‘Difficult second album syndrome’: why auteurs struggle to follow their debut
It Follows was a tough act to follow. David Robert Mitchell’s magnificently scary teen saga was one of the best horrors of recent years, the sort of movie that’s heralded as “the arrival of a major new talent”. Now Mitchell returns with Under the Silver Lake, and the collective response so far has ranged from “meh” to “huh?”
In the music industry, they would call it “difficult second album syndrome”, but a similar condition seems to afflict film-makers returning after a breakthrough hit. You could also call it “give ’em enough rope” syndrome. Fresh young directors will often find someone waving cash at them and asking: “What else you got?” The answer is often a pet project that was sitting in the bottom drawer because nobody wanted to make it.
The film is about an LA slacker (Andrew Garfield) searching for a missing girl, and – with its myriad movie references, over-convoluted plot and somewhat gratuitous female objectification (which a casual line of dialogue about “the male gaze” doesn’t excuse) – feels like the work of a teenager eager to show how clever they are. This is actually Mitchell’s third feature (his debut was The Myth of the American Sleepover) but, tellingly, he wrote it before It Follows. Had It Follows done worse, there is a good chance this would have stayed in the bottom drawer.
The immediate comparison with Mitchell is Richard Kelly, who broke through with the cult hit Donnie Darko, then squandered his goodwill on its follow-up, Southland Tales – again, an over-ambitious mess of a movie. Kelly has barely worked since. There are plenty of others: Darren Aronofsky had his sci-fi epic The Fountain, which the studios initially backed after the success of Requiem for a Dream. When they realised the scale of the movie – space travel, Mayan temples, Brad Pitt – the cash and the stars ebbed away, leaving Aronofsky to cobble together a lower-budget version. David O Russell is another: he had the idea for his freeform “existential detective movie” I Heart Huckabees years before Three Kings enabled him to make it. Russell later described it as his “midlife crisis movie”.
Sometimes, rising stars can be led astray by the big-budget epic they always wanted to make. Duncan Jones went from Moon and Source Code to the fans-only Warcraft. Justin Kurzel did the same: Snowtown, Macbeth, then Assassin’s Creed. And let’s not forget Josh Trank, who went from indie hit Chronicle to the botched Fantastic Four reboot.
It is striking how many of these directors manage to bounce back or fail upwards, depending on how charitable you’re feeling. Just as Aronofsky or Russell went on to make better movies, you feel Mitchell has plenty more in him. Under the Silver Lake is at least an interesting failure. He deserves another chance, maybe with a bit less rope.