Orlando (1992)
Written and Directed by Sally Potter
One of those movies you always have on the list that you finally see and somehow still retains a rarity because it meets or beats all your hyped up expectations. Orlando—if I remember correctly and can control the narrative a bit here even if I’m wrong—had a small but devoted cult following among the English department at my University (undergrad). A movie you always heard about or maybe saw an image of or someone recommended to you when recommendations were open-ended and less a plug for a streaming service. I remember walking into a Professor’s office and seeing two posters for it. The one where Tilda Swinton looks like Hamlet and the one where she is in bed with—unknown to me at the time—Billy Zane. A very present reference during my time at school that watching it now speaks to how I understand postmodernism. Probably watchable at the audio visual library but because of a depressive run that lasted a good chunk of my undergrad wasn’t an activity I was emotionally available there for even when it represented so much of what I actually liked about art naturally. Which just proves how tangled my wiring was back then. All those movies I could have seen for free and I was paying how much to prove I was smart at that place? Imagine being so sad you don’t even recognize Billy Zane. I’m surprised I didn’t evaporate through the walls at one point.
A lean post-modern procedure, the film is more of an essay chronicling an example than narrative running between the raindrops of subtext. A hypothetical figure living in between the bookends of two Elizabethan eras, Orlando (Tilda Swinton in probably the role that defines her career even when this feels like a b-side compared to her louder performances) acts as a synecdoche to British imperialism. A material and spiritual subject Queen Elizabeth (Quentin Crisp) gives nobility and immortality to that wanders or idles through the ages. Going through the motions of what is expected of them but also wavering when it comes to marriage and practical love, finding interest in poetry but enabling a poet who hates their attempts at verse, and engaging in conquests under the guise of fraternity. Changing into a woman when they see a soldier die in front of them that represents a cultural blemish (or a bubble popping) than a mortal inevitability. The metamorphosis popping out strictures always present but until now didn’t apply or a juxtaposition that takes the aloof nothingness of a nobleman’s life—a privilege abused through in-action—as a means to articulate the reality of how a woman operates or doesn’t as this synecdoche.
The film’s concerns are structural rather than conventionally dramatic. It’s always androgynous. Not only capturing an English court becoming more colourful and covered with silk bows and wigs that grow wildly, but observing how gender flows and solidifies in performance and costume. How noting a dynamic disassembles the foundational powers being held and how a re-ordering of history becomes a more chaotic act than one supporting that order through re-staging and re-enacting. Giving that power to a female performer playing a man who turns into a woman and having the camera wander towards her with her knowing she is at the centre of this art. Enabled to poke and prod at a setting that sees her as scenery through a side-glance at the lens (and maybe losing some focus when Billy Zane shows up). The structure of the film forming around that relationship at first ethereal and framed classically that becomes practical and wobbling as her daughter holds a camcorder to her face at the end of the “film”. Creating a new type of structure to appear in or now dwelling in another record.
It isn’t a new trick even when examples stretched apart make an audience think it’s revolutionary. Fleabag is the newest version (Waller-Bridge like Orlando is also a synecdoche of British Imperialism*) but there is a deep tradition here that doesn’t get ignored but gets forgotten. This period near the end of the last century where you have films like this and plays like Top Girls or books like Written on The Body. Showing age but within a historical period in art that’s not nearly as observed as art** that rots quicker. Made worse when a dude calling himself “The Movie Bully” has to point this out.
River of Grass (1994)
Written and Directed by Kelly Reichardt
Rustic living-in-the-second photography*** telling a story very deliberately sitting in the middle of a sensual and vulgar place, River of Grass feels like a riff on Badlands in denial. Capturing a kind of irony in analog nostalgia—old records in cardboard boxes, brown leather-bound crime hardbacks on linoleum tiles (the kind of books you’d find in an uncle’s house), bar interiors designed for soaking dust and letting shadows paint the walls—but feeling too sincere in the appraisal. Under the same sun as a Stray Bullets story that will never go off or become a meaner thing even when the ending isn’t a nice gesture. Bouncing off ideas but still focused on one meaningful point it makes that proves a lot of the texture of the film was just a style or something else to film for the day.
The assignment of giving Sissy Spacek’s character in Badlands an agency through her naivety works but seems more conservative. Lovers on the run become two people on the run. Their connection less primal and inanimate and their crime a misfire that isn’t worth a chase or hiding. It’s a purposeful action but it feels weird when a realism or behavioural style of acting dominates the design of the whole. A theoretical premise illustrating the lives of lower class people that feels more science fiction than Bresson. Especially alien when the scenes where these two people meet feel genuine and an actual example of what Reichardt’s career resembles. But even thinking you committed murder shouldn’t be an excuse to hang around a dude with that kind of hair.
Kentucky Route Zero Act 5 (2020)
By Cardboard Computers
I bought a Nintendo Switch around my 30th birthday (almost last year as I write this) in a place of total defeat and finally knowing how to wallow in it. Coming towards the reality that many dreams I wanted to pursue at this point would have to be expressed in a part-time capacity that had a tenacity to dwindle and lack a real consistency. Creative projects existing only as these starts consuming notebooks and either repetitious or scattered ideas for a collection of ill-developed projects serving as fire-escapes (podcasts). Work creating the gaps that never produce a groove and having to halt and repeat. Each year after university drifting away from communities I could have joined or been a part of and finding myself in spheres incredibly alienating the more I sticked around in them. Realizing ideals and value systems and judgments that I had somehow kept believing in were actually the signs of a weirder person to those around me. Black-pilled old people fostering ugly ideas as the world falls apart, contemporaries who fell on the other side of the internet who think having a passing interest in Radiohead (“yeah I like them I guess”) is strange, people you grew up with becoming more conservative gradually finding solace in cul-de-sacs beside highways, maybe owning three books total, watching made-up shows like Peaky Blinders and Ozark. Constantly trying to figure out how exactly I became this phenomenon (in the absolute lamest of definitions) even when I constantly felt like shit. Alone and finally feeling lonely.
Buying the latest Nintendo console didn’t solve these problems or feelings but at the very least it provided some sort of opening that wasn’t filled constantly with worry and straightforward failure (the failure that punches rather than the failure that hangs behind you). It being a decision I made rather than still existing in a nebula of doing nothing but let the wave shatter me down further was enough. A thing I can focus on that wasn’t work in whatever sense. Still knowing that one day I am going to sit down after work and before I really feel it become engulfed in flames from the toes up.
It’s through that kind of opening you then discover things like Kentucky Route Zero.
Existing in fragments for most of the last decade and completed at the start of this one, Kentucky Route Zero channels an intimacy art as we normally interpret it can carry out but video games rarely take the risk in providing even when given the opportunity. Working within the more melancholic aspects of game design, it is a solitary experience always longing for community. Mimicking the lack of rhythm slow cinema provides the viewer in another medium built on training focus for hours at a time**** and a piece of theatre operating totally within appliances where the player can choose how to process and read the poetics of narrative. Characters/actors are faceless. The material is almost completely text. Audience take in performance as a projection. A conscious strip down as a means to recreate a closeness games sacrificed for total fidelity to create a vaguer beauty. Something you still have to half-imagine even when you’re looking at it. The fault that made video games unique as an art.
Anticipating The Return of Twin Peaks—Act Three (2014) the most in-debt to the series as it was and somehow becomes—and occupying the same structures in decline, the game feels too relevant to really summarize properly. Like Twin Peaks, the experience of taking it in still echoes. Parts feel too personable. The ritual of experiencing it relies on going towards it and allowing for a kind of surrender as the thing conducts imagery that both connects and estranges. A relaxed state indelible of a no-frills reality and a source for dreaming. Walking through post-modern structures in decay as they recede into a night sky or sink into underground rivers. Playing an older character—a delivery man searching for an address not on a map—and then gradually drifting away from them when they start accepting their failure in a state of tranquility annihilating their soul.
The Last Act reaches a purity in art I haven’t felt in a while and probably won’t feel again this year from anything new. A feeling of solidarity that video games weren’t equip to really contain. Organically generating something touching. A William Morris-esque commune after a hurricane where it’s context is explorable but also has to be symbolically relatable. About people who thought they won something but end up losing it in a night (which now happens like a holiday). Ending the same way as Altman’s Nashville with a song that struggles to be optimistic in spite of everything dealt and still being devastated. “The heart breaks and lives by breaking.”
Manhunter Update:
I hope this was good. I just see all you bozos getting a Nintendo Switch to play that Animal Crossing game where you have to appease a landlord and God knows what else (I heard a guy wants to take your picture and when you go back to his place he has nothing in his basement) and feel like I have to recommend something non-deranged. If you’re not getting better at Guilty Gear during this time you at least should experience something genuinely amazing that requires no skill! There will definitely be more to cover with Kentucky Route Zero as well. Both critically and as I think of my own creative projects.
I’m going to be more regular with this and manage my time for it a little more. I need to write instead of thinking about writing because the alternative isn’t really fun. So we’re going full on King of Fighters ’98 up in this piece. Next week! Meek’s Cutoff ! Also less-appeasing movies to talk about that may or may not be….anime. I have to earn your respect before you know longer respect me!
The Endnotes:
*What?! I liked The Good Crashing.
**and no I’m not going to say “media” What am I too good to say “stuff” now?
***I’ve been looking at a lot of William Eggleston photography. Maybe because I’m yearning for these public spaces again even if these spaces weren’t really what I saw before this pandemic or maybe because summer is around the corner and summer nights have that kind of magic to them.
**** “Finally take the reins of the Turin Horse in this massive open world!”