The release of Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color earlier this year lead to a good deal of chin-wagging – some of it intelligent and fruitful, all of it very anticipated – about what the film means. Carruth’s hypnotic, show-don’t-tell approach to storytelling can pretty easily leave viewers puzzled: especially viewers unequipped with a basic understanding of film as a visual medium, and the meanings that follow from one image/shot/scene to another, and accrue in the long run.
What nags most about Upstream Color is Carruth’s willful obfuscation. Though the director (and writer, and producer, and distributor, and scorer, and star) has been eager to talk about the film, certain of its details feel not so much elusive as intentionally withheld. Some people would say that getting hung up on these details isn’t really the point, that enigmatic (or outright inscrutable) films like Upstream Color function by making a virtue of their secrecy (or outright inscrutability). As the fella puts it in the Coens’ A Serious Man, “Accept the mystery.”
And sure. That’s fine. Films can be gorgeous, experiential, ineffable things and picking them apart can sort of ruin it, like someone saying “I love you” and then you responding, “Well, you know love was just made up by romantic poets as an imaginary framework for the chatteling of wives in Victorian England.”
Yet it seems fair enough that movies can be two – and maybe even more – things and that the thrill of unpacking the dense, cryptic ones, poring over their details for clues like some dorky, cine-sleuthing Langdon Alger can provide its own valid experience, as legit as accepting the mystery and letting a film’s pleasures just sort of wash over you. As rapturous and ineffable and etc. as movies can be, they’re also just things, fit to be endlessly dissected like an old hot rod engine or a passive-aggressive e-mail from an ex-girlfriend. And having some basic understanding of how this thing works on narrative level, and how all the little details fit together, certainly can’t hinder a more thorough understanding of what a given film is up to.
Rodney Ascher’s excellent Room 237 – which opens in Toronto this Friday – succeeds in large part because it does two things (maybe even more) relating to all of this. First, it zeroes in on the compelling nature of cinephilic obsession, giving itself over to the boundless theorizing of a group of people obsessed with Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Ascher understands, and even seems to revere, the idea that this kind of engagement with a film becomes a form of captive psychosis, the movie holding sway over the viewer like some sort of weird hypnotist.
Second, Ascher doesn’t really take any of it too seriously. Room 237 isn’t about how credible any of these theories are. It’s about the sheer depth and sincerity of them. Here the film strikes a tone somewhere between the compassionate and the absurd, viewing its interviewees almost as victims, some coming cross as functionally insane.
This is what I probably like best about Room 237: it treats films not just as airy ineffable things, but consuming, evil things. And not just “evil” in a “Hollywood is bad!” kind of way, but actually destructive, polluting the souls of its viewers. It goes a long way toward consolidating the power of film that people tend to talk about in hushed tones – it’s power to move, inspire, excite, etc. as if it’s actually some animate, sentient thing.
So for every rhapsodic, enigmatic Upstream Color or Tree Of Life there must be a The Shining, good and evil locked in some swirling Zoroastrian power struggle for the feeling of the cinephile. And pulling these spookier puzzle films to pieces is totally understandable. It’s a form of immersion therapy. Dismantling these movies is a way of understanding them, and in so understanding them, putting them safely out of mind.
Anyway. Having said all of that, here are the Top Five “puzzle films” (for lack of a better anything):
1. Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001): This was the big one, for me, personally. I remember seeing it grade ten, ca. 2002-ish, when a teacher loaned it to me after I told him how much I liked Lynch’s Eraserhead and The Elephant Man. It’s the first movie I remember watching, rapt, all the way through, and then immediately watching again. I wasted countless hours on message boards trading theories about the film with fellow obsessives, shot down the rabbit hole as if out of a canon.
As a puzzle, Lynch’s (second) high masterpiece works on a number of levels: there’s the general impenetrability of the woman-in-trouble plotting, which throws out film noir-ish cues only to spin them on their head. There’s the piecemeal structure, which betrays something of the film’s origin as a passed-over pilot for an ABC serialized drama. Then there’s the larger mystery of what the film is really “about,” i.e.: is the first part a dream? Is the homeless guy behind the diner the devil? And so on. Like most of Lynch’s films, Mulholland Drive’s heavy symbolic coding and intoxicating dream-logic rewards repeat viewings, and multiple interpretations. Lynch is famously tight-lipped about all this stuff, but the original DVD release included the director’s “10 Clues to Unlocking This Thriller,” some of which are hilariously obtuse in themselves – “7. What is felt, realized and gathered at the Club Silencio?” – while others seem like red herrings Lynch is gamely tossing out (“10. Where is Aunt Ruth?”).
2. Last Year At Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961): With its shifting spatial and psychic geography, this French drama is pretty much the original The Shining. Unfolding at a party of well-to-do types at a lavish chateau, Marienbad uses flashbacks, repetition and a juggled chronology to explore the ambigious relationship between a man, a woman and some other guy.
3. Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972): Like Upstream Color, one of Tarkovsky’s two or three or four masterpieces brilliantly apprehends the potential of cinema to tell stories, and express emotions and ideas, in a way that’s pointedly, uh…cinematic? Ostensibly a sci-fi drama about Russian cosmonauts studying the ocean of another planet, Solaris poses all sorts of knotty questions about the reliability of memory, the character of human love, and the place of humankind in nature. Heavy with sleepiness and dreamy imagery, Solaris’ space opera is a bit of a MacGuffin. Tarkovsky’s mind, and heart, isn’t so much turned toward the celestial heavens above as the unconscious expanses within.
4. Primer (Shane Carruth, 2004): The debut micro-budget feature from the Upstream Color director, Primer is dense with techno-jargon, doubles and a rat’s nest of intersecting timelines. Following two friends who accidentally invent a kind of time travel while tinkering in their garage, Primer may really be about the fissures that drive best buddies apart, but understanding just how their time-travelling doohickey works, and how its workings affect the characters’ disintegrating friendship, doubtless offers a more nuanced understanding of its basic theme.
5. Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001): In high school, when I was super into Mulholland Drive, I used to scoff at the kids wrapped up in Donnie Darko, like it was a Lynch film for babies or something. With the benefit of hindsight, and the marginal wisdom of age, I can see it’s a different beast altogether. Like Primer, Darko is hung up in some regard with the reality of time travel. But its story of a sullen high schooler trying to piece together a series of Doomsday prophecies, and communing with a guy in a spooky rabbit costume, pulls double-duty as a study of teenage alienation and depression. Too bad I only came around to realizing this stuff when I was well out of high school.
Honourable mention: It’s Pat: The Movie (Adam Bernstein, 1994): Is the androgynous, acutely annoying, Pat Riley a man or a woman?! I gotta know!
