There's Nothing to Solve, You Know?: Origin Stories, Easter Eggs, and Under the Silver Lake
"It's silly wasting your energy on something that doesn't matter."
“…For now, the answers remain hidden, deep below the surface, under the silver lake…”
Sam’s rent is criminally overdue, and he’s wondering what his neighbor’s parrot is saying. “‘Not a friend?’” guesses his unnamed casual sex partner, an actress (Riki Lindhome), who stopped by with lunch and the promise of a quick fuck on the way to an audition. “‘Rotterdam?’” she tries a second time, but still no.
Again and again, Sam (Andrew Garfield)—a messy-haired, disillusioned slacker who once had dreams of being someone who mattered—returns to that bird and its garbled speech emanating from the apartment across from his. The space is occupied by a middle-aged bohemian woman with long grey hair that falls down her back like spider silk, who owns more than one avian pet and frequents her porch topless. Sometimes, her bird—a Yellow-naped amazon—will sound to be quite clearly saying the name “Oliver,” and sometimes it seems to be saying something else entirely; other times, it doesn’t seem to be saying any real word at all.
In Sam’s quest to uncover the endless questions posed by the codes and clues that proliferate his close-knit bubble in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, he’s desperate to believe that this arbitrary creature holds some hidden nugget of truth. “Our world is filled with codes, pacts, user agreements, subliminal messages,” explains the eccentric author (Patrick Fischler) behind the paranoid comic series Under the Silver Lake, who Sam reaches out to for help as he falls down a rabbit hole in his search for a missing woman. But perhaps, if he can just figure out what the bird is saying—this bird… this ordinary, inconsequential animal—everything will suddenly fall into place. If anything can be a clue, then everything is a clue. Coincidences are skeleton keys.
The vast conspiracy at the heart of David Robert Mitchell’s Under the Silver Lake begins with a girl. Sarah (Riley Keough)—Sam’s manic pixie, golden-haired neighbor who gets high and pairs saltine crackers with orange juice—disappears without a trace the day after the two young people finally meet and very nearly have sex. But when Sam returns the next day to consummate their relationship in response to Sarah’s hasty invitation, her apartment is stunningly vacated—save for one lonely box left in the closet, which carries Sarah’s vibrator, three dolls fashioned into the likenesses of the three lead actresses from 1953’s How to Marry a Millionaire, and a polaroid of Sarah.
Sam stashes the latter into his pocket as Sarah’s friend (Zosia Mamet) stops by the abandoned room to pick up the box, this one lingering loose thread from Sarah’s previous life. She closes the door on her way out to reveal a mysterious symbol: two giant diamonds plastered onto the wall and fashioned like an infinity sign. But what does it all mean? From here, Sam forgoes personal hygiene, his sanity, his rent, and any potential employment to keep him from going destitute over solving what happened to a beautiful woman he barely knows. But he soon realizes that she’s embroiled in a wide-reaching cabal that simmers menacingly under the cool, rippling reservoir waters of Silver Lake—uniting threads that one would never think to knot and sowing distrust and obsession in everything from the powers that be to a rising indie rock band.
After being thanklessly dumped on VOD in April 2019, following dual release date pushbacks and a polarizing critical response at Cannes in 2018, Under the Silver Lake found an ironically fitting home on Reddit. There, the same listless young people looking for meaning in a meaningless world—embodied in the film’s chain-smoking, chronically lustful paranoiac—took to dissecting the very film that lampoons them. On r/underthesilverlake, the subreddit for “all those who want to discover the secrets of the movie,” Mitchell’s third feature (succeeding 2010’s The Myth of the American Sleepover and 2014’s It Follows) found its fanbase and a burgeoning cult following.
Hundreds of threads and videos in the subreddit—still going strong to this day—are dedicated to breaking down the potential hidden meaning in the narrative: the character known as the Homeless King’s cloak; the homicidal, humanoid cryptid dubbed the Owl’s Kiss; Sarah’s three Barbie dolls, and the songs by R.E.M. featured on the soundtrack. But Redditors do more than simply posit on the film’s wealth of mysterious iconography and unanswered questions. Some propose that the film is actually a game—that Sam is the Nintendo character Mario, who he does play as at one point in the film. Others connect Sam to Jesus Christ himself. One user shared a link to an article on the recent sexual misconduct allegations of an “L.A. Goth nightclub known for rituals and secrecy.”
Through its various homages and influences (Hitchcock, Lynch, Wilder, Pynchon), Easter eggs (including a scene where Garfield bats away an Amazing Spider-Man comic), and intentionally aimless subplots and puzzles, Under the Silver Lake invites the same feverishly gratuitous analyses that it satirizes—those that were fostered in the pop culture landscape it chastises and, at the same time, wholeheartedly aesthetically embraces and pines for. Or, is this eagerness to search for answers less symptomatic of the film than of a culture at large trained like Pavlov’s dog to hunt for clues in paint-by-numbers cinema? Or, perhaps, is it a bit of both? Thus, Under the Silver Lake can just as easily be associated with and examined through the lens of Reddit and QAnon as it can be the reference-indulgent state of current franchise films, which nurtures the production of airless entertainment under the guise of prestige art.
Among other contemptible things—a direct pipeline to sell merchandise, a means to milk creatively finite narratives to a lucrative pulp, a path towards dominating entertainment until there’s only one corporation controlling it—modern blockbusters arguably function most efficiently as a way to curdle “art” into unambiguous trivia games, engendering articles with headlines like “20 Things You May Have Missed…” and YouTube videos that promise “Endings Explained.” Blockbuster films and pop culture spin-offs have become vessels to recognize past things and anticipate more of them; display cases of acquired IP. Our consumption of entertainment is littered with intentional hidden messages meant for both hungry audiences and the studio executives monitoring how voraciously we tear them apart.
Sam’s sweet, soft features gifted to him by Andrew Garfield, penchant for flannels and cardigans, and mop of chestnut hair that begs to be tousled grant him an “aw, shucks” persona and believability as an empathetic and even desirable leading man, despite the fact that he’s an odious louse. The women in the film are kept largely unnamed as Sam never bothers to ask who they are—not even Sarah, whose name he only learns once she’s beckoned by a roommate—while his salacious appetites and desire to track Sarah down render women merely tools for lustful engagement, code-breaking, or both. Consequently, the often excessive male gaze of the camera is not emblematic of the filmmakers, but of the way our protagonist sees the world. He’s prone to irrational aggression and sudden bursts of violence; he’s voyeuristic, predatory, and cruel to those weaker or less fortunate than him.
Clues have led Reddit sleuths and film fans alike to suspect that he may be the serial dog killer who’s been terrorizing dog owners and butchering innocent pets across Silver Lake. And yet, Sam sees himself as the oppressed hero of his story, trying to save a damsel in distress and take down a fearsome conspiracy. In this way, it’s easy to link Sam to the brainwashed QAnon fanatics who believe that they, alongside former president Donald Trump, will save the world from pedophiles and child sex traffickers. But Sam also gleans roots from modern-day nerd culture, still tending to its persecution complex towards the mainstream media that once chastised it, even though these days the two are one and the same.
Sam is the very bully he seeks to destroy—the same villain complicit in a toxic society that cultivated the existence of a (fictional) billionaire suicide cult that Sarah was lured into joining. Because of this, Sam navigates the path to her whereabouts with the ease of the handsome, kind-faced white man that he is; flitting effortlessly from exclusive rooftop party to underground club and one beautiful woman to the next because he looks like such a nice, innocuous guy.
But those who see through his disguise—or do not go quite so willingly—are manhandled and demeaned, Sam embodying not the standard vision of machismo, but the malicious, self-effacing “Nice Guy.” A term defined by Urban Dictionary as someone (usually a man) who believes that “because he behaves in a certain way the world owes him for his actions,” the Nice Guy typically sees basic kindness as currency for sex. Through his unreasonable acts of aggression, we understand that Sam feels he deserves the information he seeks. He not only is the hero, but should be—lest we forget the root cause of his quest having been the missed opportunity to have sex with Sarah.
And, unlike in real life, the clues that Sam unearths bear steady fruit, no matter how unbelievable or contrived. Everyone Sam meets either knows each other, or knows Sarah, or both—all of them inexplicably linked by an up-and-coming hipster rock band called Jesus and the Brides of Dracula. Upon being pushed further down the black hole of delusion by Fischler’s comic author (an Easter egg itself linking the film to the similarly conspiratorial, Hollywood-set Mulholland Drive), Sam eventually decides to seek meaning in the band’s hit single, “Turning Teeth.” Doing so unlocks a code that leads him to a chain of vacant, underground bunkers in Los Angeles, overseen by the aforementioned Homeless King. While exhibiting the kind of frenzied mania and paranoia that might nevertheless signify a mental illness lurking somewhere underneath, Sam is unfailingly correct in the connections and discoveries that ultimately lead him to an intricate scheme concocted by Hollywood’s rich and famous—one that QAnon devotees could only ever dream of bringing to light.
“There’s nothing to solve, you know? It’s silly wasting your energy on something that doesn’t matter,” explains Balloon Girl (Grace van Patten), one of the many young women Sam pursues for both pleasure and explanations, at an underground dance club. “We have this tiny little window where we can have fun, fuck, be free. Life is too short, right?” she proffers rhetorically, before Sam, stirred by her brief monologue, implores her to dance with him. For a moment, as Sam and the girl gyrate wildly and uninhibited to the sounds of R.E.M.’s “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?,” Sam fleetingly frees himself from the fetters of conspiracy and basks in the liberation of his young life.
For a moment, Balloon Girl’s words seem to penetrate his addled mind, as he sheds his paranoiac skin and revels loosely, unburdened by tangible nor mental limitations. But in the midst of their cavorting, Balloon Girl suggests that the two of them should fuck, and near-instantaneously the spell is broken. Sam, having earlier ingested the entirety of an edible, rushes to the toilets to purge. He purges himself of carefree bohemian thoughts to return sober to the task at hand. The promise of sex is once again pulled tauntingly from his grasp, as if his own body is revolting against him, compelled to pursue what it believes to be the bigger picture.
Matt Cipolla writes for The Spool that “throughout the film is a fetishization of mass media without titillation, most sex scenes tinged with a fascination of the elite instead of the human body.” In our current world of sexless superheroes, it makes all the more sense that sex should be consistently unattainable for our hero as he indulges in this fatuous quest. The film wreaks of sweaty, carnal impulse and yet Sam only engages in intercourse at the very beginning, then once again at the very end. In between, even masturbation cannot fulfill him. A neutered mirror for our dominant pop culture portrayal of sex, and a punishment for the man so bewitched by it.
“It’s an entire generation of men obsessed with video games, secret codes… space aliens,” Sam’s nameless hipster friend (Topher Grace) muses. “Used to be, 100 years ago,” he continues, “you know, any moron could kinda wander to the woods and look behind a rock or some shit and discover some cool new thing. You know, not anymore. Where’s the mystery that makes everything worthwhile? We crave mystery ‘cause there’s none left.” It’s a sentiment both damning of the very people who worship the film and made ironic due to the character who espouses it, who, at one point uses a remote-controlled drone to spy on an emotionally fraught woman undressing in her home. But Under the Silver Lake is self-aware of its content and its audience, made all too apparent during a scene in which Sam’s search for answers leads him to an idyllic mansion.
From the hidden message within “Turning Teeth” and his liaisons with rising young actresses who moonlight as sex workers to get by, Sam is pointed towards the elusive residence of a person known only as the Songwriter. There, he learns that an ancient man is behind the most beloved music of all time. Songs like “Don’t Stop Believin’,” the Cheers theme, “Push It,” and, most upsettingly to Sam, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” were not concocted from the minds of singular artistic spirits but of one gluttonous hack—simultaneously tasked with hiding messages within lyrics meant for certain people, as with “Turning Teeth.”
But when Sam confronts the nameless old ghoul, it becomes clear that the real-life identity of the actor portraying the ghastly, decrepit millionaire is not of an elder performer, but of someone younger caked under extensive makeup and prosthetics. As a result, the audience spends half of the sequence endeavoring to discern what famous face dwells beneath the artificial wrinkles and liver spots waiting to be recognized—the only plausible explanation for why the filmmakers would go out of their way to hide an actor underneath such a considerable façade.
But the actor, Jeremy Bobb—whose credits include mostly television roles like The Knick and Jessica Jones, and occasional minor film spots—is no A-lister, nor even B-lister. He’s not a household name. He’s just a guy. Another meaningless puzzle meant to toy with an audience trained to be toyed with. “This ugly old man, me, I am the voice of your generation,” the Songwriter sneers at Sam over a melancholy piano melody of “Where is My Mind?,” another song from his hack oeuvre. “Your art, your writing, your culture is the shell of other men’s ambitions. There is no rebellion; there’s only me earning a paycheck.” The second act climaxes as Sam, distraught and loath to accept that the art he holds dear is rendered creatively meaningless, attacks the Songwriter savagely and smashes his head with Kurt Cobain’s own guitar, popping the old man’s false face like a grisly pimple as gore splatters Sam’s body.
The Songwriter is a gruesome caricature, but one which conveys the truth. We are puppeteered, one way or another, by pop culture—by men far older, far richer than ourselves who don’t care for preserving art, or independent film, or physical media; who are only concerned with subsuming culture for themselves as it devolves into a crass series of things to be recognized. Sam is no hero, no outsider trying to destroy the system. Sam is the system. He’s another gear helping the wheel to turn as it eats our world alive; another devoted fanboy defending a billion-dollar corporation. Sam’s act of violence against the Songwriter is not an act of revolution, but one of a spoiled child lashing out—the Songwriter, with his grotesque, mock-up visage, just as much a cog as Sam is.
The ultimate conclusion of Sam’s quest leads him to a solitary hut in the Hollywood Hills, where he learns that Sarah is one of many beautiful young women who’ve chosen to “ascend” by ritual suicide in groups of three, each woman accompanied by one wealthy, powerful man. The underground bunker system that Sam discovers concealed underneath L.A. is meant for them to go down into and then die, enclosed with a layer of concrete and containing enough food to last them six months. When Sam is granted permission by one such powerful man he meets in the hut—referred to in the credits as the Final Man (Don McManus)—to phone Sarah and speak to her one last time, Sam openly expresses worry for her, wondering if she made the right choice. “Well, there’s no getting out now,” Sarah tells him serenely, as any shred of brief panic washes from her pretty face, “so I might as well make the best of it.”
It makes sense that Sam should end up successful—that he should get what he wants and the answers that he seeks—and yet still find his quest rendered meaningless. Sam is told that the messages were never meant for him and yet he searched for them anyway because, well, what else was he supposed to do? We’re a culture allergic to the unknown. Art laden with puzzles and mysteries must certainly be in need of someone to solve them; otherwise, what else could they be other than plot holes?
YouTube channels like CinemaSins have found success in creating videos meant to reduce film to a series of technical narrative inconsistencies. Franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Wars, and Stranger Things use nostalgia and recognizable IP to pump streams of serotonin into our monkey brains, and to become tools that allow for audience dissection until only a pop cultural husk remains. A question previously left unanswered becomes money in someone’s pocket, another spinoff or soft reboot, another Hot Topic t-shirt or YouTube explainer. There can be no mythos in popular cinema, no black void of beguiling mystique. “Where’s the mystery that makes everything worthwhile?” Sam’s friend had asked and, well, the irony is that we don’t want it. We want origin stories and Easter eggs to give us everything and nothing at all.
It’s even more ironic, then, that the film is set in 2011 (made clear through the phone apps used and the news broadcasted), one year before Marvel’s The Avengers would be released in theaters—spiraling the film industry down its current infatuation with extended universes, and kicking off Disney’s ever-expanding stronghold on the cinematic and television landscapes. Under the Silver Lake yearns for the pop culture of decades past—of Sunset Boulevard, of Old Hollywood actresses, of femme fatales and hard-boiled noir; of sun-kissed dreams and obscurity.
Still, the evil was always skulking deep below the surface, the machinations that would foster the Hollywood of today; the old executives in their death cult sacrificing young women for some greater purpose. Using allusions, homage, references, and Easter eggs, a skeletal structure is erected to satirize Hollywood’s present-day mutation, with a protagonist who embodies its naïve and unflinching crusaders. Under the Silver Lake does not hate its audience, but nevertheless knows them and what they’ve become. “You’re living in a carnival,” the Final Man tells Sam, “throwing plastic rings at oversized pop bottles, hoping to win a prize.” *
This was fantastic! Absolutely worthy of convincing franchise obsessed folks to see their internal absurdity
Well put. I’ve been trying and stumbling to explain why I became fascinated with this move, and you said it beautifully.