Tribeca Film Festival 2024: VULCANIZADORA

Vulcanizadora, Joel Potrykus’ latest, is all about men who feel almost superstitiously guilty. Like the rest of this idiosyncratic director’s filmography (Relaxer, Buzzard, Ape etc.), this new film, which had its debut at Tribeca this week, probes the vulnerable underbelly of affable, slacker masculinity gone sour with sickly, hypnotic fascination. Shot in soft, almost milky 16mm and replete with long takes, Vulcanizadora is loose in its narrative, reflecting its characters’ masochistic relationship to emotional honesty by dexterously withholding information between bursts of caustic confessionals, veritable spitballs of anger, sadness, fear, and humor. With this in mind, too much synopsis would only detract from the experience (Potrykus’ films are very much about having an experience, often a visceral and unpleasant one, though always entertaining). The first half of the story revolves around a solemn pact two friends, Marty (Potrykus’ constant collaborator Joshua Berge) and Derek (Potrykus himself) have made; the second half is devoted to the consequences of that pact’s failure. The end result is funny and self-consciously feel-bad, likely verging on bleak for less masochistic viewers. Its scattershot, observational approach to its characters’ tangles of emotional turmoil also risks teetering into a lack of true narrative cohesion, less making a specific point than hurling ideas at its audience. For fans of Potrykus’ films, though, Vulcanizadora is a meditative, perhaps even understated (at least relatively compared to Relaxer), exploration of his recurring, quasi-existentialist preoccupations around our responsibilities to ourselves, to each other, and to the incredibly daunting, cosmically absurd task of ever being born at all. 

Moderate spoilers ahead:

“Ripped Off”

One of Potrykus’ greatest successes as a storyteller lies in his ability to transform passivity into a tangibly active force in his characters’ lives. This paradoxical fascination is most obviously on display in Relaxer, a film entirely dedicated to its protagonist’s literal refusal to get off of his couch, playing malaise as an endurance test. There, inaction is a perversely liberating (if gloriously abject) choice, playing out the man-child fantasy of sitting, eating pizza, and playing video games to its furthest conclusion, which eventually turns out to be a hallucinatory, nightmarish survival scenario shot through with regret. In Vulcanizadora, though, the same pathological (anti?)masculine inaction is no longer so rudely, deliciously, painfully feasible for the characters in question: It has consequences for people beyond themselves. 

Derek and Marty are both at loose ends when they meet for a camping trip. As we watch them stagger through the woods in a looking glass riff on Old Joy— Derek chattering away with the kooky, coked-up cadence of an eccentric Jackass guest star, Marty largely silent— we slowly learn of their predicaments, ranging from familial strife to the threat of (more) prison time. The two take polar opposite approaches to their grim, lonely realities, but ultimately they’re both bottomless pits of need and nerves, desperate for connection but psychically closed-off, incapable of making it; they’re trapped in juvenile adolescence like the porno mags the grey-bearded Derek triumphantly pulls from an old hiding spot with raucous cries of “nasty!” and “raunchy!” His reactions don’t seem to jive with the tame pictures on the faded pages, particularly once we learn he’s a father. Potrykus’ portrayal of Derek is fiendishly well-modulated, a constantly vibrating fever pitch of tragically goofy, genuinely annoying, and even somewhat threatening moments. His direction performs similar subtle switchbacks, playing with audience sympathy and character agency (whose idea is this camping trip anyway?) before creeping up on the viewer and slapping them across the face. Once the men reach their destination and their plan is revealed, however, an equally deliberate sense of creeping foreboding takes over, pushing the story forward in an almost biblical direction. Do we owe each other anything in this life? Our families? Our friends? Their families? Do we owe anything to ourselves, even our own self respect? 

Rather than try to answer these impossible questions, Vulcanizadora wrestles with them almost helplessly, putting its characters through their paces like rats in a maze. Both Marty and Derek are defined by their lack of self-determination, which they unconsciously chalk up to a cosmic system seemingly designed to rip them off. Like Berge’s Abbie in Relaxer, his Marty is so guilty for his personal failings that he molds himself into them, an exploding mess of self-sabotage and self-actualization in equal measure. Believing he will go to jail for the arson of a tire shop (thus the title) for the simple reason that he did it, he selfishly bullies Derek into drastic action he wouldn’t otherwise take (avoiding spoilers), solely hoping to force himself to act. Where Derek’s childish optimism belies simmering resentment and a similar passivity underneath (he may be a fast talker, a big planner, but he owes his ex a lot of child support and he can’t make a fire and he never got that job and he never went on that trip and, and, and…), Marty’s failure, particularly here, is right on the surface. He watches his life burn with the same trancelike, nihilistic bliss he gets from melting rubber. That is, until it’s too late, over and over and over and… 

Conclusion 

The real discomfort of watching Vulcanizadora comes in the back half, when Marty’s refusal to take responsibility comes up against a world Potrykus paints as a bureaucratic parody of Rousseau‘s cruel state of nature: For some reason, Marty just can’t get himself caught, no matter how much life is defined by fear, isolation, and bargain basement anarchy. No matter what you do to feel better (take your meds, don’t take your meds) as Marty tells Derek, “tomorrow you’ll feel bad again, so hold tight.” He longs for the amniotic bliss of the carceral system’s forced self-abnegation— really any self-abnegation will do as long as he’s lucid enough to feel it, like a self-inflicted vivisection after actions he so thoughtlessly takes. He wistfully images prison as “a place where you get pancakes on Tuesdays” and death as a trip to Florida, dreaming of escape from his civic duty to being alive. Still, he can’t muster the guts to go all the way (in any direction), out of fear of doing anything at all without someone’s hand guiding him along.

The overall effect is an icky jumble, at once anesthetizing and agitating, languorous and frenetic, a cinematic case of acid reflux. Potrykus has said that the film is his “most personal” piece of work thus far and was inspired by becoming a father, putting this particular stomach ache in the Eraserhead school of male anxiety, if only by way of Napoleon Dynamite (though it could just as easily be compared to Ari Aster’s recent Beau is Afraid, which explores similar themes). Potrykus also says he doesn’t want to talk about it. Fair enough. This is not a movie that wants to explain itself, just spill its guts. In the end, Vulcanizadora is a cruel joke, but the right kind of viewer will definitely laugh.