Tribeca Film Festival 2019 presents a wide diversity of films, including screenings of branded entertainment. Branded programming is sponsored by a corporate marketing strategy, trying to connect with an audience in a richer way about the brand. On Friday, April 26, Tribeca X explored the intersection of storytelling and advertising. In an era of “Instagram influencers,” the audience for films no longer differentiates between advertising and editorial; that’s an old-journalism idea that has become almost irrelevant. Among other speakers, Natasha Lyonne discussed her work with the fashion brand KENZO. A short film she created for the company was so successful that it resulted in the Emmy-nominated Netflix show Russian Doll, which enjoyed amazing, almost-instant-cult-like popularity. Several different types of branded entertainment, from Feature to Episodic to VR, will be in competition. IndieNYC had the chance to view one of the intriguing Episodic Finalists, History of Memory (Short Documentary), sponsored by The Garage at HP, and talk with the directors Sarah Klein and Tom Mason, of Redglass Pictures.
“a sort of branded Proust”
Tribeca X has not created a new category of filmmaking; branded cinema has a well-established tradition. One legendary BMW campaign employed the auteur’s talents of John Frankenheimer, Ang Lee, Wong Kar-Wai, and Guy Ritchie, among others. See Frankenheimer’s remarkable film, The Hire: Ambush, starringClive Owen, below:
Tribeca’s effort to bring the genre to prominence now, through Tribeca X, offers a fascinating look into the process.
Klein and Mason were hired by HP to create a series of short films about how printed photographs affect people’s lives. They were given an evocative working title, “History of Memory,” to start them on their creative journey. The duo focused on the power of photographs to generate deep emotions, and how printed photos act as “magical artifacts.” When I interviewed him, director Tom Mason said:
“If your house catches on fire, what do you grab? You take your photo album. It’s an irreplaceable family heirloom.”
So they asked themselves, “What are the stories that do justice to the incredible emotional connection we have to our most treasured images?” Ultimately they asked the “Can one picture change your life forever?” which became the tag-line for the film series.
As with any documentary film, a key element is the selection of subjects and storylines. Klein and Mason found four compelling, true stories about lives that were altered by the image:
“At First Sight” couple in History of Memory
a woman who discovers her true racial identity via a long-hidden family photo album, and then becomes part of the family in those photos;
a couple who meet across continents because of a single printed photograph sent through the mail, now married, 25 years later, having aged along with that old picture;
an adoptee, who as a young adult receives his “baby picture” that was never taken, now framed on the wall along with the rest of his adopted family, providing a part of his life that had been missing;
and an elderly Chinese man who becomes an international sensation, based on a photo of him captured many years before, but the picture and negative lost, then discovered by a French archivist who takes his gallery show of reclaimed pictures around the world.
Separately titled “A Secret Album,” “At First Sight,” and “It’s a Boy,” each story depicts personal memories of how people were shaped by their own photographic history, sort of the branded equivalent of Proust.
“At First Sight” bride in History of Memory
It is interesting that Klein and Mason have worked with Ken Burns, where the photograph reigns supreme. Burns famously gives life to still photographs by slowly zooming in on subjects of interest and panning from one subject to another in the same photo. This technique is now made possible in many professional and home software applications and is termed “The Ken Burns Effect“ in Apple‘s iPhoto and iMovie. His once-genre-defining technique has become a commodified effect that can be placed onto a photo as easily as a colored filter.
Photo from “The Vietnam War” by Ken Burns
But Klein and Mason did not copy the stylistic methods of their mentor. They talked with us about what they learned from master-documentarian Burns — to ask the questions “Does the story move me? Does it enrich my understanding of the world?” The stories in this movie do just that. They are well-told tales about real people in the most important moments of their lives. And the film’s investigation into the relationship between photographs and personal history elevates the stories from being merely sentimental.
These four films are very seductive about the inherent power of photographs. But they are talking about analog images, good old-fashioned snapshots and fading family portraits – very tangible in the hand and lasting in the mind. Today, we live with thousands of personal photos on our phones and hard drives, too many to contemplate much less remember, and we squint to see them on tiny screens – pixels, not paper.
Can the emotions that existed when those images were captured be transported to the digital future? Maybe with the help of a printing machine, HP would like to suggest. But will digital photos, forever cleanly stored in the computer, have the same impact when they are converted to paper?
Gail as a young girl, in History of Memory
I assume HP wants us to choose the pictures we wish to save from the digital trash heap, and print them now on HP printers, so they can become our new family heirlooms. The problem is that now we have the option not to print, and to just store on a thumb drive. This is an option that did not exist in the past, and we are no longer compelled to use those antiquated analog formats, which seem burdensome and produce clutter. Modern life cares about saving trees, not memories.
It is somewhat ironic that HP, a “new technology” company, wants to re-invent the past. But if photos are to continue to play important roles in people’s lives, and especially if they are to preserve our emotional connections with our most important memories, then we and HP can only hope that people will opt to print. (See the History of Memory trailer, below.)
I cannot help but compare History of Memory to the now-classic TV series Mad Men – season 1, episode 13, called “The Wheel,” which centered around Don Draper’s efforts to create an ad campaign for Kodak’s new, circular slide projector. That particular ad presentation by Don Draper is the moment when Mad Men became a certified pop-cultural phenomenon. Watch a clip from that famous episode,below:
Don compares the slide carousel to a portable nostalgia creator. He says, “it lets us travel around and around and back again, to the place we know we are loved.” Great line! But the real story of that episode is that Don is savvy enough to manipulate the marketplace but ultimately his ad campaign works on him as well and affects his personal life. Don falls victim to his own manipulation when he uses his own family photos for his ad presentation. It’s a dramatic narrative inside an ad campaign inside a dramatic narrative.
Mad Men, The Wheel
And History of Memory works in a similar way. Director Tom Mason even mentioned that the process of making this movie changed the way he and his own family preserve and display their photographs. I think Don Draper would be proud of what History of Memory accomplishes, and so would Mad Men creator, Matthew Weiner.
Update: Congratulations to History of Memory filmmakers Sarah Klein and Tom Mason, and HP, for winning the Tribeca X Award in their category!Click here for the full press release.
Following up on my previous What-to-See article, which focused on Archival Movies at Tribeca Film Festival, I am listing a few more Top Picks that I could not exclude. There is really SO MUCH great stuff at Tribeca2019 (including Tribeca Television Festival and Tribeca Immersive, which I won’t even touch but are worthy of exploring), that it’s tough to pull out a short list. But here are some films that grabbed my attention during the pre-festival screenings, and which you cannot fail in seeing. I am recommending two Magic Realism films that are beautiful and dramatic, and two Activism films that are urgently important. Plus, one of the several Music Documentaries that I haven’t seen but is sure to be a winner.
How can a documentary be so gorgeous and tell such a perfectly formed narrative? It doesn’t seem possible; it’s a rare thing. Our Time Machine is a profound and poetic film that is achingly uplifting as it tells a universal story about the exquisite sadness and joy of life. Shaken by news of his father’s dementia, Chinese artist Maleonn sets off to build an intricately-designed time-machine puppet that will unite him and his father as it transports them to the memories his father has forgotten. (If you don’t understand how puppetry can be a true art form, this film will show you.)
Our Time Machine, at Tribeca
This Chinese-language film is full of tableaus that blend the real and the surreal as Maleonn follows in the artistic footsteps of his parents; his mother was an actress and his father, Ma Ke, was a long-time director of the Peking Opera Theater. Through the lens of a father-son relationship, Our Time Machine explores what it means to be an artist in China in the 20th century and today. From the condemnations of the Cultural Revolution to contemporary financial and social challenges of putting on a complex and wholly original hybrid art performance, directors S. Leo Chiang and Yang Sun probe the artistic impulse across generations. Mixing haunting imagery with real-life moments, Our Time Machine conveys the mystery and consolation of art against the ravages of time.
I put this movie on my Pick List because of its evocative use of animation and graphic elements (by Smith and Lee), which seem to lift the vibrancy and energy of this film off the screen and make the entire experience feel palpable and enthralling. The depressive grittiness of the story layered with the magical storytelling mechanism make for a rich film that stays with you after you’ve left the theater. Plus there is the electric actress, Slick Woods, who plays Goldie; when she is on the screen, it is impossible to look away.
Slick Woods as Goldie, at TFF2019
Goldie is a street-wise, 18-year-old dancer with big dreams of big fame, even as she is stuck at home minding her two sisters while their mother is in jail. When an opportunity to audition for a real music video comes her way, Goldie feels the time has finally come for her star to rise. All she needs is the perfect canary yellow fur coat she has had her eye on in a local vintage store window. But with the day of the shoot rapidly approaching, and Goldie’s pockets still empty of the cash needed to purchase the coat, her desire for it—and its perceived promise of transformation—becomes an all-consuming obsession.
Sam De Jong’s second feature is a stylish coming-of-age fable, anchored by a magnetic debut performance from Woods. Against the background of the vibrant Bronx streets in the summer, viewers are invited to keep up with Goldie’s breakneck race to realize her dreams or lose it all.
After the 2008 election, a secretive, well-funded partisan initiative poured money into state legislative races in key swing states to gain control of their redistricting processes and used high-tech analytics to dramatically skew voting maps based on demographic data. The result is one of the greatest electoral manipulations in U.S. history, one that poses a fundamental threat to our democracy and exacerbates the already polarized atmosphere in Congress and state houses across the country.
Slay the Dragon documentary
Gerrymandering, the practice of redrawing electoral maps to serve the party in power, has been around for centuries. But in today’s hyper-partisan political environment it has been taken to unprecedented extremes, fueled by the elimination of corporate campaign contribution limits and the availability of vast amounts of personal information. The effects of this audacious plan have continued to bear fruit through the 2018 midterms. But voters, fed up with cynical efforts to sidestep the will of the majority, have begun fighting back. In one example, a grassroots movement led by a young woman with no political experience gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures to put an anti-gerrymandering initiative on the ballot in Michigan.
The new documentary Slay the Dragon shines a light on this timely issue, and follows a handful of citizens’ groups, outraged by what they see as an attack on the core democratic principle that every person’s vote should count equally, as they battle party operatives and an entrenched political establishment to fix a broken system.
Katie Fahey, in Slay the Dragon
In this film, we learn about “packing” and “cracking” and witness creative redistricting lines full of twists, curves, and squiggles to guarantee a certain majority. But we also experience hope in the form of Katie Fahey, a Michigander who forms the group Voters Not Politicians working to bring a measure onto the state’s ballot to require an independent group—not the legislature—to draw the lines. And in Wisconsin, an activist group challenges the state’s redistricting in a case that makes its way to the US Supreme Court. Directors Barak Goodman and Chris Durrance craft a detailed, infuriating, ultimately inspiring look—deftly balancing the facts and maps with the tireless work of people like Fahey to get us to act to ensure that democracy will survive. But the battle isn’t over yet; you need to be informed and vigilant.
Note: Barak Goodman and Chris Durrance have directed several films together, including Clinton for PBS’s American Experience, and the six-part series Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies. Separately and together, they have won numerous Peabody, Emmy®, and Writers Guild Awards, and an Academy Award® nomination. Barak is also the director of another film at TFF this year, which I also recommend — Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation, detailed below.
Captain Paul Watson has dedicated his life to fighting for one thing – to end the slaughter of the ocean’s wildlife and the destruction of its ecosystems. Without the ocean’s ecosystems, Watson contends that life on earth itself will not survive, and he makes a surprisingly convincing case for the urgency and necessity of his mission. Co-founder of GreenPeace and founder of Sea Shepard, Watson is part pirate, part philosopher, in this provocative film about a man who will stop at nothing to protect what lies beneath. Like a crime-fighting superhero of the high seas, Watson and his crews confront illegal whaling vessels from Europe to the Southern Ocean, seal hunters in Canada, and shark finners in Central America. Impervious to threats, with more than one nation issuing warrants for his arrest, Watson continues to intervene on behalf of the endangered ocean creatures and ultimately life on this planet.
Captain Watson, at Tribeca
Braiding contemporary interviews with Watson, archival footage from decades of Watson’s ferocious activism, and spectacular underwater nature footage, award-winning documentarian Lesley Chilcott (An Inconvenient Truth and Waiting for Superman) tells a story that is shockingly informative, magnificent, and deeply disturbing. Watson is a must-see for anyone concerned about the future of our planet.
When business partners John Roberts and Joel Rosenman floated the idea of hosting an opening day party with live music to celebrate their new recording studio in Woodstock, New York, they had no idea what it would eventually become: a pilgrimage of 500,000 like-minded radicals and hippies to Max Yasgur’s farm in Bethel, where they would find spiritual reassurance and release in a celebration of freedom.
Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation
50 years later, Barak Goodman’s retelling of the three-day music festival captures the zeitgeist of the time. Structured faithfully around audio testimony from attendees, Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation focuses not just on how it all came to be, despite enormous challenges, but how it felt for it to happen: an endless traffic backup was elevated to a communal experience, and a food shortage became a collaboration rather than a disaster. Historic musical performances spotlighted in the film, from Jimi Hendrix to Joan Baez to Crosby, Stills, and Nash, form the backdrop to what is fundamentally the audience’s story. Woodstock takes us all back to a time and a place now captured in a time capsule, but also reminds us of the immediacy that love, music and shared experience can elicit.
It’s Spring in New York and that means one thing to cinephiles: Tribeca Film Festival. The festival runs April 24-May 5 at Village East Cinema and Regal Cinemas Battery Park. This year I will save my “what makes Tribeca so special” intro for later (if time allows) and cut right to my Curtain-RaiserPick List, as the Tribeca2019 opening day is soon approaching. Continuing to expand its entertainment offerings, Tribeca has broken up their titles into an even more confusing array of categories than ever before, including Documentary, Spotlight Documentary, Viewpoints, Untold Stories, Spotlight Narrative, US Narrative, International Narrative, Movies Plus, This Used to Be New York, Critics Week, and on and on – not exactly easy to navigate. So, ignoring all that, and also side-stepping the more typical Critics Picks of big-name and high-profile productions (see any other publication for that), I will offer a select list of films that fall into a category defined by my own tangled and perhaps questionable perspective: I am interested in the number of Archival Movies at TFF2019, and I will list just a few here.
Archival Movies
This seems to be an unofficial theme this year – films that begin and end with images of VCR tapes or microfilm, drawers full of old photographs or scrapbooks of newspaper clippings. Archival materials are typical components of well-researched documentaries (and TFF is always wonderfully rich with documentaries), but this year the focus seems to be as much about the archival material itself as it is the subject of that material. Several films investigate real-life individuals whose identities where defined by and sometimes destroyed by their images on paper or video.
Recorder Movie: archival footage galore
I theorize that with the advent of the internet and the digital age where unlimited masses of everything are recorded, without context, the old concept of carefully collected documentation is increasingly a thing of the past. And old, analog items, such as photographs on yellowed, warped paper, are a dying breed of memoires — history made real by material things. It’s the beginning of the end for archiving as we know it, and we rightly are already nostalgic for those tangible touchstones. Here are some movies that ask the viewer, in various ways, to reflect on the relationship between archival items, the people who keep them, their depictions on screen, the memories they create, and reality.
Marion Stokes secretly recorded American television 24 hours a day for 30 years, amassing an incredible 70,000 VHS tapes. Long before our current era of “fake news,” Marion was seeking and protecting the truth by archiving everything that was said and shown on television. The public didn’t know it, but the networks were disposing of their archives for decades – into the trashcan of history. Remarkably, Marion saved it. A mystery in the form of a time capsule, Matt Wolf’s film delves into the strange life of a reclusive archivist who was perhaps crazy, perhaps genius, perhaps both.
Marion Stokes in Recorder
Beginning with the Iranian Hostage Crisis in 1979 and ending with her death during the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook, Stokes captured wars, triumphs, catastrophes, talk shows, bloopers, commercials, and more. The archive reminds us who we were and explores how television shaped the world of today. At the same time, it looks at the woman who dedicated her life to this visionary and maddening project and the toll it took on those around her.
Tribeca X explores the intersection of advertising and storytelling, in itself a fascinating topic. For more on that, click here.
The History of Memory is a series of short documentary films, created by Redglass Pictures and the Garage at HP, that celebrates the power of printed photographs to change our lives. From Florida to India, Beijing to New Orleans, the short films explore stories of real life people whose lives were forever altered by the discovery, creation, or preservation of a photograph. In At First Sight, a deep connection is made across continents following the exchange of two images. A Secret Album tells of a woman who discovers her true self after the uncovering of a hidden family photo album. And in It’s a Boy, a young man poses for an unconventional photo shoot, and then feels a part of a family for the first time in his life. In each film of History of Memory, we are reminded that the most important memories are those that we cherish, share, and protect. (And ideally, if you believe HP, that includes printing your cherished photos.)
Throughout his life, Bill Wyman, one of the original members of The Rolling Stones, shot hours of unseen film footage, took thousands of photographs, and collected a vast archive of memorabilia. He also kept a detailed diary to accompany these treasures. Known by his former bandmates as a man of few words, the notoriously private bass player reveals himself to the audience by talking us through his life’s archive and reflecting on his experiences. It’s an engaging perspective of a man at the end of his career. Directed by Oliver Murray, The Quiet One is a cinematic memoir from a working-class boy, raised by his grandmother, who found his home in the band that disrupted the music scene and made rock n’ roll history.
Note that I have not yet seen this film, so Helen can’t Highly recommend it. But I will suggest that it seems to be an intriguing and fresh look at a can’t-be-told-too-often story. I include it in my Pick List primarily because of the compelling and devastating use of a home-video archive. Nine year old Emmanuel began filming himself and his family with a home video camera in 1999, capturing his Washington D.C. neighborhood through the eyes of an innocent child. Growing up just 17 blocks from the U.S. Capitol, however, proved more difficult than expected. Filmmaker, journalist, and frequent This American Life contributor Davy Rothbart befriended the Sanford family as they continued to document their daily life over a 20-year period in a city plagued by poverty, addiction, and gun violence.
17 Blocks, documentary
What resulted from this uniquely collaborative effort between Rothbart and the family is a portrait of the unwavering strength of familial bonds. The film follows the characters through periods of joy and sadness, all captured on tape with stunning intimacy. This non-fiction odyssey offers a remarkable look into the lives of one family who was brave enough to share their story with the world.
I am going to break this Archival category into a sub-group of Rise-and-FallStories about iconic men whose lives were quite literally defined by the images of themselves created by and about them. Destroy the image, destroy the man? The Halston movie below begins by telling the audience how all of Halston’s tapes of himself and his work during the years of his reign were intentionally and systematically erased by the man who pushed him out of the business branded with Halston’s own name. The tapes were not trashed; they were erased, with fresh blank labels attached to cover up the old ones. Did this destructive act succeed at erasing the man himself? The documentary investigates.
Pictures meant everything to Halston. “Life is like a picture,” he used to say. The man, the brand, and the downfall of legendary fashion designer Halston, are poignantly portrayed in this documentary by TFF alum filmmaker Frédéric Tcheng (Dior and I, and The Eye Has to Travel, about fashionista Diana Vreeland). America’s first superstar designer, Halston created an empire and personified the dramatic social and sexual revolution of the last century. The film reveals Halston’s impact on fashion, culture, and business. It captures the epic sweep of the life and times of Roy Halston Frowick, the man who set women free with his unstructured designs and strove to “dress all of America.”
Halston, the documentary
While framing the story as an investigation by a young archivist diving into the Halston company records, Tcheng expertly weaves rare archival footage – depicted through contact sheets, TV monitors, negative images, and video glitches, with intimate interviews with Halston’s family, friends and collaborators, including Liza Minnelli, Andy Warhol, Iman, and filmmaker Joel Schumacher. What results is a behind-the-headlines look into the struggle between Halston’s self-created image, his depiction in the press, his artistic legacy, and the man himself. As in the story below, it is suggested that perhaps cocaine was key to this icon’s downfall. But the film digs deeper and looks at a carefully considered timeline of events; there is a lot to this story. In addition to its glitzy appeal, this documentary truly investigates America’s cultural and business history in a way that makes it surprisingly significant today.
*Take note during the credits of the film at how much of the archival materials came from the Andy Warhol collection. Now there’s a guy who protected his image.
The story of John DeLorean and his iconic car is mainly associated these days with the beloved movie Back to the Future. The true story has faded since the cameras, gossip, and intrigue swirled around him in the 80s, epitomized by a top-model wife and an infamous cocaine bust, followed by revelations of theft and corruption. But this film suggests that DeLorean’s triumphs and downfall, and their consequences, remain relevant today. And who better to portray a flamboyant man with a giant ego than Alec Baldwin, who appears in this film portraying himself portraying DeLorean?
Alec Baldwin as DeLorean
DeLorean’s fascinating tale is documented by one of the most glamorous archives in biopic history – full of private planes, fast cars, celebrities, posh lifestyles, flashy ads, mob-guy confessions, FBI secret footage, and even a filmed polygraph test plus the rehearsal for that test. The use of that archive in combination with process-aware re-enactments and interviews with many who knew him, including his much-disillusioned and angry son, provide a portrait of a complex, brilliant innovator and marketing genius whose Midas touch disappeared too quickly. The juxtaposition of archival materials, present-day interviews, and occasional commentary from actor Alec Baldwin overtly begs the question: what was real and what was a con? But perhaps the most compelling part of the film is the disclosure of what happened after the cameras stopped filming and the newspapers stopped reporting.
What’s Better: Jon Snow Rides a Dragon or Batman Pitches Opioids?
While Game of Thrones famously warns that “Winter is Coming,” John Oliver warned “Omar’s comin.”
by The Critic and HelenHighly, re 4/14/19
Game of Thrones vs Last Week Tonight w John Oliver
The Critic Says: Last night everyone was indulging in the power manipulations of Game of Thrones, for the 8th season premiere. But the show now articulates its power struggles more as spectacle than crafted dialogue. Yes, Westeros has dragons, but Shakespeare has yet to make an appearance in their universe. The truly shocking words of domination last night came not from the Targaryens but from the return of Walter White, Omar of The Wire, and Batman, just an hour later on another HBO show, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. To bring home the hideous thoughts of the reclusive Richard Sackler, former chairman of the OxyContin empire, Purdue Pharma, Oliver enlisted Michael Keaton, Bryan Cranston, and Michael K. Williams to summon everything evil as they read transcripts from Sackler’s deposition. If only these truly wicked words could be incorporated into Games of Thrones.
Helen Highly Expands the Correlations
As our Critic suggests, life’s truest statements come from legal depositions, where even villains are afraid to lie. Thus, when Last Week Tonight employed four master actors to read excerpts from Richard Sackler’s leaked testimony, both the acting and the dialogue were better than Game of Thrones.For the most genuinely emotional human drama, John Oliver won the day.
Bryan Cranston as Walter White does Sackler
Also on TV last night was Anderson Cooper doing a 60 Minutes segment about the much-anticipated final-season premiere of Game of Thrones. Cooper interviewed George R.R. Martin, writer of the fantasy novels on which the television show is based. Martin says that despite the showy dragons and magic in his story, he aims to depict “a story that is about the human heart in conflict with itself, about these very basic human emotions.” He’s using fiction to depict human truth. But John Oliver used real-life human testimony to depict fantasy-level super-evil, and it was more effective. Of course, Michael Keaton was a big help. Oliver chose Keaton to read from transcripts of Sackler’s statements because “When you’re casting for a shadowy heir to a vast fortune, who doesn’t like to be in the limelight, you go Batman.” Game of Thrones had Jon Snow learning to ride a dragon, but Last Week Tonight had Batman pushing drugs.
The Sackler and Stark family stories have even more correlations worth mentioning. Martin explained that his story is all about “Power – what it does to someone, how much we covet it, how it goes wrong in the wrong hands, and how different it is when you have it versus when you’re coveting it.” He easily could be talking about drugs, yes?
Winter is coming, in more ways than one.
Powerful drugs, such as the infamously addictive painkiller OxyContin, continue to lay waste to families and communities far and wide – even more lethal than the power in Games. Despite multiple lawsuits, new government regulations, enormous fines, and desperate efforts by the drug’s victims, this war to manipulate and control addiction is almost unstoppable. (Like White Walkers?) The Game of Thrones notorious line, repeated again last night, seems morbidly appropriate in articulating the significance of the deadly-yet-ongoing opioid addiction cycle: “What is dead may never die, but rises again harder and stronger.”
While Game of Thrones famously warns that “Winter is Coming,” John Oliver warned “Omar’s comin’,” as he presented The Wire’s Omar Little, Michael K. Williams. Omar delivered a similarly ominous quote from Richard Sackler: “The launch of OxyContin Tablets will be followed by a blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition. The prescription blizzard will be… deep, dense, and white.” Which winter is worse: a blizzard of killer pills or an army of frozen zombies?
To see more of John Oliver’s actors reading scary Sackler transcripts, go to www.SacklerGallery.com
Are Us and Life Sucks tethered together like combating doubles of each other?
by HelenHighly
“Us” Movie Poster with Lupita Nyong’o
It happened again: Entirely randomly and coincidentally, I saw two different narrative presentations (this time a film and a live play) just days apart, and despite their having no real connection, they merged in my brain to produce one review. The various parallels in the two stories, including matching themes and potential relevance to right-now America, were difficult to ignore and not compare, so I did – compare and contrast. First, I saw Us, the much-anticipated sophomore-effort horror film by Jordan Peele, which follows his much-celebrated first writer/director endeavor, Get Out. Next, I saw Life Sucks(now extended for a summer run at Theater Row, beginning June 4 )a play that claims to be “sort of adapted from Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov,” also a much-anticipated sophomore-effort variation on Chekhov for contemporary American audiences, by Aaron Posner (with Wheelhouse director Jeff Wise), following Posner’s much-acclaimed Stupid Fucking Bird, an adaptation of Chekhov’s Seagull. As Us was percolating in my brain, and as I was noticing more and more articles discussing the supposedly mysterious themes and hidden meanings within this genre-bending movie, my experience at the genre-bending Life Sucks hit me hard, as an answer to all my doubts and emerging cynicism about Us.
Note: There are some “spoilers” in this article. But Helen Highly suggests that if Peele wants to play in the philosophical Big Leagues, discussing archetypal relationships, then he needs to grow up and leave the notion of spoilers for lesser minds. Generations of people have known how all the Chekhov stories end, but that hasn’t yet stopped them from watching.
In the movie Us, Adelaide Wilson returns from the city to the beachfront home where she grew up, accompanied by her husband, son and daughter and planning to spend time with old friends. Haunted by a traumatic experience from the past, Adelaide grows increasingly concerned that something bad is going to happen that will threaten the safe, docile, middle-class lives of her family. Her worst fears soon become a reality, when four masked strangers descend upon the house. When the masks come off, the family is horrified to learn that each attacker takes the appearance of one of them and is harboring some long-buried resentments about power inequities and secret yearnings. Each family member must face off against their murderous other-selves, who are figuratively and sometimes literally “tethered” to them. It’s the quintessential us vs them scenario, where the threat from others truly comes from ourselves. Thus, in keeping with the classic horror genre, the danger is coming from inside. In the end, there is a parting between us and them, but the future is uncertain.
“Life Sucks” Poster, by Aaron Posner
In Life Sucks, an urban professor (Austin Pendleton in the original production and Kevin Isola in the remount) returns to the country home where he grew up, accompanied by his beautiful young wife. They descend upon the house that contains the long-ignored family and friends he left behind. Haunted by a family history of power inequities, repressed resentments, and secret yearnings, the characters experience increasing concern that something bad is going to threaten their complacent, docile, middle-class lives. Their worst fears soon become a reality as they each are confronted by the images of themselves that they project onto others, and they are forced to face their own regrets as mirrored in the seeming success of those most closely connected to them. Denial has been living in the basement and accountability has come to call. Posner has taken Chekhov’s traditional “suffering is beautiful” stance and given it some edge, and a pointed opinion: We are our own worst enemies. In the end, there is a parting between us and them, but the future is uncertain.
“Us” movie poster
Do the two sound similar? Yeah. Dualities. Opposites that create and destroy each other. The way that people are tethered to their darker selves, both personally and as a society. Who is the real “us” – the people we feel we are inside (our hurts, our hopes, our dreams) or the people others perceive us to be (selfish, ugly, threatening)? What happens when our worst selves are unleashed? In us vs them, who is truly to blame and who is the victim? Who gets to walk away a hero, and at what cost to others?
The real question is this: Would you rather explore these philosophical quandaries within a bloody battle with speechless creatures from a subterranean world or over tea and vodka with articulate intellectuals as they stroll through gardens and play piano in their living room? Box office sales would surely indicate that most would prefer the former. But Helen Highly prefers the latter. (And for the sake of total accuracy, I note that Posner changes the traditional Chekhovian beverage from vodka to rum and coke, as part of his modernization of the play – a small detail that I would have preferred to remain traditional.)
My immediate reaction to Us was extreme disappointment, as I had adored Get Out and would have been happy to see it win an Oscar for Best Picture. But this new movie is a relentlessly violent and bloody slasher flick, where the crude brutality overwhelms whatever finesse, imagination, or meaningful messaging it may contain. Peele gave quite a few interviews explaining his film, after-the-fact, and many an article was written deciphering the riddle-like significance of the film. But whatever nuanced complexities might have been in Peele’s head didn’t make it to the screen, and certainly didn’t make it into my head. And just like any joke, if you have to explain it afterward, that means it didn’t really work.
Even when Peele’s often heavy-handed metaphors did scream about their social or psychological significance, I just didn’t care, because I didn’t want to have to sit through another kill-fest scene in order to grasp his laborious, clumsy philosophizing. Is there more ironic significance to be found if one swims through all the blood to reach it? Maybe. But when I saw Life Sucks, it was profoundly and unequivocally clear that Chekhov is and always will be a master writer and philosopher, no matter how much contemporary silliness is thrown at his work, while Peele is still very much a newbie, and this film did not earn the “homework” afterward to try to make sense of his mess. Kudos to Peele for his commanding first film, and he certainly should keep working, but Helen Highly suggests that those watching keep proper perspective and reserve their highest praise for those who truly deserve it. Aaron Posner deserves it.
“Life Sucks” Play by Aaron Posner, w/Jeff Biehl as Vanya
Posner brings Chekhov out from the dusty past and makes him as fresh and relevant to contemporary life as Jordan Peele wishes he were. And director Jeff Wise seems to work in perfect partnership with Posner, delivering an audacious, immensely entertaining production that mingles mirth and angst with shock-and-awe in ways that portray life’s greatest dilemmas and despairs while ultimately sending the audience from the theater feeling strangely uplifted despite their newly activated personal pain.
It’s amazing how a few surprise gunshots that miss their targets and draw no blood can be as alarming and powerful as countless bloody murders. But what’s it all about? Both the movie and the play have a lot on their minds – virtual prisms of contemplation.
Speaking of prisms, I’ll start with mirrors, which figure prominently in Us. There is a decrepit carnival house of mirrors (and later, fractured shards of mirrors) that reflect a frightened little girl, who sees – or imagines? – her darker double, an image that returns repeatedly throughout the film. That scared little girl grows up to be a troubled, bourgeois wife and mother of two, who finally comes face-to-face with her “tethered” underworld double – her metaphysical opposite, both played with extraordinary dexterity by Lupita Nyong’o.
Plus, there is a vanity/makeup mirror in which a bleeding, murderous doppelganger of another bourgeois housewife applies lipstick with ghoulish panache, which is perhaps the most entertaining part of the movie, thanks to a thrilling performance by Elisabeth Moss. This deranged opposite-monster gives the most heinous portrayal possible of the superficial, self-absorbed character she seeks to kill and replace. At this point, it’s certainly no spoiler to reveal that all the ordinary, petty, self-entitled, real-world characters each have a zombie-like double who seeks to destroy and replace them. Does this already sound like Invasion of the Body Snatchers? Ding ding ding: You win the prize.
Meanwhile, Life Sucks sticks to the old theatrical trick of characters acting as human mirrors of each other. There is a clever scene, amazing in its simple effectiveness, in which all the characters line up to face off against the bourgeois, self-absorbed, complaining, Vanya (played by Jeff Biehl), each asking in turn, “What, am I supposed to feel sorry for you?” and then detail their own under-the-surface pains and grievances, which sometimes serve as confessions as well. Posner has taken the underlying psychologies of his layered characters and turned them inside out, so that they directly speak their interior thoughts, and even explain their personal issues and social philosophies, and still the play does not get near the level of over-bearing, self-important obnoxiousness that runs through the movie Us.
“Us” Movie Poster
What’s the most scary thing in Us? Your miserable, moaning, opposite-self, who is emotionally tethered to you, is coming to stab you to death with a giant pair of scissors. (Scissors are made of two identical halves that are attached to each other, and also represent a severing of unity: Get it?) What’s the most scary thing is Life Sucks? I asked the director, Jeff Wise.
He answered, “The scariest thing in life is our ability to delude ourselves. The characters in this play, like so many people, detach themselves from reality to avoid taking responsibility for themselves and the pain that brutal honesty would bring with it. And the more detached you are, the more vulnerable you are to reality making itself known to you. This is very scary – being so sure of something that is not real. And when the truth is made real to you, that’s terrifying. That’s when people have psychotic breaks.”
He continued, “Vanya is not happy about the decisions he has or has not made in his life. He thinks in an entitled way. He blames others. He blames society. He refuses to be accountable. And finally he starts lashing out in real and violent ways – the dissatisfied, angry part of himself who believes that life has been unfair to him. He brings a gun into the house. Now his fear has manifested in real danger. He has become toxic to his community. His unwillingness to confront his own struggle is dangerous to others. So, they must confront him.”
It’s the emotional confrontation that is terrifying. The other characters force Vanya to look at himself, as if in a mirror. But who needs a real mirror when you have the genius of Chekhov to depict the conflicts in our consciousness – the smashed glass between our egos and our ids? In fact, Posner interweaves sardonic humor with cutting truth so easily, you are able to watch that conflict – the confrontation between who we pretend to be and who we are afraid to be, and laugh at Vanya’s and our own tortured psyches. Posner doesn’t need absurd giant scissors; he has language.
Helen suggests that when Vanya’s seething resentment peaks, and he attempts to shoot and kill his better-than-him brother, he is attempting to tear the same type of tether to their better-halves that the ghouls in Us so viciously resent. In some ways, it’s a struggle to own ourselves and a question about free will. Can Vanya be the person he wants to be or is he doomed by his denial of who he truly is – his jealousy, his guilt, his weaknesses? Can Adelaide ever truly free herself from her ugly underground double? And which one of her double-selves most deserves the daylight; which one is the real one? It seems odd that these two very-different stories both grapple with the same questions. Are Us and Life Sucks tethered together like combating doubles of each other? If so, Chekhov walks away the winner.
Austin Pendleton in “Life Sucks”
There is another pair of tethered characters in Life Sucks that merits mention. Vanya’s niece, Sonia (Kimberly Chatterjee), is homely, hard-working, unsophisticated, and sexually “invisble,” especially to the man she loves — Dr. Aster (Michael Schantz). In contrast, there is her father’s beautiful, alluring, worldly wife, Ella (Nadia Bowers), who receives unwanted romantic overtures from every man within wishing distance, especially from her brother-in-law Vanya, and also, painfully, from Dr. Aster — the man Sonia believes should rightfully love her. There is a wonderful heart-to-heart scene between the two women, in which they confront each other’s (and their own) jealousies and failures and reflect on how each possesses much of what the other wants. Their late-night drunken dialogue has a charm that is both solemn and giddy. It’s a true, heart-wrenching joy to watch, and far out-classes any Jordan Peele scene of two, female opposites literally ripping each other’s hearts out.
In Get Out, Peele was more effective at integrating comedy into the tragedy than he is in Us. But Life Sucks reaches moments of outright hilarity, although it is not quite as tight and astute as Stupid Fucking Bird. Neither writer has achieved the greatness of their first efforts, but both remain promising young artists who are contributing to our national discourse on personal and societal responsibility as we move from the “old order” to the “new order,” or at least they’re making the attempt. At a time when immigration has become a national emergency in our country, they are dealing with issues of outsiders vs insiders, us vs them (within ourselves and society), and blame vs responsibility. That’s the wonder of art – to make us think while we are entertained.
Lupita Nyong’o in Us Movie
Both stories have a moral seriousness and earnest intensity dotted with amusing pop-culture references. In Us, we get to see an Amazon-Alexa-like voice-operated music player get splattered with blood as it plays “Good Vibrations” by the Beach Boys (a song from 1966). In Life Sucks, we get to hear the Pickles character sing “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road,” by the Beatles (a song from 1968). We also hear Paul Simon’s “American Tune” (1975). The lyrics are right at home in Life Sucks but would have fit just as well into Us:
I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered
I don’t have a friend who feels at ease
I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered
or driven to its knees
But it’s all right, it’s all right
We’ve lived so well so long
Still, when I think of the road
we’re traveling on
I wonder what went wrong
I can’t help it, I wonder what went wrong
Okay, maybe that’s me showing my age. I do agree with other critics who have applauded Jordan Peele’s savvy exploitation of how tethered we are to pop music. See this article by Micah Peters at The Ringer, for more on that.
Peele aims to be more overtly political in his story, but… his 1980’s-era Hands Across America tie-in reads more nostalgic than meaningful. I think he gets himself too twisted up between Alice-in-Wonderland rabbit references and homeless guys with Bible verses written on their foreheads to really put together anything resembling an intellectually viable political thesis; he’s made a mediocre, psychological-thriller / slasher-film combo with some archetypal undertones and enough symbolic details to let anybody read anything they want into the meaning of it all. It is generous to include his movie in any real philosophical discussion, but he does seem to be thinking about things; maybe next time he’ll express some real ideas.
Posner and Wise’s effort is much stronger and more emotionally gripping. Let’s face it; no one can touch Chekhov when it comes to existential angst and human complexity. It’s worth noting that Posner does squarely place the setting in the United States but is vague about the date, although there is an Exxon reference at one point. So it seems both stories see something significant about America in the 1980s, while they also speak to a contemporary audience.
I am left with questions: Are we our own worst enemies? Does life really suck? And if it doesn’t suck, what does it do?
Life staggers. It confounds. It rages. And it yearns. Life is beautiful and Life Sucks.
Go see the play. Skip the movie.
Life Sucks was a downtown smash hit at Wheelhouse Theater but now is having a summer run uptown at Acorn Theatre, beginning June 4. Helen HIGHLY suggests you go see it. I personally guarantee you will be glad you did. Click here for tickets.
