The Poisonous Image in Wisconsin Death Trip

This was a while back, but 366 Weird Movies published another piece of mine, on an obscure documentary called Wisconsin Death Trip. It's a pretty cool, out-there kind of movie.

Frank Cooper’s account of Black River Falls, above, may be little more than a publicity blurb, but in Marsh’s film, it represents something much larger. It is an image of the town and an image of small-town life as a whole, an idyllic fiction created and taken as a faithful reflection by those who identify with it. It is a broad meta-narrative, a reassuring script – a framework to give larger meaning to many small lives and arbitrary circumstances. This is a category of “image” that Mitchell barely touched upon… the reflexive mental image called a self-image, which gives identity to both the individual and (by custom and consensus) the collective. Unfortunately, as the citizens of Wisconsin discovered in the late 1800′s, this self-image is a fragile thing, a glass castle on a precarious perch, and its destruction can be catastrophic.

-- The Poisonous Image in Wisconsin Death Trip, published in 366 Weird Movies

PressPausePlay - a short reflection on a film about the creative climate

PressPausePlay is a documentary that I caught this weekend about the digital revolution in the arts and culture. It's from directors David Dworsky and Victor Köhler, and if you dwell on the same stuff I do, you might want to check it out. It's mostly dedicated to celebrating the accessibility of digital media, and trying to get a grip on the changes it's bringing about. They got some interesting people to address this topic... Moby, Robyn, Hot Chip, director Lena Dunham, Napster daddy Sean Parker, and authors like David Weinburger and Andrew Keen.

It's free on their website, if you wanna just go take a couple hours right now. Go ahead, I'll wait here and drink my soda.

Okay, so... buried in the unrelenting optimism about the future, there is some anxiety in PressPausePlay, and honestly, the interviews that speak to this anxiety are the most interesting of the bunch. Doomsday prophets are always kind of captivating, giving voice to our fears, and the few interviewees who really sounded freaked out about the whole thing are actually kind of existentially reassuring. At some point, one of them says, "Every artist I know is scared by this," which is actually really nice to hear.

I think the anxiety comes from a very specific question, and a few of the interviewees approach it from a few different angles. The question is... how are we going to get along and keep culture in shape if the system of filters and gatekeepers has collapsed? And I think it's a really valid question, and the only real answer is, "Wait and see?"

When I say "gatekeepers," I mean a lot of different things. First of all, there are the simple resource scarcities of yesteryear, something that's often called a "barrier to entry." Once upon a time, filmmaking was so expensive that you needed to know people... producers, other filmmakers, or very wealthy family members... to get anywhere near the industry. Second of all, there are the credible critics, people vetted by major publications, armed with graduate degrees in the arts and publications in journals, who were hired to tell us all what was really the good shit, and what was just shit. The days of blogs have severely damaged the landscape of professional reviewing and criticism, and the incredible surplus of new work is overwhelming the ones who still have any cultural clout.

This all makes it very hard to confidently differentiate between brilliant work and crappy work. One of the documentary's talking heads said that we may be getting to a point where all the good work is drowned in the noise. Another one said he doubts the old great directors -- people like Scorsese and Coppola -- would ever have risen to the top or been discovered in the current climate. Their early shorts weren't genius, and in the current media glut, they would have been swamped to the point of frustration by amateurs competing for the same money and attention. Some of the cultural authorities in this documentary were driven to say, "Look, most people just aren't talented and shouldn't be making art." One of the most interesting of the critics claimed that this loss of sobriety in media and discourse would lead to a new cultural dark age, where cultural production rises so much that cultural literacy just falls entirely flat.

There's a question implicit in all this that nobody quite got around to asking (although some of them answered it, in a roundabout way). Whether you're really anxious about this is contingent upon what you think of those cultural gatekeepers, those filters, those critics, those barriers to entry. They are losing their influence. The question is: were they actually selecting based on merit, and thereby fulfilling a very important cultural function? Or were they actually selecting based on privilege, institutional bias, and luck? Because if the latter is true, then losing them will be one of the best things to happen to art... because even if an absolutely democratic process of selection is stupid, illiterate, and prone to distortion by advertisers, at least it's authentic. At least our art will match our preferences and our interests and desires, even if those aren't exactly high-brow or well-informed. At least our art will be a reflection of us as a collective, be that for good or ill.

Of course, between these two... gatekeepers are a positive force vs. gatekeepers are a useless burden... the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. And to be honest, I doubt the cultural landscape will ever be a flat ocean of white-noise. New mechanisms will arise to help shape the landscape of art and media, and we'll figure out how to make them work in service to culture. I guess, deep down, I'm just a dumbass optimist about the whole thing. That's fine with me. I may as well have faith in something.

Intimate May: Billy the Kid (2007)

Billy the Kid: a documentary by casting director Jennifer Venditti, chronicling a short period in the life of a passionate, sensitive, conflicted, and sometimes troubled teenager from rural Maine named Billy Price. This is the perfect film for Intimate May... it's closeness, its nakedness, and its sense of purpose are like an emotional antenna, picking up and reacting to all the deeply-rooted anxieties and uncertainties inherent in adolescence.

If you read up on Billy Price's life since he was the subject of a probing documentary film, you'll find he was diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome after it was created. This provides a minor insight into some of the peculiarities in Billy's behavior: his fluttering, nervous habits of making occasional eye contact, his apparent insensitivity to social cues, and his lack of a filter during conversations. However, in reality, the diagnosis doesn't really explain anything... even its medical basis is uncertain, and within the space of the film, it only really provides the illusory relief of giving us a label to put on the subject's behavioral quirks. In a certain way, discovering this label breaks down one of the film's greatest achievements: that it allows us to see Billy as a complete person, the greater product of a range of virtues and difficulties ("complications," as he calls them).

Watching Billy the Kid caused me some discomfort. Some may assume it's the discomfort of sudden close proximity to someone who seems strange to you; for me, it was the discomfort of recognition. In Billy, I see the anxiety that I lived with all through adolescence, especially when I was first interested in womenfolk. There are things I did in private as a teenager -- second-guessing myself, trying to force myself to be clever and conversant, trying to build courage and often failing, and occasionally surrendering entirely to the triumph and drama I saw in my own mundane childhood -- that I've almost forgotten about, now that I've internalized all the social conventions, frustrations, and familiarities that are required for "successful" adulthood. I may never have been as far outside the mainstream as Billy, who contrasts sharply with the socially-lubricated kids around him, but I felt all those things acutely. Those feelings are the foundation for the power of Venditti's film.

Why is it so effective at evoking these primordial anxieties? Because Billy doesn't just hide those familiar conflicting feelings under feigned confidence or shyness... he wears all of them on the outside, carries them through his day, and presents them to the camera. Billy's scenes with Heather are harrowing sequences, because he works so hard for every morsel of attention. His moment of conflict, standing outside the diner and amping himself up to enter, is crushingly familiar, and it's something I've replayed in my own head on dates, even in adulthood. His inability to maintain a smooth conversation with the people around him, and his approach to it (just keep trying just keep trying), are both outward projections of deep fears of mine, and I confront them whenever I'm thrust into a new social situation or forced to hang out with people whose opinions I care about.

The things that make Billy seem so immediate, so unmediated, are inherent to his personality, and it seems that Venditti just got lucky in finding so frank a subject. Billy has very little filter and very little sense of privacy... he's amazingly nervous and awkward, but surprisingly unselfconscious, especially about his situation with his father and his love for his family, both of which he wears as markers of identity. He is also forthcoming with his private victories, such as his love poem after he takes his first walk with Heather. These moments of triumph are treasured things, no matter how brazenly outgoing you are, and when Billy shares them with us, it feels more intimate than any of his lectures or displays of frustration.

Jennifer Venditti gives Billy a voice, and it's not always directed at us as the audience. In one surprising scene, she visits Heather, Billy's hapless love interest, and though it's off-camera, it's clear that she asks a rather personal question: "Why did you break up with him?" Heather has to rally in the face of the filmmaker, and she doesn't have a readymade response to this inquiry... her grandmother steps in and repeats an earlier explanation. This struck me as cruel, in a sense, but also as redeemable, because when we adolescent boys are frustrated in our romantic pursuits, we get a palpable sense of isolation and invisibility, and there's rarely a remedy on hand. At least Billy has someone to represent him and confront Heather about her decision (with fair objectivity and diplomacy, of course). Venditti's lens thus becomes both a window on Billy, and a proxy for him in the face of a sad but inevitable situation.

Of course, there's no doubt that the camera affected everything that came in front of it, and many of these subjects may have been characters performing roles for the filmmakers. The presence of the recording device may have suppressed some of the mocking and bullying Billy received, or it may have contributed to both the rise and the fall of his micro-romance. Of course, sometimes kids are just less cruel than we assume they are, and sometimes things are just hard to predict when you're a kid... so the general effect of the camera is indeterminate. Its only traceable intrusion is in the self-consciousness that it generates in its subjects, like Billy, who often glances at it but generally avoids making eye contact with the lens, and Heather, who seems to struggle to ignore its presence. Whether this is a polluting influence or simply an unavoidable, and therefore honest, intrusion into the lives of its subjects is a topic for discussion among methodological purists and documentary theorists; I'm just here to appreciate the honesty of the portrayal, even if it's simulated, to some degree.

Seeing Billy the Kid, I can't help but think of Chris Smith's American Movie, which was also a film about a gawky, passionate outsider whose nakedly honest self-presentation complimented his ocean of eccentricities. That was a film about a Midwesterner named Mark on a quest to produce his masterpiece horror movie. Mark and Billy are only related in the most general ways... both are outsiders in a small-town setting, both struggle to cope with a certain measure of gawky awkwardness, and both are invested in epic struggles to find their places in the world. However, there's a kinship between them, and at the very least, I can say that if you liked Billy the Kid, there's a good chance you'll like American Movie.

These are the characters that make up our textured culture, and in a society that's obsessed with financial success, generic heroism, and rebellion controlled by convention, Billy is the type of person who often slips through the cracks of the social sphere. We're lucky that Venditti gives him a forum: his voice is potent, so his film is powerful, and you may find him uncomfortably close to some tender surfaces of your soul.

INTIMATE MOMENT: I'll do whatever I want with my hair


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Intimate May: Babies (2010)

Babies: the stories of four infants during the first year of each of their lives, bracketed by birth and their first steps. The film, directed by Thomas Balmes, debuted a week ago, and this weekend I saw it with my fiancée at the Landmark Sunshine Cinema here in New York. We both responded well to the humor, pacing, and cultural insights the film provided; to her, it felt like an anthropology of childhood, as much as a tableaux of cute baby footage (thus thwarting the danger of being a film version of an Anne Geddes photoshoot). This impression – the story of four wildly different cultures, each with its own philosophies of work, play, nurture, and community – is the aspect of the film that’s easiest to intellectualize, and this is necessary, in a certain way, to build a full experience out of the movie. We may enjoy the simple sensory content of the film, but it requires a cohesive idea to act as connective tissue, so without this structure and framework, the film would have felt surprisingly empty. This angle also came naturally to her, being a researcher in cross-cultural development and education.

For my part, being a designer and an amateur photographer/filmmaker/critic/etc, I was most engaged by the babies’ direct experience of the world, which the film did a powerful job of evoking. Babies proved that the most effective way of making a film about a certain person’s perspective isn’t to put the camera behind their eyes, looking out at the world they see, but in front of them, looking into their faces as they’re seeing that world. Balmes’ camera fixates on his subjects, providing only occasional, incidental glimpses into the cultures where they’re being raised. This does a lot for the movie’s “cute” factor, but it also uses an element of craft to make an important creative statement.

In the first post this month, I mentioned Deleuze’s theories about the close-up, which is the paradigm case of what he calls the “affective image.” This sort of shot has the primary effect of isolating the expressive surface (i.e. the face) from its surroundings and making the emotion itself the primary subject of the shot. Babies makes inspiring use of this technique, and it’s one of the most affect-intensive movies I’ve seen since the The Trial of Joan of Arc. The entire two hours of Babies frames the reactions of these brand new humans as they fiddle with objects, scan landscapes for their parents (or for food), and exhibit pride and frustration in very small events (the annoyance with a confusing toy, the victory of dragging a roll of toilet paper across the room).

This is the life of a baby, a life that most of us have completely forgotten: an adult passes through a frame, we hear a fragment of a conversation, feet and hands distract us for a moment, words become meaningless white noise added to an abstracted soundscape. Rooms lose their emotional significance and are reduced to boundaries, and yet, as we inhabit these spaces, we see their meaning beginning to form: Ponijao’s watering hole, Hattie’s play room, the epic horizons spread out in a circle around Bayar. We have no relationships with these spaces, but through our baby subjects, we begin to form them. At the same time, all the actions and gestures of the adults are rendered insignificant, the automatic motions of unfamiliar objects, things we can consider for a second, and then dismiss as irrelevant to the current moment. This is probably why we forget our early childhood: there is no anchor of meaning or significance to remember it by. There’s just the passing of volumes, colors, sounds, and spaces, punctuated by an occasional fetish object or mother’s face, the first semantic building blocks of the child’s life-world.

The key moments in Babies, by my reading, aren't the adorable shots where the protagonists sit next to kitty cats or reach for their own feet... they're the immersive scenes of the babies are caught up in the mundane world, which they still find so alien. The shot of Mari cruising through a supermarket, overwhelmed by its kaleidoscopic colors; the scene where Ponijao is on his mother's back while she's washing clothes, and he experiences the process as a disorienting rocking forward and back, like he's on a boat in a storm; even the shot of Bayar being washed with his mother's milk, subject to a custom he doesn't necessarily understand, but whose significance for him is wholly different from its significance for us. We've lived in this world long enough to forget that it's a strange place. We have to see it through Mari, Hatti, Bayar, and Ponijao's eyes to remember.

INTIMATE MOMENT: Standing up is hard (also, like, the whole movie)