RUBBER (2010)—Albert Camus, this one's for You.

Cinema of Cruelty (Movies for Masochists)

On this week’s deep dive, The Cultists Present Quentin Dupieux’s ‘Rubber’ (2010). Notoriously known as that movie where a tire gains psychokinetic powers and just enough sentience to go on a killing spree, this film often gets tragically mis-labeled as your standard B-rated monster movie horror romp. And yet, Rubber is anything but. Once and best described as ‘Samuel Beckett by way of Roger Corman,’ from surface to core, "Rubber" is a modern staple of absurdist theater lovingly transposed to celluloid. Pulling from classical absurdist plays like Eugene Ionesco’s The Chairs; enacting human-pawn replicas of the weirder particulate behaviorisms of quantum mechanics; and weighing in on the old Aristotle debate on the proper use of The Chorus in Attic dramas, Rubber is A LOT of things. (And all of those things are pretty damn spectacular).

Deep dives for this one include: Albert Camus, Martin Esslin, and The Theater of the Absurd; Absurdism vs. Surrealism; psychokinesis vs. telekinesis; the music of “Mr. Oizo”; The August Schlegel vs. Aristotle approach to interpreting the function of the Greek Chorus; Eugene Ionesco’s use of chairs; Tom Stoppard’s use of the invisible conceit of the actor-audience bond, and, of course, quantum mechanics.

Episode Safe Word: “rationality”