Notes on Rubber

NO REASON, SOME REASON, LOTS OF REASON
There is a kind of narrative that must be played out as long as the wheelchair bound spectator (Wings Hauser) lives, and a narrative is a kind of waterfall of reasons, fundamentally (this movie has many of those rocks which jut out from the otherwise smooth surface behind the waterfall). Things can make sense without being sensible, or as a friend told me after watching Rubber a second time, "There are parts of this movie I like without knowing why."

The movie begins with a series of chairs set up for no apparent reason that are destroyed for no apparent reason by an oncoming car along the desert road, but one of the spectators later questions why the chairs were destroyed when they could have been sat in - this joke begins a series of internarrative logic based paradoxes which expand in humorous and interesting ways through the movie's duration (by the way, the movie begins not with this car, but I believe with the man holding the binoculars, which is a weird image, later given reason when the spectators use the binoculars in an impossible way made possible by internarrative logic: it's how they watch the movie they create by watching it).

IS ROBERT INNOCENT OR MALEVOLENT?
The #1 reason I went to see Rubber a second time was to have a good time. The #2 reason was to investigate an alternate interpretation of Robert's character which was proposed to me over roasted bone marrow at the Little Bird Bistro on my birthday. Attempting to describe the movie for a friend, I began by stating that it's "about a malevolent tire that emerges from the desert without a past and embarks on a senseless mission of violence." Whether it was the special day, the bone marrow, or naive arrogance, I remember feeling that I was at the beginning of a pretty good description, which is sometimes difficult to do on the spot and unrehearsed. Only, then a friend across the table interrupted me, "Ahhhh. I don't know," he said, perhaps wagging his finger, "I thought Robert was an innocent." "Me too," someone else said. "[Something about a tire's destructive nature and the fulfillment of natural urges]" my first friend said. "[Something about lions in the wild hunting for food,]" another friend said. I defended my position okay enough, but I don't believe I changed minds just then. Later of course there were things I wished I'd said, but didn't say then, but said, with appropriate conviction, in muddled whispers to myself while showering or aimlessly walking. Many people don't appreciate other people stirring misunderstandings or conflicting viewpoints, however, and so it's been my own battle since then.

Robert’s a pretty malicious character, but he’s also likeable. What was your inspiration for that?
Quentin Dupieux: Honestly, when I wrote it, it was only supposed to be an evil character. In my mind it was like, ‘Okay, it’s just the bad guy,’ but then, when I started to shoot it, I had to deal with a tire and there’s nothing evil about a tire. So I had to change my mind a little bit (laughs), and when we did the first tests with the remote controlled tire – I had the camera attached to a stick – and it was just following the remote controlled tire in the field and, at this point, the tire was like a dog. The way it was rolling and behaving in the field, it was like a dog. So I decided, ‘Okay, it’s like a dog. It has to be like a dog.’ That’s why there’s shots where it drinks water, things like that. Suddenly, it was not just an evil character. It was more like a stupid dog. That was the inspiration.

Dupieux's answer seems to validate both interpretations to some extent. I wonder how different it would be if Robert had a face, or at least eyes, and what that face or those eyes would make us believe, or rather, how those eyes or that face would strengthen the force of our beliefs. Ultimately the answer is that Robert is fictional and neither malevolent nor innocent, but rather a character obeying laws appointed by a writer constructing a narrative, and given the facelessness of Robert and the multiple original concepts for the inanimate object, it's the best answer. I also submit that this answer is no fun.

EVIDENCE OF MALEVOLENCE (can I say I'm so, so pleased with this note's heading?)
1. Robert explodes heads.
2. There is a montage of people with destroyed heads. These people are strewn about streets and sidewalks and seem unconnected to the narrative trajectory, i.e. the love story between Robert and Sheila, which motivates many of Robert's actions.
3. Robert doesn't attempt to destroy trees, buildings, cars, etc., and if he was truly innocent wouldn't he not be making these types of distinctions while expressing his inborn state of destructiveness?
4. It's true that tires are kind of destructive, but a) it's not like their principal purpose is destruction, like a bullet or missile or something, and b) if you view a tire as destructive it's only because of the way humans use them (they put them on their cars and drive over surfaces and sometimes minor obstacles), and hence it's a nurtured or acquired state, because if you see a tire just fucking lying on a store shelf not on a car or anything and like shiver from fear of personal injury caused by the lifeless tire you're a fucking weirdo.

THIS IS TOO CONFUSED TO COUNT BUT
My initial confrontation with the question of Robert as like a lion was to quip, "A lion doesn't seem innocent when it's attacking you," which was good enough to cause the group to consider, but upon review it really seems more like fate or circumstance is the malevolent force and not the lion, because the lion continues to behave as a lion, lacking aspects of self-awareness and premeditation that enable its action to be labeled malevolent, or at least its kill to be called murder. But for me this opened a rabbit hole into other considerations, primarily I began to wonder what animal first ate another animal, what was the first one with teeth that bit into another living creature, and whether the witness sensed on a primal level (which was just the normal level at that stage I guess) something wrong about carnivorousness, and like signaled with unspoken emotional communications that an abrupt change in the perceptions and realities of relationships and communities was taking place, if the animal witness thought, even without advanced levels of self-awareness and certain reasoning faculties, "this is going to lead us to horrible long-term consequences, this single act here" and if the animal trembled, really trembled. It seems to me the origins of senseless killings are tethered to the origins of purposeful killings, because when no one is eating anyone else, and then someone eats someone else, isn't that the beginning of malevolence? It would benefit the conversation to offer definitions of the words on trial:

malevolent |məˈlevələnt|
adjective
having or showing a wish to do evil to others

and

evil |ˈēvəl|
adjective
profoundly immoral and malevolent
• (of a force or spirit) embodying or associated with the forces of the devil
• harmful or tending to harm
• (of something seen or smelled) extremely unpleasant
noun
profound immorality, wickedness, and depravity, esp. when regarded as a supernatural force
• a manifestation of this, esp. in people's actions
• something that is harmful or undesirable

and

innocent |ˈinəsənt|
adjective
1 not guilty of a crime or offense
• [ predic. ] ( innocent of) without; lacking
• [ predic. ] ( innocent of) without experience or knowledge of
2 [ attrib. ] not responsible for or directly involved in an event yet suffering its consequences
3 free from moral wrong; not corrupted
• simple; naive
4 not intended to cause harm or offense; harmless
noun
an innocent person, in particular
• a pure, guileless, or naive person
• a person involved by chance in a situation, esp. a victim of crime or war
• ( the Innocents) the young children killed by Herod after the birth of Jesus (Matt. 2:16).

An animal is harming the other animal it eats, even if it's within its nature to eat it, though it's free from moral wrong, and as it doesn't know the potential depths of its own consciousness it can't be expected to grasp the potential depth of another consciousness. The thing about mankind is we've brought efficiency and numbers to the act of killing, and introduced the term murder - which I definitely don't think animals do, murder, given the premeditation aspect (though it's kind of cute to imagine lions hunched over a table covered in blueprints, cigars in their lion mouths) - but I reject the claim that this makes us extra evil, or only extra evil, because we're also capable of extreme tenderness, compassion, empathy, mercy, rectitude, etc. We're simply extra capable creatures who possess sufficient reasoning faculties that we hope will eventually win the battle over our extra harmful potentialities. The thing about the cycle of life and nature and shit is that advancement and evolution entail injustices that must be balanced by nature, and I think it's interesting that human self-awareness and reasoning allow us to kill plentifully, but also love exceptionally and to amazing degrees. Robert demonstrates an advanced degree of self-awareness, a component of humanistic reasoning, by loving Sheila for purposes beyond evolutionary or survival advantages. She doesn't pet him, take care of him, etc., though she doesn't attack him either. Robert's consciousness lacks a sense of morality, perhaps, but I believe his knowledge of love is superior to, for example, King Kong's. Robert's story is like the story of King Kong - Robert is taken from the jungle of unconsciousness into the civilization of consciousness - and they're both captivated by a single woman - but King Kong behaves like a real animal, and is only violent in animalistic senses, while Robert demonstrates several human and superhuman qualities that could potentially result in culpability for his actions, which extend beyond self-preservation. I'd have dinner with King Kong, but not Robert.

EVIDENCE OF INNOCENCE (AND EXPRESSIONS OF PERSONAL BIAS)
1. Well, it's not like lions confusedly attack trees and buildings (please link to appropriate article w/pictures if they do). They attack things which pose a threat to them, and Robert makes peoples' heads explode because they are his potential threat (but was the water bottle a threat, was the glass bottle, and was the goddamn bunny?).
2. As Dupieux discovered when he began to consider the tire as an evil entity, a tire is not inherently evil. Think of the lion again, and think of training a lion to attack, which is weird so downgrade and think of an attack dog: the dog takes on a violent purpose due to conditioning and training. Robert is trained to destroy through a past life as a car's tire (as seen, in fact, during a flashback after the pool drowning incident). The lesson of destruction is forced upon it through prolonged experiences that shape its view of reality, made to absorb violence at the center of its being, its nature corrupted by man. I think Robert demonstrates signs of advanced consciousness and self-awareness, for example emulating Sheila by showering (to shower, Robert must have used his mind powers to turn the water knob), swimming, and watching television, and I think these evidences of advanced consciousness rule out this consideration, but maybe not.

EVIDENCE OF THE NARRATIVE BEING THE CORE OF ROBERT'S ESSENCE AND THE SUBSTANCE OF HIS DESTRUCTIVE NATURE
1. Robert becomes inert (at the bottom of the pool, though, a kind of multiply motivated inertia I admit) when the narrative is believed to be concluded due to the deaths of the spectators. Once this is disproved and reported, he re-animates and kills the hotel owner.
2. Seems like, in the same scene, he should have exploded the head of Lieutenant Chad (Stephen Spinella) to eliminate the brunt of his woes.

EVIDENCE THAT ROBERT COMES TO EXIST ON THIS NARRATIVE PLANE AS A CREATION OF THE NARRATIVE AND THEREFORE HAS INTRINSIC CHARACTERISTICS WORTHY OF DISCUSSION
1. Robert, in his new form, explodes the head of the wheelchair man and continues his journey (towards Los Angeles!).