When Walter Benjamin wrote that “the eternal is in any case far more
a ruffle on a dress than some idea,” he was, of course, challenging
Plato’s view of beauty as a form of remembering. When one sees
something beautiful in Plato’s world it is something that helps the
mind remember its lost perfection, its place in heaven, in the realm of
pure ideas. The beautiful is a form of anamnesia, the end to amnesia,
the moment you remember who you were before your birth, your
materialization, your fall. With Paranoid Park, Gus Van Sant
returns cinema to the philosophical inquiry of beauty. What is it? What
makes a young man, a sound, an article of clothing, an expression in a
song a thing of beauty? Van Sant locates his answers exactly between
Benjamin’s ruffled dress and Plato’s eternal idea.
What I mean is this: Platonic beauty is inseparable from the good
and the just. A human cannot be naturally attracted to what changes
constantly. The beautiful—like the human soul, the good, and the
law—is fixed in time. Benjamin believed the very opposite. The
transitory is beautiful because it vanishes. The ruffle on a dress will
eventually be lost forever in the flow of time. But in sequence after
sequence of Paranoid Park, Van Sant shows us that a fleeting
gesture, look, fold on a shirt, flight and fall of a
skateboarder—these are beautiful because, in their captured
brevity, they isolate the eternal. Imperfection (rather than
perfection) is the way to the all that is happening in the now.
Based on a young-adult novel by Blake Nelson, the movie’s story
concerns a teen named Alex (Gabe Nevins), who is caught in the moment
between departure and arrival. He is leaving boyhood and entering
manhood. He is breaking from his broken family and becoming an
individual. He has left the shores of virginity and is looking for the
new world of sexual awakening. These journeys are not easy, and this
difficulty is expressed in the film by a violent death. Someone at some
time in the night murdered a rail-yard guard. The police believe a
skateboard was the weapon. Skaters in the high schools around Portland
are under suspicion. One of the suspects is Alex. Around the time the
police recovered a skateboard from the banks of the Willamette River,
not far from the scene of the crime, Alex lost his old skateboard and
bought a new one. Is he hiding something? Will the cops crack the
case?
But what Alex is hiding is not a murder but the condition of his
soul, which is in a state of uncertainty. What is going to happen to
his family (which is breaking apart) and to his sexuality (which is not
fully determined)? He may or may not be gay; or it may simply be a
question of not liking the girl he is dating. There are other girls in
his life. But what kind of girls are they? Just friends or possible
lovers? Alex is split in two.
To capture the confusion and enchantment of Alex’s transition, Van
Sant hired Wong Kar Wai’s leading cinematographer, Christopher Doyle,
and his protégé, Rain Kathy Li (Van Sant worked with
Doyle a decade ago on a bad Hollywood project). In Paranoid
Park, the photography, music, and editing (rather than the acting
and writing) are mostly responsible for capturing the fleeting and
timeless moments. The camera relentlessly searches for them, and when
it finds them, the editing sacrifices the movement of the plot and the
dialogue for a moment with someone’s soft lips, golden hair, knowing
eyes, stride down the hall, drive through the rain, run across a
bridge, ride on the side of a train, glide down a concrete wall, and
walk toward a beach, toward the Pacific Ocean, toward the end of the
world. We are imperfect but we have our shining moments. 
