NO FUTURE, NO HOPE – The Horror of ‘Ex Drummer’
There is a horror absent monsters. Bereft equally of ghouls and apparitions. A horror that may be defined by its everyday, all-too-common quality. Not a horror of telluric serial killers or crazed cannibals, no, one perfectly congruent with a political order characterised by the rule of law, fair play for all men, gay marriage, and a graduate programme with Deloitte. One in fact unique to, or at least exacerbated by, the conditions present in a technologically advanced, welfarist, and post-industrial society. The horror of the lumpenproletariat. A horror depicted in an array of media, from ‘Bad Boy Bubby’ to ‘Naked’, as well as the subject of this review – the 2007 Flemish lumpen-exploitation flick, ‘Ex Drummer’.
‘Ex Drummer’ follows a writer of renown in Belgium; solicited by three defectives (to put it mildly) to join their band, he agrees, viewing them as fodder merely for his next book. What follows is, to put it candidly, hell. Yet contrary to one’s expectations, the writer proves himself to be the morning star of the narrative, demonstrating an unimpeachable authority before which his peers and underlings prostrate themselves or, after some cajoling and deception, defer. His bandmates each possess a defect: for one it is chronic dope use; another is a homosexual with an Oedipus complex whose arm, which cannot be bent, is the only straight thing about him; the third, the most fearsome of the three, is an anti-social, borderline homicidal misogynist (not of the cultured variety i.e. the MEON readership).
The film is set in the Flemish coastal city-let, Ostend. A cursory 5 minute reading about Ostend on Wikipedia (all the city deserves, really) reveals a pedigree marked by invasion, slaveholding proprietors, Geopolitical intrigue (the ‘Ostend Manifesto’ was drafted in Ostend, the basis for the acquisition of Cuba by America), a seaside holiday spot for King Leopold II; most recently, the Ostend municipality decided to pimp out its abandoned hanger (in possession of architectural status, it ought be noted), converting it into a mega-brothel – a decision that would certainly be welcome by some of the characters in this film.
It suffices to say that Ostend is a total irredeamble dump. Owing to its seaside heritage, it’s more akin to the once bustling seaside towns immortalised by Morrissey’s ‘Everyday is like Sunday’, than the titanic industrial hubs Britain once boasted of, like Birmingham and Manchester. In contrast to Blackpool, the paradigmatic seaside town, Ostend – at least in the film – is not awash with Kitsch; the proliferation of passé tat, cringingly reminding one of a best-forgotten past, and impotent as a positive countervailing point against modern decadence, serves solely to demoralise and depress. The Ostend of the film is melancholic, liberated from any delusion of improvement by an abyss in lieu of a horizon. Trash in lieu of tat. Intense violence in lieu of pleasure-as-distraction; relative to the seaside spicehead, even the potent rapist of Ex Drummer appears redeemed.
Viewers today are dickwads, diminished by doomscrolling, porn, and other such embarrassing rottenness. But even the degenerated – a preponderant segment of the MEON readership – will notice the break with literalism in the film. The Barabas of the flick, the rapist-cum-homicidal skinhead, appears upside down, feet planted on the roof, like a vampire bat – fitting given that his domicile in shrouded in the meridian graffiti of his victims. The semiotic of inversion suggested is complemented by the repetition of the question: “Where were you when King Boudewijn died?”. Putting aside the merits of this particular Monarch, the Ostend – the Occident, in general – of ‘Ex Drummer’ is in an indubitably state of crisis due to the absence of a centre.
Lacking genuine authority – that aborted facimile, the state, is a knockoff – and authentic spirituality, its denizens are reduced inexorably to short-term hedonic pleasures, substance abuse, familial existence debased to the point of parody, a disposition of reflexive hostility whose telos is self-defeat, general apathy, extreme violence, manipulative cynicism, and so on. The king is dead; the tattoo on the back of the film’s Barabas reveals God’s fate, as well as the milieu’s lack of faith. If the audience may permit a brief dalliance with traditionalist talking points: kingship, as the ancient Chinese grasped it, entailed not government so much as the absence of it; the Monarch who did least, did the most, for his role entailed the preservation of the cosmic order; he interfaced with the divine with the aim of ensuring equilibrium in the world. The world of ‘Ex Drummer’ represents the antithesis of this, the consummation of chaos upon chaos. Without end. Without future. No order. No hope.
A brief punctuation of hopelessness comes with the Odyssean climax of the film. Heretofore confined to a straight jacket by his promiscuous cock-fixated scion, an Oedipean half-measure short of murder, the Father is liberated by the writer. Drenching his face in the blood of Barabas, he proceeds to gun down the majority of the band, his uber-Norwooded wife (complicit in his imprisonment), and their groupies – all male, as befits the inverted world. This return of order – with a viscous vengeance – drips red with a semiotic depth that defies the critics’ trite assails (“nihilistic!”, “edgelord filmmaking”; for a taster, please consult the Letterbox reviews).
Though boringly predictable, the critics aren’t incorrect. The film basks in its nihilism, aestheticizing the last-man epoch of the occident. The choice of Devo’s ‘Mongoloid’ is deliberate. When the vocalist, that veritable Barabas, bellows – “Mongoloid, he was a mongoloid. Happier than you and me. Mongoloid, he was a mongoloid. And it determined what he could see” – he does so forthrightly, proudly, unabashedly. Yet one is also treated to a hoarder’s paradise, wherein dopefiend Adam and dopefiend Eve quarrel, to the dismay of their neglected daughter – the latter, mired in the accumulation of filth and waste, eventually succumbs to death. Innocence and blamelessness fall victim to vice and sin. Nihilistic? Yes. But also no.
But it is the protagonist who is of greatest interest. A surface level viewing leaves one with a depreciatory reading of the writer; with the view that he is merely acting in accordance with his nihilistic whim. Afterall, his motivations are scarcely explicated, and when provided they convey deliberate subterfuge; he conceals himself in unpopular, but explicable cynicism. To a point I would grant this explanation of his motivations some credence – to a point. The conversation with the sociology student, following a threesome with her and his wife, regarding how he reacted to the death of the king represents a turning point. To the question he delivers a cynical monologue, disclaiming the very possibility of collective sorrow. Only to adopt the role of interrogator in subsequent scenes with the various troglodyte sub-humans he encounters.
It’s as if the writer anchors himself to a solid foundation, from which his critique flows, contrasting with the nihilistic causticness of earlier scenes. This newfound appreciation for the bases of civilisational life – the subaltern antipode represented by Ostend, in all its filth and decay, serving as an argument via negativa – culminate in fomenting the vengeance of the Father against a rotten society, the microcosm of which is the band, and particularly the betrayal of his family. Or perhaps it’s all arbitrary and meaningless.
The ambiguity of the film is appropriate. For the destiny of the occidental intellectual is equivocal; of all types, this one bears the most responsibility – either for or against decay; either for or against resurrection; either for or against Ostend. These are the questions which face him.