this movie/this article are indispensable lessons in honesty and shame and creative writing and should be mandatory reading/watching i am not joking!!!!!
I keep repping for Daniels, especially leading up to their possible feature film breakthrough Everything Everywhere All at Once. I’d never actually seen their prior feature film, so I watched it last night. Daniels does the specific thing -they start with some unnaturalistic conceit or gimmick that 1. is designed to create interesting visuals effects challenges and possibilities, the results of which make your eyes pop out; 2. is a formal element that determines the progress and structure of the narrative by acting as the inciting event and mode of resolution; and 3. is modal in the themes of the work in that there is an underlying unresolved issue that the conceit forces people to face and the relationship to which is key to a psychological coming to terms. Often, this will lead to cosmic or earth shattering consequences and usually the gimmick itself illuminates broken symmetries and then abets reunification in someway.
In my favorite thing of theirs, Interesting Ball, the conceit is a ball bouncing inexorably down towards the ocean that causes magical realist events to happen to everyone is encounters, demonstrating specifically loneliness an alienation that progress towards radical resolution, ending with a universalist message that our separateness is an illusion, even though the various individual resolutions are comically on the nose, absurd, and often deadly. This determines the structure, which is like a master line of dominoes setting off one by one parallel lines of dominoes that all culminate together.
InPosibilia, the conceit is all of the branching paths of the same argument which essentially follow the same verbal path but show different emotional states and status changes are available to you all at once, as if you were editing it. You are free to follow any path, click back-and-forth between paths, and observe how things happen, but eventually they’ll collapse into one visual set piece were the versions reunite using a common YouTube trick that nonetheless is very effective. This is a very optimistic one, positing all the choices in a relationship related to Brownian motion forcing people apart as being ultimately less important than the force that tends to pull the relationship together. If you don’t want the interactive, you can watch a run-through here.
This said, Swiss Army Man is a bit of a head scratcher. From this point, there are spoilers for the movie. The movie is about your prototypical man trapped on a desert island (Paul Dano), about to commit suicide because he is so alone, who notices a body wash up on shore (Daniel Radcliffe) which appears to be dead, but actually has enough farting power to use as a JetSki to get back to dry land. He attempts to cross the woods back to civilization from the beach carrying the body with him. The conceit is that the body can do various outrageous things once the main character has accidentally unlocked the abilities as well as talk to him, although he is 100% naïve and needs to be instructed on the meaning of everything. As they progress through the woods, the kind of gross talents are used to survive and overcome threats, while increasingly the body’s questions surround the woman on the unlock scene of a cell phone who we presume to be the dead body’s s/o.
They stall somewhat in the woods, partially because they are blocked by a threshold guardian bear, but mostly to resolve the identity of the woman. This involves building sets, and constructing a fantasy version of their courtship, and Paul Dano dressing up as her (oddly, not completely unattractive). We slowly find out that the woman (Sarah) is actually on Dano’s cell phone and that they do not have a relationship, he just would see her on the bus and never talk to her, but she it’s so central to his failures that he has creepily stolen her image. The pretenders kiss unlocking a final power, overcome the bear, and get to civilization, only to realize they were mere yards from Sarah’s backyard, and things in 3 seconds go 0 to 60 cringe, the kind that makes the local news, as Sarah (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) says what the fuck about seven times. He steals the body back to the ocean in a small action set piece, and the body FartSki’s off as Dano is arrested, and everyone looks on with disbelief.
if you squint it has the same plot as Mulholland Drive: A person who is severely alienated imagines that they can talk to a person who is, in fact, dead but it’s really just a projection of a part of themselves. This projection has amnesia, and allows the main character to become active in their environment and move toward their goal more effectively because they have to help this new friend, however much of the goal surrounds discovering the lie that the main character is telling to themselves. They play act a script, where he takes the female role an the dead person takes on the male role and, eventually, act on the gay subtext, after which there is an extremely awkward scene where all the principles in the lie are present, and what’s left of the delusions are completely shattered. Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays the Justin Theroux part, and the ad looks like Cookie. The main difference is that the suicide of the main character takes place on the other side of the film, which somehow makes it more optimistic.
Trigger warning - bodily fluids and effluvia for gross out laughs.
I liked this movie, though elements of it really confused me. I understand magical realism enough that you can’t really focus on the difference between something really happening and it being a psychological artifact, but this movie ending the way it did made me wonder where the ground was. Was he really on the island to begin with? That really does not make much sense. Did he succeed in committing suicide in the beginning, so this is another Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge iteration? Probably not. However it made me realize I really like TFW people in a fallen state build a simulacrum of an environment they used to inhabit, and use that “stage” to resolve their psychological problems. Maybe its a “We are like the spider. We weave our life & move along it. We are like the dreamer who dreams & then lives in the dream,” Upanishads type deal, maybe it’s an echo of memory thing like fallen world sci-fi/fantasy or the Langoliers, or maybe I just like staginess as a quality. Who knows.
But the majority of this movie works as a quarantine movie: learning to do new things and modeling how you would do the things you’re missing out on while slowly going crazy talking to yourself creates a mind that wilts at contact with the outside world (yes, I know the movie was from the before times). The unnatural gimmick here is equivalent to asking yourself though questions and physical self actualization leading to eventual confrontation with the world - this is fine - it’s just that the ending seems like it’s supposed to be uplifting but I can’t quite figure out how.
I keep thinking about this and the ending only works as a double absurdist fakeout. The “setting the symbol of naive hope/potential free because I have integrated it” doesn’t work straight because he’s in handcuffs and more a social exile than before. The “fly, be free” said to the dead bird as he throws it out the window and it falls to the ground Mel Brooks single fakeout isn’t it because everyone else can see it fly. It’s that the world is so absurd it actually follows his rules, his logic. Everyone but him (including the audience) is struggling to understand how it makes any sense but he has used the power of his own reality to morph the plot into a happy ending. Epistemology in the Trump era. Only thing that works.
Regarding Mulholland Drive, one thing to note is that this has a similar narrative order but a different plot order, and I considered whether that had any impact on how the ending lands. The ripping of the Band-Aid off occurs in roughly the same place in those movies, but much earlier in the MD chronology. Dead end. Still an interesting point of comparison as both concern people who are not “seen” which causes them to withdraw from the world. They then “invent” someone to see them but in the self dialogue within the fantasy they loose their ability to repress the intolerable knowledge. It’s just that this movie ends suggesting that, given magical realist logic, the fantasy actually happened, and everyone else is wrong. There’s nothing to do but stand on the beach and re-order their worldviews around this dude.
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