Brick: The Art of Seduction

“Maybe I’ll Just Sit Here and Bleed at You”

It seems to me that the action of “seduction” is reserved for stories of love or eroticism. However, underneath its seedy surface level application lies a simple definition: “to attract powerfully”.

A sunshine noir in a high school uniform, Brick has no apparent audience. Though Rian Johnson’s hardboiled directorial debut may not be a steamy romance or sexual thriller, there is a certain sense of seductiveness exemplified by its whodunit narrative. A youngish Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars as Brendan Frye, a private investigator/high-schooler hybrid, who involves himself in a drug ring operation in order to investigate the murder of a former flame. The rest of the characters exist in the same limbo archetypes. They are drug dealers, murderers, detectives, femme fatales, and the only thing saying that they are high school students is the circumstances of the film.

Brick never grounds itself in reality, and it has no intention for doing so. It is for this unwavering devotion to its style and genre that Brick is an incredible viewing experience. Just like we as an audience choose to eventually give in to the seductive pressures of the film, Brendan also chooses to continue his journey in uncovering the truth behind the murder. When thrust into a movie world that is both comfortably familiar and uniquely foreign, audiences must choose their level of participation. How much am I going to allow myself to give in seduction?

From the Spanish-Western sounds of the film’s main theme, to the brash and reserved Brendan Frye, to its consistency in slick visual themes and camera movements, Brick uses every technique in its arsenal to invite audiences to open up to the strangeness of its circumstance— a high school murder mystery where everyone and no one is actually playing the role of a student.

I call this seduction, and not persuasion or enticement for a couple of reasons. Persuasion involves some knowledge of what you are being sold. In this case, Brick’s mystery both in its plot, its form, and its tone leaves you with very little to go off of. How can you be persuaded of something you are not fully aware of? In order to persuade, the film must make a clear case for itself giving you the reasons (whether it be cinematography or tone) as to why you should buy in to it. Brick does not do that. It is a film that could care less if you liked it or not.

Enticement, another word that could substitute “seduction”, seems to imply an emotion. It implies some kind of pleasure or advantage to giving in to whatever is being offered. Brick remains at about the same level of emotion throughout. It does not necessarily want to impress or please its viewers. At many times, a lot of onscreen actions by many characters are incredibly unpleasant. And even though you may forget that they are high school students, once that is taken into account, the film becomes even more dissuasive.

Seduction is the only word that can describe the film’s ability to tell its story in such a way that you allow yourself to fall further and further into it. As more clues and hints to the murder are revealed, you begin to get the sense that these are not for the audience, but for the characters within the film. Each piece of information is necessary only to the world of the film, each character is fully integrated deep into the lore of the movie’s Californian suburb. After initial skepticism, you find yourself enveloped by a world of drugs, scandal, deception, double-crossings, and hope.

So as you watch, as you allow yourself to be seduced by a film in between familiar and foreign, Brick begins to open itself up even more, spilling secrets and truths that you didn’t know that you wanted to find out.

The film bleeds at you; you bleed at it.