Best Keanu: “Go back to sleep. I love you.”

A new friend of mine is attending art school. She was just telling me about the final project in one of her courses. She submitted a series of photographic images meant to invoke a specific mood; isolation and loneliness I think. Her professor gave her a poor grade. He said the lighting was too dark.

“That was the point,” my friend said. “The lighting was dark on purpose.” It was thematic. She’s an artist, but the person grading her work just didn’t see it, literally and figuratively.

This friend also told me that, in art school, they have end-of-term sessions where every one of their classmates gets 20 minutes to critique their work. As a result, they spend an entire day listening to their colleagues evaluate a piece that is, for the artist, very personal, and whose value is subjective.

Art is subjective, and my expectations for Exposed were so low given the terrible reviews and boring trailer I was almost guaranteed to give it three stars just so long as it didn’t hit any of my personal sore spots — those tend to be misogyny, homophobia, and whatever else that might come up that I don’t realize I am sensitive about until an image or line of dialogue or look in an actor’s eye makes me feel all nauseated and bothered.

Exposed had none of that. Exposed respects its women, and if there was any homophobia — besides the absence of queer people — I didn’t catch it, although I am choosing to interpret the details of abuse in the film as just that, abuse, although someone else with different personal sore spots might say that, yes, there is a touch of homophobia in here too.

Exposed is also nicely surreal, women-focused, and complicated. After the film finished I found I was still putting small pieces together, a reminder that a lot of what the film does is subtle and requires a fair amount of paying close attention.

It’s also heavily edited. Exposed was originally a film called Daughter of God by first-time director Gee Malik Linton, who is also its writer and producer. Linton had the pseudonym “Declan Dale” placed in lieu of his own name as director on Exposed, in protest of the editing that happened after his job was done.

The film’s studio, Lionsgate, apparently reworked the movie to enhance the role of the Keanu Reeves character and other non-Black and non-Latino characters (I hesitate to write “white characters” or “white actors” here, because, well, is Keanu Reeves white? Keanu himself has expressed a mixture of thoughts on whether he’s comfortable taking the “person of color” label. It’s not as simple as heritage or genetics, of course, and the perception of him, and other characters in this film, as “white” is enough to make the point of whitewashing). The studio apparently wanted more of a boilerplate thriller and a little less of whatever the first cut of the film turned out to be.

The director’s cut of Daughter of God is downloadable on Gee Malik Linton’s Twitter profile, so what this film might have been — and is, if you choose to watch that film and not Exposed as released by Lionsgate — is out there, watchable for anyone who’s interested.

I imagine it is a very different film. I have yet to watch it, but plan to do so. Maybe that will get an ancillary page of its own. For now, I watched Exposed, and I, for one, liked it. A lot.

Yes, it’s slow-moving. Yes, the early scenes especially move rapidly back and forth between the experiences of the Ana de Armas character, Isabel, and the cops investigating the death of one of their own. Yes, the scenes of Isabel are vastly more interesting than those of Keanu’s cop character, Scott, who is lonely, moody, disconnected from his son, and apparently lacking in significant social connection.

The quick shifts, knowing the film’s backstory, seem to be the result of the editing. But if I didn’t know the backstory, I might have written it off as an artistic choice, one that gives the movie a distinct rhythm. It creates a layered feel where each character group has its own isolated environment. Isabel and the deceased cop are integrated into a single story, but they oscillate in different worlds.

But even if that worked for me as a viewer — and all of it did, right to the end, through the often troublesome halfway point of independent films where it can either go right or wrong — doesn’t mean it’s what the director intended. The story might not be what he wanted, either, and the representations, racial, cultural, or otherwise, might fall short of what he hoped — or even had on film before it was chopped and rearranged.

That says something, I am sure, about the resistance of Hollywood to focus on stories about and starring non-White people, especially in 2016 when Exposed was released. But it also just says something about movies as product instead of purely creative endeavors. Lionsgate apparently wanted a film they thought they could sell, because they distribute visual product. They are not in the business of bolstering one individual’s personal creative vision, because that’s rarely good business.

Films are collaborative. That means that although the director had a vision, he also had to work with an editor and other producers who also participated in the final product. It’s an open question exactly when it happens that art ceases to be owned by an individual and stands on its own, for others to tweak and refine, to the point where it may no longer resemble its origins.

For me, Exposed was about trauma. It’s the same kind of trauma explored in the other Keanu Reeves-Ana de Armas pairing, Knock Knock, and Exposed does it better. But maybe shedding light on trauma wasn’t the director’s vision, and even if it worked for me, that disconnect might be enough for him to want to separate himself from the project.

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According to the counter at the top of this page, I’ve so far written just shy of 1,000 words, ostensibly about Exposed. Because this website is mine, a personal endeavour and not a product, I can make this post as long as I like. It’s possible no person will ever read it, or someone will, skimming through, stopping and clicking away after the first 100 to 200 words as may be typical of modern audiences of online content.

I write because it helps me process. I am a sensitive person, one who at once craves and becomes overloaded with sensory input. Sensory input for me has a pretty distinct meaning. I’m like all people, who want tactile sensations, touch, food and flavour, scents, sounds, music, speech, interaction with others. I’m an independent, often solitary, person, but I seek people out. It’s not until I’m alone, and I’m writing, that I release the energy I’ve accumulated through the collection of my senses and that which has been draped on me by other people. This is the nature of living, and it’s not until I begin to dislodge my thoughts through writing that I understand what I’ve been carrying. Often the energy is old, sometimes it’s new, but it is engaging with this art that allows me to participate in my human life.

So writing for me is very personal. It’s also how I make money. Not by blogging about Keanu Reeves movies — this writing is mine — but by piecing words together in a specific style and voice according to those who hire me to do it. That writing is product.

When I first started writing for money, I was quite attached to the words that came under my name, even if I did not choose the topic or the style or come up with the reference rules or even speak in my voice. But I quickly discovered I had little control over the words that were eventually published under my name. They’re edited, reduced, deleted, for the sake of search engine optimization, product placement, or marketing strategies like matching reader intent.

But because writing is my life, my personal practice, I imagine I understand what it may be like to have your art co-opted, twisted, rearranged, repackaged, and sold, while pieces of you are still inside of it. I imagine it might be quite painful, and the source of deep conflict. You might have to ask, do I keep this for me alone, with all of my heart contained in it, or do I attempt to share it, in the process taking on collaborators who may have a different vision, alternate ideas of what my art could be, so that more people see it but it’s no longer of me?

Filmmaking, because of its practical details, is virtually impossible to do on one’s own. Filmmaking artists have to make visionary sacrifices almost as a matter of course. As writers, we do that too — perhaps less so, but publishing a novel of any substance means working with an editor and distribution house who also have vested, economic interests in your artistic work. They may also have different visions of what your story should be, and the tale you should tell.

I am thinking about this now because I have, finally, a creative work, a novel, that’s ready to be written. But what to do with it once it’s done? Is it always necessary to sever the emotional connection to one’s own art, or is it possible to find a supportive outlet that will let it stand as I believe it should be, even if it reaches fewer people?

I have never smoked cigarettes. But cigarette smoke is one of my favourite things, my favourite smells, my preferred sensory input. I have been known, when I’m waiting on a busy corner or at a transit stop near other people who are smoking cigarettes, to covertly move closer to them and breathe deeply. I love the smell of cigarettes and regret it’s harder and harder to breathe in second-hand smoke as fewer and fewer people carry cigarettes these days. As much as I love the smell of cigarette smoke, I have resisted the occasional urge to start smoking, much for the same reasons that I finally stopped drinking a few years ago. Sensory input comes with consequences, and as age creeps up on you, you start making different choices to safeguard the parts of you that remain robust and in good working order. Or, you do what you can to repair the damage you inflicted upon yourself when you were younger and less concerned about how your future self would manage their moods and lung capacity.

Art is subjective, including filmmaking. There are visual techniques a director might employ to make a statement, but invariably they won’t reach every member of their audience. Why a moviegoer does or does not like a film, or the message they get from it, whether it’s art or product, is an individual experience.

Case in point. I very much enjoyed the film Thumbsucker, where Keanu plays a dentist with some unorthodox professional quirks. In one scene, he chain-smokes while talking to the film’s main character about life. What does it for me in this scene? The smoking. Some people may want to fuck Keanu Reeves or kung-fu fight Keanu Reeves. If anything, I would like to breathe in second-hand cigarette smoke from Keanu Reeves. Art, like sensory input, is subjective, personal, and something we all process in our own individual way.

April 2022