Most documentary-style narrative filmmaking tends to fall in one of two categories: the mockumentary comedy or the found-footage horror. 2012’s Project X is most interesting for its Rorschach Test ability to fall into either category, depending on the audience. It’s got a Spring Breakers or The Real Cancun quality about it, in that you either see it as a simulation of a fun party or a simulation of Hell, mostly depending on whether you’re still a teenager when you watch it. It’s unquestionable that producer Todd Phipps set out to make a modernized 2010s boner comedy—filtering some of his Hangover-era bro humor with Jackass-style physical stunts—but the result is so monstrously grotesque that he instead ended up delivering the nightmare version of Superbad, by way of The Blair Witch Project.
Thomas Mann (of Me and Earl and The Dying Girl infamy) stars as a high school nerd whose parents are leaving town in the week leading up to his 17th birthday. His two mouthbreathing besties decide that this is the perfect opportunity to climb the social ladder by throwing a once-in-a-lifetime rager, hoping of course to get laid in the process. Notice and notoriety of the party quickly spreads outside of the school, however, to the point where anyone & everyone who chugs liquor & pills in Pasadena, CA shows up at the overwhelmed teen’s home, effectively destroying it in a party gone way out of bounds. The vibe is fun enough at the start, with all the DJs, skinny-dippers, and beer-shotgunners needed to make for a memorable night in these otherwise sheltered kids’ lives. A baby-faced Miles Teller even makes an appearance as the party’s celebrity guest. Then, the vibe sours. The family car is driven into the swimming pool. The family dog is ritually tortured by drunken goons. Fireworks are set off indoors. The neighborhood drug dealer shows up with a military-grade flamethrower. News helicopters circle the chaos. By the end of the night, it’s not a party at all; it’s a riot.
Project X is less interesting for its narrative than it is for its technique. Before the party starts, you can already guess exactly what’s going to happen to Thomas & his goons, right down to his “It isn’t what it looks like” romantic crisis when his lifelong crush catches him losing his virginity to an anonymous hottie. The picture’s dark, anarchic energy is mostly due to the experiment of its shooting style, in which Phillips & crew built a small replica of a Pasadena neighborhood so they could shoot an actual rager party across multiple homes, handing digicams, smartphones, and Blackberries to attendees to document the chaos from as many angles as possible. It’s like an evil mutation of what Jonathan Demme accomplished in Rachel Getting Married: staging an intimate melodrama within the raucous, spontaneous atmosphere of a real-life party. Only, I doubt the Rachel Getting Married set reeked so heavily of Taaka vodka & Axe body spray. The simple kids-getting-laid story Project X tells, then, is less of the main focus than it is an excuse for endless montages of flashlit hedonism, straining at every moment to make it seem fun to make out with a stranger you just watched throw up on the lawn.
If there’s any continued cultural significance to Project X that’s lasted past its contemporary inspiration for similar out-of-control block parties IRL (despite Warner Bros. slapping a Jackass-style “Do not try this at home” message on the opening title card), it’s in its time-capsule document of the so-called “Indie Sleaze” aesthetic. You’d think its location on the wrong coast and the wrong decade would exclude it from an official Indie Sleaze designation, but that’s only because it took a decade for that scene’s influence to trickle out far enough into a mainstream to make it into a major motion picture from a big-name Hollywood producer. Despite the LFMAO-bro atmosphere of the party they soundtrack, the DJs pepper in hits from LCD Soundsystem, Animal Collective, The XX, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs to establish an unearned sense of indie-scene cool, which combines with the crime-scene lighting of the digi-era cinematography to approximate an authentic Indie Sleaze aesthetic. It just falls heavy on the “sleaze” end of that cultural marker, turning your stomach with the bro’d-out, gross-out behavior of every dipshit involved.
If you want to see the Lawful Good version of this same experiment, check out the Beastie Boys concert film Awesome; I Fuckin’ Shot That!, in which the beloved-by-all rap trio distributed digicams to random members of their audience to capture the good-vibes party they put on in Madison Square Garden from every angle possible. Project X is more of a bad-vibes-only Chaotic Evil proposition, like chugging Everclear in the parking lot outside a Kanye West concert. Just try not to splash puke on your own shoes.
-Brandon Ledet
Swampflix 