Head Games

Our critic takes on "The Men Who Stare at Goats" and Chris Smith's new doc "Collapse."

There’s no ambivalence in the mix of Chris Smith’s doc “Collapse,” a single-minded scald of alarmist dread that quite organically steals your sleep and your waking peace of mind in ways that horror films, even “Paranormal Activity,” couldn’t dream of. That’s because it’s little more than a coalescence of available facts, organized into a simple nightmare: we’re doomed. The man doing the organizing is Michael Ruppert, an ex-LAPD officer whose past of checkered employment and official character assassination began, he says, when he refused to take part in on-the-job drug smuggling for the CIA. (His marriage, to an apparent agent, dissolved as well.) Since, he’s been an independent newsletter-publishing reporter, and if he began investigating departmental corruption scandals, he ended up prophesying the complete collapse of modern civilization, a process he feels is finally underway, years after he’d forecasted it and had been derided as a “nutlog” for his troubles.

At first, Smith went to interview Ruppert only about CIA drug trading, and then realized the man was his own film, lock, stock and barrel. In a way, “Collapse” is the ultimate conspiracy film, because it’s post-conspiracy — post-9/11, post-Octopus, post-everything. On screen, Smith only farts around a little, in the Errol Morris mode — cutting to archival illustrations and news footage and typewritten bullet points. But otherwise, he sticks to Morris’ primary strategy, and lets Ruppert, in what looks like one harrowingly long, full-frontal, chain-smoking interview, explain his vision, which begins and ends with the crisis of peak oil.

You hear the term and your inner channel-remote searches for another program, but Smith doesn’t let us off the hook: Ruppert enumerates in a degree of detail we don’t really want about how our life as we know it is contingent on oil (plastics, food production, communications, etc., not just transportation) and how that life is already looking at the business end of bankruptcy, shortages, famine and social chaos. It’s a post-apocalyptic thriller comprised only of one man talking, never less than when he suggests that should certain documents be declassified we’d be “building scaffolds” for the likes of Dick Cheney.

There are no footnotes, and despite a few mistakes (Ruppert sounds authoritative about everything, but sorry, there was no NSA during WWII), you have to admit he’s essentially correct about it all, and good luck staring at the ceiling at night afterward. Smith’s film posits a global catastrophe we can no longer avoid, and so it’s not a documentary you wish everyone would see, but only the people you want to fuck up. Ruppert even summarizes our future social madness as falling into Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’ five stages of death; we may be exiting “denial” by now, he guesses, but we’ll be only lucky to ever make it to “acceptance.” No let’s-solve-the-dilemma documentary mollification here. Ruppert recommends growing your own food, now. There’s no point, it seems, in discussing it any further.

Michael Atkinson is our guest critic for the month of November.

“The Men Who Stare at Goats” opens wide on November 6th; “Collapse” will open in New York and will be available simultaneously on VOD starting November 6th.

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