which had been anticipated the entire film was replaced by the execution of Scally, who owned the beachfront and was loved by the locals. Could the Surfer’s return to the town be seen as a shift in power which culminated in the locale’s metaphorical destruction, symbolized by Scally’s death? This was a poignant and meaningful death and an excellent punctuation mark to the film.
Personally, I think this would have been better than what we got.