The Parrot Isn’t Saying Anything: How the 2024 U.S. Election Has Proven ‘Under the Silver Lake’ to be Right All Along

Election fraud. A migrant crime wave. Immigrants eating pets. FEMA exploiting hurricane survivors. The Democrats controlling the weather. These are just a few of the widely circulated conspiracy theories that have fueled right-wing discourse surrounding the 2024 election cycle—entirely fabricated narratives that all but assuredly played a hand in the American people welcoming Donald Trump back into the White House for a second term. The American public has always had a place for conspiracy theories in the election cycle ecosystem, but the rise of rampant social media algorithms and warped groupthink that assist in spawning the likes of groups like QAnon has all but made such conspiracies a primary focus point of running a political campaign—to positive effect if you’re in the position of the new far-right, extremist version of the Republican party that has emerged in the wake of Trumpism, and to cataclysmic disaster for anyone else attempting to run a campaign based on reality.

Of course, there are myriad reasons why sitting Vice President and President-hopeful Kamala Harris lost against Donald Trump, some that can be attributed to Harris’s own campaign strategy and the public’s association of her with a historically unpopular Democratic administration (this, despite the practical, effective efforts made by Joe Biden and Harris to strengthen the American working class and reign in raging price hikes and inflation, but I digress). But there’s no way to talk about our current era of politics without addressing the big, nonexistent elephant in the room: misinformation, and the way a large swath of the American electorate is now more susceptible than ever to information that is slightly tweaked to fit an ideology, or outright wrong. 

Plenty are blameless when it comes to consuming this information—victims of a world unprepared for oligarchs from Big Tech’s unchecked control over the digital sphere. But there are others whose shoulders the blame should fall on squarely—intentional bad actors purposefully fabricating and sharing false information to engender a sense of uncertainty and chaos within our discourse, and those who genuinely believe these theories—ready to believe anything to help them make sense of a caustic political and social environment that doesn’t seem to make much sense anymore, and that will let them engage in simple confirmation bias without having to have their beliefs challenged. The latter group has had me thinking about director David Robert Mitchell’s 2019 film Under the Silver Lake. 

Released under a bungled rollout from A24 that saw the film go mostly straight to VOD after a tepid response following its Cannes premiere and, assuredly, stuck with a distributor that wasn’t sure how to widely market its strange, meandering rambles, Under the Silver Lake is a film that’s never quite received the flowers it deserved. Though watching the thing, it’s immediately easy to understand the divisive response that generated and difficult to believe that this would have had any real success under a traditional theatrical release (this is not to let A24 off the hook for never allowing me or most anyone else to see this in a movie theater, those bastards). It follows in the footsteps of the cryptic LA noirs of years past, those both surreal and hazy—look toward the likes of Mulholland Drive, Inherent Vice, and The Long Goodbye to discover the realm of inscrutable mystery and dipshit, strung-out odyssey that is propelling this tale of a perpetually stoned and horny slacker behind on his rent but nevertheless consumed by the titillating enigma of clues pointing him to some greater mystery that lives within the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. 

That slacker is named Sam and he’s played by Andrew Garfield, who ingeniously subverts his handsome nice-guy persona into that of a disheveled layabout who likes to spy on his topless neighbor, beat up children who have aggrieved him, and fall in love with every girl he comes across while believing there’s some greater machinations at work in a society that wants to convince everyone to play along as normal. He’s also perpetually out of a job and apparently stinks.

Sam has an almost-intimate night with his new neighbor Sarah (Riley Keough), who he’s been keeping his binoculars trained on from his balcony, and he follows through on her invitation to come hang out with her the following day—the issue being that upon arriving that morning, Sam discovers that the apartment has been vacated. Not one to leave such a mystery unsolved—or perhaps not one to allow himself to be spurned so callously (“Maybe she just didn’t like you,” says his landlord)—solving this puzzle becomes the backbone of Sam’s life, propelled by secret symbols and signals that lead him down an impenetrable rabbit hole.

The joke is that Sam mostly seems to be using this as a meaningless distraction. The film is bookended with reminders that he’s due to be evicted from his apartment, and he’s constantly faced with the pressures of being an adult with responsibilities impeding his desire to…not do that. In fact, this grown-up world is so mind-numbing, so rigged against the regular person, that something else has to be going on—the clues are all around us, in everything you watch, listen to, read. Someone else has to be pulling the strings, and it has to be connected to this girl that Sam missed out on sleeping with. What a coincidence.  

This is a central motivator for real-world engagement with conspiracy theories as well. Regular life is frustrating, mundane, and unfair. It becomes a lot easier to tolerate the slights of your day-to-day—especially if you’re someone of poor economic means—if you have an invented boogeyman to rage against, to assign the blame for the gradual deterioration of societal frameworks. This becomes actively insidious when weaponized by propaganda pushers to make that boogeyman a marginalized group. The Haitian immigrants of Springfield, Illinois make for a great scapegoat for a political party that sells itself on the policy proposal of mass deportation to restore America to a non-violent, “civilized” way of life, though two seconds of research will reveal that the association of immigrants with an uptick in crime is certifiably false. 

Sam’s search for revelations isn’t particularly politically motivated, and Mitchell’s film is more actively about the vapidity of LA and the folly of trying to crack the codes of the elite within the entertainment industry. Nevertheless, Sam’s base incentives to begin his search have real-world analogs that extend into the theories surrounding the 2024 political sphere. Sam is fabricating his own conspiracy and assigning a sense of importance and urgency to it that makes it dangerous and essential to him, merely because it will allow him to exist with his ideological framework left unchallenged. This is a facet exacerbated to an even more dangerous degree in the widespread theories that have been floated during this election cycle with the prevalence of social media, particularly the Wild West experience of attempting to navigate X, the site formerly known as Twitter that was bought out by Tesla-owning billionaire oligarch Elon Musk who turned it into an echo chamber for far-right hate speech and who is directly associated with the Trump campaign, that allows pure disinformation to run rampant. Fake news is being disseminated widely and expeditiously, constantly—to the point that those who see through the lies and those who engage with it in earnest seem to be living in two entirely separate realities, unable to agree on what’s even happening in our world. 

Of course, one of the genius touches of Under the Silver Lake is that Sam does slowly unravel a few disparate, weird goings-on, including investigations into a local pet serial killer called The Dog Killer, encountering a seemingly supernatural serial killer called the Owl’s Kiss, discovering an old homicidal aristocrat seemingly behind a large cohort of society’s favorite pieces of music, and a cult seeking to be delivered to a higher plane of existence where Sam ultimately discovers Sarah. She’s not interested in being saved—she made her choice, it’s too late to walk back on it, and Sam’s belief that she was interested in him was misplaced anyway. He wanted to believe it, and he invented a narrative where that was true. The only thing he learns by the end of the movie is that nothing will change from his discoveries. He’s still the same broke, conspiracy-obsessed loser that can’t pay his rent, and that doesn’t have a girl that’s interested in him past a regular friendly fuck from his regular hookup played by Riki Lindhome. Nothing is learned, nothing is gained. The world is run by a bunch of weird rich freaks, there are dangerous red herrings that distract from that fact, but this is something that is fundamentally already known. What is there to do about it? 

While hanging out with his similarly creepy, blowhard (and unnamed) friend played by Topher Grace, Sam finds himself in a conversation about the depressing reality of their world. Grace’s character asks the question that becomes the skeleton key for Mitchell’s societal observations that he communicates through Sam’s quest: “Where’s the mystery that makes everything worthwhile? We crave mystery because there’s none left.”

We know our world is run by an insular circle of rich oligarchs. We know these same rich people engaged in shocking activities the public isn’t privy to. Society wants easy answers and that’s why it’s so convenient to fall for the narratives devised by a man who seems to have the simple answers to complex problems—the man who has an R next to his name and won’t make people self-reflect about why they vote for that letter without a second thought. Sure, there are hurricane machines and secret DNC agents installed at voting booths to steer the election in their favor. That makes more sense than the fact that the world is unjust and is being foundationally ruined by big-business price-gouging, insufficient housing supply, and tech autocrats looking to obfuscate reality while lining their pockets. No matter how outlandish, anything is better than the truth. (To be fair, liberals have proven just as prone to believing conspiracy theories in the aftermath of the election, but at least these narratives aren’t spearheaded by the political candidate at the head of their party affiliation.)

A recurring motif in Under the Silver Lake is a parrot owned by Sam’s neighbor that constantly repeats the same sound. It almost sounds like a word. It could be saying a few different things, but it’s a bit too unintelligible to make out. Mitchell offers this mystery to the audience to make up their own minds about—could the parrot be the essential clue that ties together everything Sam has found? The movie returns to it multiple times—it must mean something. The answer is indicative of Sam’s futile quest and the insipidity of our culture’s willingness to validate preposterous, sometimes knowingly volatile stretches of the imagination: the parrot isn’t saying anything.

Under the Silver Lake is available to rent on Prime Video or streamed with a YouTube primetime subscription.

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Trace Sauveur

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