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I think Drive may be a really important movie. A dissection of the concept of a hero... more to come.

I can dig it

Man, what an amazing movie.

I simply can't stop thinking about Drive. And the more I do, the more I think it's a parody of Hollywood action movies. Right down to the pink cursive font of the credits. The first hour which is largely ambient driving through LA, synth pop, and falling in love has the action fans wondering if they're in the wrong theater. Then when the violence comes, it's so gratuitous, it makes you wonder why you were waiting for it. And the way our silent anti hero reacts to the violence is worse. Even though he's killing bad guys, watching him sweating and panting half in the shadows after ripping a man in half makes us wonder if were rooting for the right guy. They took the Clint Eastwood archetype to it's logical extreme. The strong silent hero living in a blank empty apartment until the right girl comes along shouldn't be romantic, it's a sign of mental illness. The Driver was sociopathic, maybe worse. He's billed as the hero, but if there were a sequel he'd be a horror movie villain.

I feel like parody isn't quite the right word for what Driver is. It's certainly showing how Gosling's character is an exceedingly violent man who is scared of what he's capable of. (His rules for driving at first seem like a way to keep him safe, but it's just as likely that he's put them in place to make sure he won't have to become violent.) It's a bare bones, and I mean that in a good way, character study that gets at the core of the action movie hero. The pink font, for me, was simply evocative of the 80s feel that the movie goes after, rather than parodying anything specific since there's no way any action movie would ever use font like that so it's impossible to classify it as parody. I think a more appropriate terming would be an undercutting of action movies.

@ERoBB said:

I simply can't stop thinking about Drive. And the more I do, the more I think it's a parody of Hollywood action movies. Right down to the pink cursive font of the credits. The first hour which is largely ambient driving through LA, synth pop, and falling in love has the action fans wondering if they're in the wrong theater. Then when the violence comes, it's so gratuitous, it makes you wonder why you were waiting for it. And the way our silent anti hero reacts to the violence is worse. Even though he's killing bad guys, watching him sweating and panting half in the shadows after ripping a man in half makes us wonder if were rooting for the right guy. They took the Clint Eastwood archetype to it's logical extreme. The strong silent hero living in a blank empty apartment until the right girl comes along shouldn't be romantic, it's a sign of mental illness. The Driver was sociopathic, maybe worse. He's billed as the hero, but if there were a sequel he'd be a horror movie villain.

I'll take it one step further, not only is this guy an emotionless state in what he does and how he lives, remember his face. It was stoic for the most part, just like the main villain Bernie Rose. They were both one in the same, extreme evil that took each other out. Albert Brooks shaved down his eyebrows even.

I don't know if it was intentional but you get these two caricatures that have no life and they just go through the motions of what they know they're good at, no matter what it is. They aren't human beings.

That's what the movie was trying to show you when Ryan Gosling put on that hideous uncanny valley rubber mask for his stunts, he took off that stoic facade and underneath it was still a stoic facade for a face.

Yeah, it becomes from male power fantasy wish fulfillment "how cool is this guy and his clothes?!" to "I want nothing to do with this!". It didn't glorify crime or violence in any way, especially the elevator scene.

Interesting how the contrast of "A real hero, a real human being" is at the end, in that he's definitely done heroic things for the girl that he loves and yet you have to be pretty horrific to achieve it.