At the premier of his first feature film at The Main Street Museum in White River Junction, Vermont, director Loren Howard remarked "don't worry Dave I don't want to kill you." Presumably speaking to his boss at his day job, this disclaimer was-if jokingly- warranted. The hero of Custodian: The Tragedy of Trav Cone, the titular Trav, is an impoverished musician who winds up killing his degenerate bosses after a series of humiliations. Where one director might have played on the absurdity of someone killing their boss as a penultimate kind of departure from reality (and there’s a kind of jerkoffishness to all of the characters inability to get a fucking grip) we’re really in Trav’s corner. What Howard understands is that poverty is a construction, and one you’re never really promised to escape. Certainly not in America. Trav’s tragedy is one of circumstance and of isolation. Neither things he can particularly control. He is comically poor. Like a hobo or a figure in a Depression era Farm Security Administration photograph. Or a bum in a newspaper cartoon. He is a sad mother fucker, playing an open mic he gets snubbed for some promised cash and rushed off stage. Cut to, Trav pulling a plastic red wagon behind him as he takes cans from peoples recycling bins so they can be exchanged for the deposit. He sleeps in his car, which mostly doesn’t work. Reflecting back to these scenes I felt a kind of terror for Trav and the inconsequentiality of his life. When Howard let that quip off at the premier we had all just watched the same flick. A chuckle bubbled out of the audience. It was funny ‘cause we all knew you can’t write this movie without some belief in violence as an understandable reaction to the incarceration of poverty.
It's an uphill battle to fight narratively. I wouldn’t consider Trav an anti-hero, the acceptable depot for a murderous lead we’re supposed to root for, in that he doesn’t have some gritty-yet-palatable moral philosophy underpinning his brutality. Trav doesn’t have ANY philosophy it seems. He doesn’t bemoan his position- though it's probably safe to assume he doesn’t like being that poor. He doesn’t have any ambition in the arena of capitalism or a sense of duty or heart toward its destruction. He just can’t manage the abuse anymore. The tiny, seemingly insignificant ways his life gets moved in one way or another time and time again.
Sympathizing with a killer isn't often a universally translatable idea in a film that more mirrors the aching challenges of the world I wake up in than in some taut, dazzling other world. It's also a specifically hard uphill battle if one pauses to think on the fact that the entirety of the globalized economy has relied on the notion that forced hierarchy, in exchange for wages, is the natural order of the day. You get a job, and you tell your boss when you have to piss. Sure there's a decorum in place which more or less guarantees that they’ll just let you go piss (but hey the Amazon piss bottles tell us that this is not a universal decorum). They say jump and you gotta ask how high. Your labor gets bought from you, and you cannot buy it back. It's a kind of theft beyond recompense. And on mentioning this, upon considering it in your own mind even, out from the woodwork come the voices of contrition. "That's just how it works!", "Someone keeping you on task isn't evil.", "Don't you want to be a boss someday?". “Profit blah profit blah.”
Consider all the violence that the state and corporate entities expend in the pursuit of making sure that a system of singular tyranny, transferred from one person onto their subordinates, doesn't go anywhere. Think about the cops and jails, both the most flagrant and visible forms of property protection. Think about the colonial wars of the early U.S Marine Corp in Asia and South America. The 1985 MOVE bombing in west Philly. Kent State. All the unexploded ordnance in Laos. Violence from the top down is routine. It happens every day. It's what makes the whole fuckin' thing work. Keeps the shelves stocked. Now violence from the bottom up? That threatens all conventional orders. This ironic repression has not gone unnoticed in the history of revolutionary thinkers. "In fact the colonist has always shown [the colonized] the path they should follow to liberation." Frantz Fanon writes in Wretched of The Earth. This too did not go unnoticed by the film maker, pointing to the taboos of power inherent within the capitalist system.
There isn’t so much an arc to the movie, as it burrows - moment by moment- a straight line from passivity to action. There are machinations and motivations at play but a clockwork plot this is not. It more feels like a demented Ozu story, existing in its sharpest focus exactly in the moment in which it is happening, especially if we replace Ozu's locked in camera aesthetic with floating handheld shots Howard employs to drift us into the story. Our story opens on a body in a river. In a pillowy sequence of Trav making his rounds, recording music in his car on a tape deck, driving around, playing the open mic, collecting cans, pushing his busted car/ home, getting gas. We first become acquainted with the echoing texture of his life here. Needing, more than to save for food or maybe a night in a motel or something, to replace his keyboard Trav wades through the fowled mouth abuses of a music store dude. When it becomes clear that 15 bucks won’t replace his keyboard the music store guy sends Trav off to a recording studio for a job as a custodian, thus beginning the relationships that will eventually drive him mad enough to depart from the routines of his life.
The cast is, primarily Edward Ferland (as Trav Cone), Jake Ford (as Chris the Engineer) and Hunter Slattery (as Alan). No dis to any of the other dozen or so people who had words to say on screen but this is the trinary star from which the picture derives its dramatic gravity. Through this ensemble we find the honesty that animates the idea. Each one brings to their character a transparency that makes the absurdity, the comedy, the strangeness, workable. Ferland brings a stammering eloquence, giving depth to all the ways Trav feels isolated or alienated or more comfortable with the inside of his own self than the outside of the big dull brutal world that he lives in. Ford and Slattery make Alan and Chris the skeeving, odd, near-do-well duo that they need to be. Bursting in sparkling anger or not-quiet-coy-enough deceit. Ford really shines as a dubious liar.
Throughout the film Howard, in joyous calliope with his many many dedicated collaborators (of which I am one), the film stops to meditate on songs contributed from bands he knows (shouts out to chico and co for that synth pop banger!). Sitting in the Main Street Museum watching the movie these scenes, which didn’t really have any bearing on the plot, as it could be called, or really the characterization of the world… or anything much for that matter outside of the few times they line up with Trav’s interior world, they didn’t really land for me. But on repeat viewing and contemplating, I have to think these scenes are all about contrasting the limitations of work, and the world attached to work, with the infinitude of creativity- as well as the ways work bends creativity al a the douchebaggery of the fictitious Slob Drop. Trav is all alone. But he has his work. Work, I mean, in a Hegelian sense. In a classically Marxist sense. His music, it’s the thing that gives his life meaning. The strength to live and onto which to reflect his own humanity. ‘Cause there really isn’t anyone else around him for that. It’s striking, while rewatching the movie to notice that Trav doesn’t have any allies or friends the entire course of the film. To have accumulated a past in a place and to feel it is devoid of care for you is certainly a familiar kind of hell. A line from Hanif Abduraquibs book There’s Always This Year reminds me of Trav’s persistent creative impulse. "Nothing survives but the imagination in a place like this. Nothing fights its way to the surface of anguish, still breathing, like the imagination."
The penultimate shot in the film comes after Trav has killed Chris and kidnapped Alan, tying him to an old chair in a luxurious theater. Fernlands face fills the screen, pooling with shadow and golden light. Twisting his mug in an arch smile. Relishing in his own depravity. It reminds me of the unhinged, anti-social skullduggery Ferland tapped into to play the another one of Howard's weirdos- Com-Eddy- in the short film Last American Cowboy. In the end Alan gets drowned in a river, a bookend to the scene where Howard really paints Alan as vapid, incredulous and unstable. Really having no legitimacy to lead anyone else, or dictate the trajectory of anyone's artistic career. Trav, for the third (or maybe forth) open mic, confesses his crimes over yet another sultry, galloping ballad. The flashing lights of the police slashing through the windows of the joint as the rapt audience erupts into applause.
Trav most likely goes to jail. We don’t know but it’s the speculation that gives a film its power. What the character’s do once that last cut hits and the credits roll. The movie really comes down to that one choice. For Trav to pick up his glasses off the ground and kill Chris and Alan. The whole movie builds to it, not as an inevitably but as a choice Trav gets to make. In our society morality, as a kind of social currency which denotes someone as worthy of public care, the most vulnerable, the most damaged and exposed of us are often taxed with a greater moral weight. While those with the most power only have to superficially play to an idea of moral accountability. Trav, living a life that had no value, throws his away in the hope of generating pride. Creating a sense of worth. He might not be able to play guitar in the big house, but at least he’ll have a bed and three square meals.
