I DREAM MYSELF ALIVE: MANDY's Giving Tree

**Notes on MANDY. (2018)**

1985.

 A-Ha invites the world to hear synth songs composed of elements medieval, picaresque and fantastic.  The songs constitute their 1985 album, Hunting High and Low.  One song in particular is constructed in a melodramatic register but also serves up popular appeal, and it is titled "I Dream Myself Alive."

"I Dream Myself Alive.
You can't deny.
There's something dark against the light.
All I can say,
It doesn't have to be this way."

The song is immersive, conducting a specific world, as the band does cohesively throughout the album.  Beyond being music, playing it evokes a subjectivity; an enclosure; a world of feeling.
As does Panos Cosmatos' Mandy.

1983.

MANDY.  Panos Cosmatos, 2018.

The synth sounds (composed by Johann Johannsson) haunt and bounce; reverberating the space they live in, like glass.  Sometimes notes collect en masse, droning; suggesting inevitability.
Red Miller (Nicholas Cage) dreams himself into an unreal reality.  He inhabits a holy space of his own creation.  He works in the earth and  the earth returns his effort and gives shelter.  Love is a private inner world he and his lover Mandy Bloom (Andrea Riseborough) sustain by maintaining its borders.  She illustrates; figurally and scenically aligned with the fantastical imagery of the Metal bands she sports on her shirts.  Their story is romantic yet conscious about its interiority; hiding inside, being separated from some greater world.  The elements coloring the story are oversaturated primaries, deep space in forestry environs, mythologic marital love, and the fantastic.

Early scenes:  Red cuts trees for work. The trees his chainsaw cleaves in two prefigure the cleaving of oneness into twoness that occurs in dramatic graphic imagery as the movie gets in motion.
When Red returns home to Mandy at the end of his work day, their domestic sphere evokes a modern treehouse, with visible lumber and the sense of being a safe space within a natural organism.

"Handke wrote, 'The people left the grave quickly.  Standing beside it, I looked up at the motionless trees:  for the first time it seemed to me that nature really was merciless.  So these were the facts!  The forest spoke for itself.'  That was beautiful, ...Handke did not lie...I was lying.  Why? When I looked at a tree, I saw that it was blind and arbitrary, an entity that had come into being and would die, and which in the meantime was growing."
-- p 177 My Struggle, Book 6 -Karl Ove Knausgaard.

TITLE CARD:  Shadow Mountains 1983 A.D.

Images track the Sacred as well as the Profane.  The couple's womblike home counters the vastness of the wooded spaces as well as the heterogenous intentions outside of their own.

Mandy is the main character through which we experience a sense of anxiety of outside threats.  The look in her eyes as she works in the shop, her awareness of another's gaze upon her; both a male in a car and another female, in person. Women are not holy to Mandy, and her modernness is sensed in her own agency by working for herself and knowing enough to be as untrusting of a woman than she may be a man.

Murmured in the background is an Unseen Voice of the Televisual: The voice of President Ronald Reagan, announcing, triumphantly, the spiritual awakening of America.

ENTER: THE BOGEYMEN.

Distinctions are as blurry as the image of Mandy's face when it falls under the subjective, longing  gaze of "Psycho Jesus Freak" Jeremiah Sand (Linus Roache.)

Vision counters sound.  The sound is rhetorical, and vision slowly states that what we know is moving into past tense. The definition of Mandy vs the definition of the evil sister is blurred because our view; our perspective is blurred. We watch Mandy walk home and we breathe in a dreamlike sense of her:  romantic and elemental in the forest.  The form of her silhouette is liquefied as she and the forest bleed into each other.  Is this a fairytale princess; the viewfinder owned by adoring husband Red?  Or is this the view of Mandy from the car window of murderous deviant Jeremiah Sand?

THE TREE OF LIFE VS THE BOGEYMAN.
PERCEPTION IS FLUID.

Good vs. Evil, or loss of individuation.
Silhouettes have boundaries.  Their outline is what differentiates (for the watcher) the distinction between where the human ends and where the forest they are walking in begins.  Boundaries (like these) bleed in Mandy.  Key here is the distended timeline and sequence of Mandy's capture. But is this point of rupture (and major tonal pivot point in the film) or a nod to the creative process? The doors of perception allow one to enter a possible crisis: permanent loss of self.  They also offer privileged rarity:  pure experience outside of the self.  To bend the mind and amuse at the loss.

Later on, in Knausgaard's book, he struggles with the process (WHY and HOW) of creating art.
A sense of boundary -less ness or selflessness is drawn:
"What does it mean to write?  First of all it is to lose oneself, or one's self.  In that it resembles reading, but ...the loss of the self in writing is in a different way complete, as when snow vanishes into snow...no foreground or background, no top or bottom."
p. 240

TOPICAL BOGEYMEN:
(in 1983)
Under the gothic pop terrain is a deeper reckoning:  reaction to the radical political change of the late 1960s -70s and the freewheeling sexual mores.  The political and cultural reactionaries came back to battle it all with BOGEYMEN.  Feminism was born and then widely rebuked in 1983; a recall based on the horror of women who do not subordinate to men.
When Mandy is taken by the man who can't escape her gaze; he is the bogeyman not unlike how traditional women saw people like Mandy at that time.  It was dawn in America, and women were pressed to maintain the traditional role. In the sequence depicting her kidnapped encounter, there is a shared recognition between Mandy and Sand; each horrified of the other, faces acidicly dripping into one another.

GODLESS SOVIETS. (Perestroika, doomed attempts to alter a governmental economy. Encroaching RED scare echoed in MANDY's apocalyptic reds)
Fear of sexual deviation and the loss of the couple: recent psychic symptoms from 1970s spate of MANSON TYPE CULT LEADERS.

INDEPENDENT WOMEN -- WILL FORSAKE MEN.  Because ERA almost passed..until in 1982 it failed to be ratified by the a few of the total needed number of states.  Anxieties of the job market are exulted by working men facing the end of economic harmony as well as the end of heterosexual dependency.

Writing on the economic crisis of 2008-09, David Leonhardt  reminds us of 1982 as he writes (NYT, Jan 20, 2009):  "Is the economy only a little worse than it was in the last couple recessions, as some have said, and still a long way from the dark days of 1982?"

she exerts agency

Trapped in his Gaze

Are they so different?

enjoyment, but solitary

Desperate to reassert his own agency

MANDY may not "be" about anything, but it recalls a lot of things.  The political psychic scars are indelible though not explicit, and the hypnotic distension of allure and immersion  foregrounds the experiential nature of art above narrative.  The epic battle of good and evil that follows is itself foregrounded by the film's slow burn of a start.  Reminding viewers that good and evil are creations people choose, politically or psychically serving the disenfranchised or the obsessed.  Refuting logic by the broken film form that lives at its core, MANDY feels as if its about the intoxication of space and sound; and how aligned it can be with a particular period of time and feeling. All we know for certain is the immersive aspect of life, stunning primary colors, serene or driving sounds  the purest blues in a valley lake, the sound of your lovers' quiet voice.

A STAR IS BORN: IT WANTS TO KILL YOU

A STAR IS BORN operates on highs:  the loudest guitar, the bluest blue, a love most supreme, the most destructive downward turn.   The movie bathes its subjects in blues and reds,  contoured by the presence of shadows (analogue to a spotlight), the colors and shifting lights correlate to the music (alternation of soft ballads' intimacy and louder vocal proclamations of rock), and how it in turns shapes our moods.

The world of A STAR IS BORN is uncluttered; it is essential in style.

Jackson;  Elegant Mess

Jackson Maine is onstage:  Red stadium lights dominate.   The spotlight in the small drag club where Ally first performs reds the entire room.  The ideas behind the color identical, yet the latter set to smaller scale.  The connective ocean flows between the rock star and the waitress. The ocean is alcohol. The series of narrative and visual echoes are filmed as intensifications.

Coming out of the stadium he is driven away and has a chance encounter with Ally (Lady Gaga).  Their resigned eyes reflect one another.

(An answer) sung by Ally in the parking lot to Jack:
"Aren't you tried of tryin to fill that void?   Or do you need more?"

They bond in Jackson's boozy exurban stop-over. The two collide and quietly connect.

Prisoners of the Light

Jackson is an addict, he is down, and so naturally, in his back pocket he's got plans.  They're reserved for another day, one not too near, because they are not sure to occur.  But he has an out.  His disease endures, desiring him dead.

The viewers are confronted with Jackson's disease in piecemeal moments; a few clues followed by a slow burn of increasingly cringe-worthy to frightening moments of obliteration. The depiction of Jackson's second affliction, tinnitus, is an echo of his addiction.  To suffer from it is to hear too loudly, or to hear sounds internally that do not exist externally.  The sounds create a singular pain. Jackson's heart and mind are sick with this affliction.  A sonic equivalent to the distorted reality that magnifies his problems; expanding as Ally rises to stardom.  What better way to illustrate the pain in being so sensitive to everything, and by not being able to dull it anymore?

The update provided in Cooper's version of A Star is Born is heightened coverage of Jackson's addiction.  The male psyche is the way in to this dark tunnel, replete with wounds and a soul baring desire for love and comfort. The connection and the love shared between them is believable. They speak of how they feel what they write -- how they shape it into something more; a connective process impregnating them both.  As their connection takes root, stakes are raised; narratively the love and safety Jackson seeks seems answered as he bolsters Ally's problematic self esteem and drive. Visual cues follow the narrative: blues become reds and the music and cuts come quicker.  Melodrama by way of music video:  dynamic cuts make points between the shots, eyes exposed -- pregnant with trauma and missed chances.  Each frame is an intact production. The music serves a heightened emotional intensity.  Addiction is rewarded with not often seen honesty-- it pulls and it lures.  His impulse to obliterate is a beautiful living thing. 

He is sickened by the alteration of Ally's music, a denigration of the Real.  Teams enter:  they surround Ally and re-mold her.  She is driven further from herself.  She is produced and contained, separated from the truth they once had in a parking lot.  Artifice was stripped when her drag club makeup was peeled off her face; a bandage hiding the wound. As fame builds and blinds (with deepening blues and reds, intensified edits), the makeup returns to obscure and entrap. The path is full of fraudulence, more than he will bare.  The answer:  Use.  Escape.

Art Pepper, addicted jazz musician:

"Living without love is like not living at all."

back to the film:
-----------------------------------------------------------------

 Another aspect of Cooper's style that struck me is the idea of the spotlight and how it bears down on someone suffering.  It can illuminate a broken spirit.  Under that light, no one escapes.  Jackson, in graphic relation to the spotlight in each frame, is devastating to the viewer.  His beautiful but broken spirit is clearest (onstage performing or at the Grammys) when he is under its pull. Ally is filmed like an illuminated spirit, expansive in power and emotion in the frames where she is in the spotlight. The film is often dark; using expressive lights via the glare of the overproduced tv segment or the total soul baring exposure of the concert spotlight.  In Cahiers du Cinema, there is a 1970 article by Serge Daney and Jean-Pierre Oudart called "Work, Reading, Pleasure."  Daney speaks of how a film can give us "...the splendour of truth."  He goes on to describe film, in a materialist sense, as a "prisoner of the light."

The end:  She is born; he dies.  He (Jack) has left the earth; surrendered his war with meaninglessness. This is a sad state of affairs, but also: brutal, secret pain has been transformed because of the artist and their craft.  Sorting out the  aftermath, there is a brief scene of his brother (Sam Elliott) and Ally in discussion. The brother riffs on inevitability and work of a songwriter:  He pointedly tells her there are 12 octaves in every song, and every song is always going to keep telling the same 12 notes, in different ways.

It is the same circle that keeps going around and around, and everyone tells the same story, and its only art when someone arranges it this way.

Another dozen--   12 steps that can lead to freedom.

Jackson's brief respite in recovery. Separated from the group.

Jerry and the Prefab People: HARDLY WORKING and Americana

(this post is of a piece I did for Mubi last winter.)

Jerry and the Prefab People: "Hardly Working" and Americana

In "Hardly Working" (1980), Jerry Lewis is Making America Goyish Again.

jessica r felrice  26 DEC 2017

Part of the Jerry Lewis tribute A MUBI Jerrython. 

In Hardly Working, Jerry Lewis, as Bo Hooper, is Making America Goyish Again. Made in between The Day the Clown Cried and Jerry’s Telethons for Muscular Dystrophy, this is Jerry’s first (seen) attempt to wed issues of Jewish /outsider identity, and Americana with the desire for artistic or political legacy.  Opening with a montage (of other movies): Jerry toots his horn in a greatest moments' super edit.  Bracketing the sequences is the typewriting scene in Who’s Minding the Store?. Though it is not a film Jerry directed, it is the only clip shown piecemeal that conspicuously shows craft.  The poetry of his comedy, seemingly effortless, credited to hard work.

This gaze extending into the past introduces an artistic defense that Jerry makes for himself.  In a late career pivot Jerry Lewis (re)directs himself in Hardly Working as a less hapless, more goyish and less boyish Clown.  This iteration is Bo Hooper, older and wider, the least 'beau' Bo; close cousin to The King of Comedy's "Jerry Langford", but without his stature or success.  Adjusting his persona as a literal clown in a more real world,  there is markedly less "Bell" and less "Boy."  More muscular, aged and thick in circumference than we've seen him on screen, physical and emotional gravity occupies these frames.

Abandoning some of the pure anarchy of earlier Jerry star turns, Hardly Workingintroduces a pathos (the circus closes and Jerry is thrust into the real world to plant roots), infecting the carefree cinema of Jerry's past.  The world may scorn an unemployed clown, but that does not make him a scoundrel. Despite his best efforts, Bo remains an optimistic square peg.  Though never made explicit, issues of difference, and the fear of being kicked out of a community reverberate as indicators of "Jewishness."

Away from the circus, Bo is thrust into the land of you better blend in, and comedy ensues as he tries on job after job after job.  These jobs don’t ‘work’ for Bo/Jerry.  Dreaming of a greater purpose, he is an artist busying himself with mindless chores.  Common work is for the common people, or at least the more vanilla ones. 

The picture crystallizes a time of becoming; Jerry the clown (and Bo the clown) is struggling to find or create serious work; to be a part of a social or artistic legacy greater than a stand alone comic sequence. 

Hardly Working followed a painful near-decade where Jerry Lewis stopped making his own films. The last film he'd previously had in production was the still unseen Holocaust picture The Day the Clown Cried.  Intended to be Jerry's first serious dramatic role, the film apparently embraces head on both Jerry's Jewish identity and his identity as a performer.

Bo Hooper is the antithesis to the clown who periled in the Holocaust.  His family members and romantic interest read blond and bland.  With his severely greased back thinning hair, Bo even bears a passing resemblance to 1979 Ronald Reagan.  Bo’s gaze of desire lands on suburban tennis courts where palm trees and well-manicured foliage abound.  Homes and sunny exteriors conspicuously point to the whitewashed appeal of 1950s revisited as 1980s suburban America, a universe welcoming Ronald Reagan’s campaign  pledge to "Make America Great Again".  Bo lives in a series of set pieces wedded to prefab housed, affluent Florida (also location for Lewis’ The Bellboy) that embody an ethnic-free America.  In  the sun-filled suburbs half the tension is "blending in", which Bo attempts with desperation, but it's hardly working.

Muted mentions of government, civil service, running for office and becoming the President dot the film.   Hooper bases out of his very blonde sister's (Susan Oliver) suburban home in Florida, and in one of the earliest not for laughs scenes, he speaks to his (very blonde) niece about working hard and becoming anything you want, even the President. 

The onset of a greater purpose may be mistaken as a poverty of poetry.  The American qualities of ingenuity and regeneration are at work. Meaningless work is the same whether it is of a pointless entertainer or of a pointless postal position. A cog in the movie machine sees a forest for the trees, dreaming of a greater impact.  The mirror exposes an evolution of another actor; from performing roles to performing politics. Ronald Reagan, already governor of California, had transitioned to a role of greater public standing.  Reagan ran for President as Lewis was making Hardly Working.

Jerry’s visible ethnic difference is highlighted by the pale blonde women cast as relatives and love interest. This quiet echo of what drove him to make The Day the Clown Cried haunts the film.  It is impossible to separate the difference of being Jewish from the different -ness of Jerry as Bo. 

A mitigation of Bo's exceptional 'difference' aka ethnicity or Jewishness, results from the splintering of characters Jerry plays.  The most outrageous, most specifically ethnic character is also the only other one Jerry plays in drag; a lady, spewing Yiddish and thickly accented english, is dressed for tennis, flirting with Bo the postal worker on his route. 

Notably, this is the only other scene where running for president is directly addressed.  Through a strained dialogue, Jerry as the tennis lady thinks that Bo the postal worker (now semi-established by middle management) is looking to run for office.

Hardly Working also gives us time-bending sequences where pure comedy reigns.  After a shift as a disc jockey in a disco nightclub, Bo, in a sweater vest and front-seamed slacks Mr Rogers would wear, unties his bow tie in a nod to being off the clock, joining the younger, hipper  nightclubbers.  Separated from the others, he wistfully props himself upon a staircase rail, igniting a Saturday Night Fever fantasy sequence. Lewis becomes Travolta, not Travolta the great dancer, but Travolta the entertainer who doubles as an object of desire.  Suddenly dressed as Tony Manero and in center frame; the faces of the onlookers take on a hypnotized stare.

Dance moves, at first slow, point to a tightly wound sensuality.  Rhythm has Bo on a short leash; the possession glows in his eyes, and it can move you to tears. The stoned onlookers' faces dissipate into relaxed smiles; all eyes focused on Jerry.  Just as the tone draws us in, the dance moves morph to pure parody and physical comedy.  Propelled by pure sensation, the droop in his eyes abides and the gravity of his weariness lightens; Jerry is reborn, alive yet again. 

In failed job after failed job, there is the shadow of persecution: a constant threat that he can again be suddenly  dismissed. The initial loss of work in the circus was traumatic enough for him to uproot his life and try to find another way to live.  The constant loss of work underlies the lack of power in the hired hand as well as the nagging anxiety of being 'found out' and 'taken away' (Jewish anxieties post World War II).  The narrative  culminates in a pied piper type calling that finds Bo marrying his adoration from being a clown to being a leader in the Postal Service. The layers of persecution , threats of removal /being thrown out of a community, along with the bright pre fab faces that populate its carefully manicured 'Americana' point to a dilution of Jewishness or any specific ethnic identity. The tension of fitting in and getting to stay in a community coincide with the least Jewish Jerry and a political climate of retroactively imagining all of America as the suburbs in the 1950s.

The electricity of Hardly Working runs counter to earlier Jerry Lewis pictures.  With a jangly alteration of scenes of relaxed comedy and those of forced sentiment, tacky romantic music underlining earnest dialogues collide with some of the greatest stand alone comedic sequences ever put to film.

The result is a movie out of step while caught trying to move forward.  Jerry is in conflict; he is a man in artistic progress and moral consideration.  He is the clown and the Postal Office Civil Servant, the suburban WASP, but he is also still the Jewish City boy.  The effect of watching all these (sometimes clashing) elements  is to force a pause of reflection between laughs-- drawn into a more intimate relationship with the film’s author.

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Jerry Lewis A MUBI Jerrython

Reflective Breath __UN SECOND SOUFFLE

Careful, don't get winded.


Notices to watch the breath and check the pulse were commonly heard on the aerobics tapes of the 1970s + 80s.  "Don't forget to breathe!" "Are you above your target heart rate? If so: SLOW DOWN. If not, let's work HARDER!"
 In writer-director Gerard Blain's elegiac UN SECOND SOUFFLE (1978), the breath and wind is slowed and riffed on.  A momentary pause opens wide onto a scene of emotional stillness; no matter if the subject is mid-run, mid-record spinning or mid-drawing room.
The portrait of divorcee Francois' (Robert Stack) wealthy, worldly late in life bachelorhood is sober and stately.  Like a regal animal, near extinction, he is chronicled National Geographic style in the frame as he accomplishes his forest jogs.
A second wind is also a return to breath; an end to the inhalation of inner stasis.  Blain lays out a story of pluralism.  This film is not a chronicle of "one" second wind, but a series of inner reflections and distanced resignations. These inward movements are interspersed with suddenly expelled emotion. Distended sequences of exercise build a wave like crescendo of the regret that only comes with age.  The zen-like runs are countered with scenes of frenetic interaction.  When he is portrayed engaging with others it is always competitive (side by side or front to back in the frame) or flung into an overly filled mise en scene, confused in its decor and emotions.
Francois is emotionally and physically distanced from his family in early scenes, and he lives in a post - marriage, post - family constructed haven.  His emotions guarded; his looks toward familiars feature scant suspicion and a weighty regret.  His gazes at his competitors in dating (all vastly younger and virile), track a haughty disdain.  His eyes never quite hunger, yet he persists in competitive pursuits and tracksuits.

queuing his song to queue emotional deep connections 

savoring his "favorite movement" which promotes in him, literal stasis; total reflection

Shots of Stack's protag are dominated by the room in which he lives; be it the room of his conspicuously mod bachelor den or the unmarked trees of the woods.   Other times his camera moves in close to Stack's expressively resigned eyes; imagining, feeling, what we are not quite sure.  

His character competes in a progressively accelerating dating game with a young man he matter of factly learns (in the most sober post or pre coital interview) is sleeping with his much younger live in girlfriend.  The young man is at least 20 years junior, rides a motorcycle, and is regaled in bright primary colors. All of these attributes (including the bike, leading to minor injury, another sequence pregnant with the viewer's worst imagined futures) are co-opted by Stack's sullen man. He is virile, he is competitive, and he now bikes in the city streets and works out in the public sphere of the pre-fab  gym, as contrapuntal as can be to the shades of green in the natural world of his earlier runs.
In one shot, the two men playing this game (though maybe only the elder knowingly) encounter each other in the gym shower; Stack literally peaking in at the competition's natural goods.
The second wind is, at times, the viewer waiting to exhale.  Holding one's breath in a pregnant wait for an emotional release; scenes are directed surrounded by a heaviness that is  insinuated yet denied.
Then there are the moments, often brief, when the pain or the reality of a dynamic is expressed most directly, even with humor such as in this scene, or sans humor early on when Francois bursts out to his daughter that she must have an abortion.  Here the second wind is the culmination of introverted breath; shooting out with surprise, brevity, and honesty.

Emotion is very simple.  Very true.

Back to the gym.. Some 14 years earlier the fear of sexual desire and virility of men was drawn in primary saturated hues of the material world, in Alfred Hitchcock's MARNIE(1964).  A screaming recall of that yellow purse is repeated in a shot (against white synthetically colored /tiled gym + shower walls) in UN SECOND SOUFFLE as an orange Adidas bag calls out a similar signification.  The denatured orange in the anesthesia of the constructed gym is stifling and alarming.

MARNIE and her Yellow Purse

Every moment we die a little more.  One's second wind is never promised; a sentiment that is the singular recurring musical and visual thread of Blain's picture. Each run is heavy with the viewers' imagination; pregnant with collapse. Gerard Blain's films stand as a recognition; a nod to this sober, unwavering fact.
As in the very title of one of his last films,  AINSI SOIT-IL (2000)
 "SO BE IT."

"Time is not on your side, on your side, on your side."

ASH WEDNESDAY's Phoenix

Her makeup and soft smile dissuade you for the moment; do not look closer.

Her sadness lies in swollen sacs below her eyes.
Her glimmer has been on a dimmer, one guesses for a decade now, or even two.

Seeing herself being seen: effort to sit alone in a restaurant.

Does she look like herself.  That is a question she asks.  Her face tells us she no longer identifies with what she sees as "me/I.”  Her gaze refuses to recognize the change and experience physicalized on her face and body.  The role she has played; trophy wife, beautiful object, beloved princess, is now utterly unplayable.  We can feel as she starts to realize, and to wonder, did others notice she could no longer play the role before she herself did?

The primary question the film examines is not "WHO?" is he now being romantic with, but "WHY?" Why are We no longer ?
Why some other woman? Are they younger, is their light still shining brighter? Are they thinner?
Time is foregrounded.  Each momentary glance at her face and or figure is something we learn takes her not just hours, but months to prepare for.
Because of Time's very infallibility, her endeavors will take increasing effort and increasing amounts of time; yet still they may be in vain. Every circumstance where she is dolled up, she inserts herself as a still figure looking for a moving target; immobile in the frame.
Most often a thinner and younger comparable figure of female desirability is featured in the same frame; vital and spry.

Henry Fonda , who she longs for and long waits for, is finally standing beside her in the frame. It is about or over  halfway into the picture.  He scans her face; he is pleased, but she does not please him. Her age is inescapable and time can be momentarily erased; never disregarded.

The melancholy in the picture is based around the wasted time and effort of a woman outside of time; counting for survival on the skills of the young; oblivious to her strained out of fashion looks she struggles to create. 

It is unfortunate when life outlives you.

Inside Out: LEAN ON PETE as Crystal- Image Personified

projected reflection:  anthropomorphism

Charley= figurative Reflection of violence // literal reflection of garish police light glare

Charley runs from us; into himself.

The escape that Haigh's LEAN ON PETE chronicles is action at its most explicit; emotion transformed into a perfectly reflecting physicalization.

The ride across Washington morphs into the seemingly endless miles walking through Wyoming.    The pivot from car to large scale walking is the concretized shift of direct psychological inquiry to an abstracted emotional experience.

Duration of film scenes align with the narrative course of what Charley experiences regarding hunger and loss of connection to the world. Both the forces of Starvation and loss of familial /human and ultimately even animal connection bring about a loss of self.  These forces are tracked through the passage of time and a simultaneous large-scale  geographical move across the country.
The time-movement image of this process is graphed with increasing visual abstraction: starting with projections (Charley's lack of self resulting in projecting relations upon newly met strangers (Buscemi, Sevigny),  reflections,  refractions and ultimately obscuration of the original image.

moving towards Abstraction: Impoverished Charley eyes his mirror reflection  as he vomits from filling mouth with gasoline to fuel truck to drive him and the horse to safety

further Abstraction: the loss of visual specificity in the image of the self
through time, through movement...hunger is reflected in this crystal-image

Unrecognizable: loss of visual self-recognition

Other filmic shifts felt within the course of the picture correspond to the heightening of the stakes that  perpetuate departures and escapes (movement-image) and patience (duration of time; the time-image).

Nothing is free of consequence. The evidence of every action is measured in increments of weight lost as hunger becomes starvation.  Measured in off handedly caught glimpses of Charley's haggard face reflected.  Subtle degrees of gauntness are increased in these second hand visual relics throughout the course of his journey.

The threat:   The "Specialness" of being a loser in life is fetishized by the movie.
How is that threat averted:  Charley is not compelling for the reason of his losses, though emotions do intensify as they accumulate.  Charley is kept at a distance from us; we only see virtual reflections of him projected...onto the humanized conversations with a horse who is not Human, and in the
actual reflections of him as he physically takes up less and less space.
His role as image/blank screen is foregrounded in this way.
We are denied the idea that Charley is knowable as a person.

Filtered Waters: First Few thoughts (on INGRID GOES WEST)

             Ride or Die Bitches are dead in the digital age.
              Good riddance Real Deal, rest in peace fake friends.

Fake Friends:  Mace in your Face

Take a trip along the sea.  Sailing through INGRID GOES WEST is smooth and steady, which is a good way in, though  not wholly appropriate condition to view a foray into the lifestyle of interpersonal fixation.

I speak of a fixation so overpowering and single-minded as to dictate the course of a young person's life. Nevermind (or maybe because) her mother just died, never mind (or maybe because) she just got released from an insane asylum and has barely any money and no job; she will spend anything and go anywhere to follow the friend crush.

     Apart from the insightful chronicle of fixation/compulsion, (endemic to media age isolations/social sites regardless) there is the exploration of the death of depth.  New relationships in the instagram age make people more shallow and lacking having your back IRL.
All that is left:  an occasional real reaction.
We see a lack of reason necessary to follow each of these decisions that Ingrid makes with abandon.

 After her mother passed, Ingrid is  metaphorically abandoned.  The  subsequent abandonment by her best friend signifies the propriety of the female post adolescent friendship as the strongest bond of a woman's life.  Or at least that 's how it used to be. 

        Ingrid's solution is to recreate through doubling.  Achieving a mirror screen of the one person she elects to screen is a pseudo symbiotic identical twin in the purely digital sense.
She improvises her way to a new family unit.

Making it up as one goes along is no novel narrative. America is the ground zero for evolution by way of improvisation; the path of the New.

Making up false stories is the newer America story; from 8chan to mainstream media.

       
Filters erasing all signs of  suffering as smoothly as a botox job, Ingrid self directs.  To screen Ingrid the person as a movie is an acceptance that our screens now proliferate; they invade our watches, glasses, phones and televisions.  We screen her whenever we elect to tune in via tuning out.

female frienship as TWINNING. Creating close familial bonds post mother/post adolescence

      What is kept clouded is the ultimate end game.  Illumination is black listed.  Do not look too closely for any real deal. Is a lack or a rot at the center of the hole? Everytime an interested party (there are not many) choose to dig, Ingrid shows up, blowing lines or blowing cash on distracting threads, to brush the dirt back over the spots in the earth.