THOUGHTS ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF FILMMAKING, WITH TOO MANY DIGRESSIONS AND AVATAR REFERENCES (cont'd)
an essay by andrew bujalski
These days, our technological ability to conquer time and space is close to absolute, but it's always struck me as funny that when people talk about the power of CGI, the holy grail, the ultimate effect they always mention is the creation of convincing synthetic actors. I have little doubt that within my lifetime they will achieve this and, say, bring back Humphrey Bogart to costar alongside Angelina Jolie or whomever. And I'll probably go pay to see that, and I'm sure it will be quite stunning while also a little depressing, but what amuses me about it is that you never hear anyone say, "We're going to use CGI to make an actor who's better than Bogart." More convenient, more malleable, more modular, but no one will try to make him better, because no one can dream that big. And in some small way, I find that encouraging. I do appreciate the sentiment behind a scheme to revive the dead, even if they'll most likely just convert Bogart into a big blue alien.
If there are few movies that really seem awful to me, there are plenty that confuse me. My wife makes fun of me because if we walk out of something together underwhelmed, she knows that I'm going to say, "I didn't get it." I think she thinks that it's a euphemism, that I just don't want to violate some filmmaker code by calling someone else's work shitty, but truly my reaction is more off perplexed than pissed off. The Hollywood studio stuff is designed to communicate as effectively as possible to as many people as possible-but they do this, perversely, by breaking down all action into a series of codes and signals based on other movies and advertisements, so that if you foolishly watch it with the goal of immersing yourself in the world that's up there, you'll get very confused indeed, because the thing is completely abstract, far more obtuse than anything Stan Brakhage ever did.
I don't think of my own films as obtuse, but I know that many others do. All three of them were movies that I imagined would play best for the person who stumbled onto them accidentally, who wandered into the theater by mistake, as many of my most treasured movie experiences have been with films I had zero knowledge or expectation of going in. And... okay, I've put off talking about Beeswax for as long as I could, but now I'm going to do the thing that I never do and share with you a little of my perspective on it.
Let me propose to you that this film that we're going to screen tonight does have a few things in common with Avatar (not, alas, its revenues). For starters, they are the only two films I can name that feature lead characters in wheelchairs that aren't concerned with tearjerking or dwelling on the tragedy of it all. But more deeply, they are both built around the quest to understand an alien mind. Corporal Sully has a much easier time of it than Jeannie does in Beeswax. For one thing, he has full control over his big blue avatar, which gains him pretty immediate access to all of the aliens' innermost secrets (and the aliens turn out to be totally cool dudes and it turns out the humans are jerks-I hope I'm not spoiling it for anyone). In my film, earthbound Jeannie has a kind of avatar in her twin sister Lauren, who would also probably be happy to go bounding off cliffsides for her, but despite the intensity of their bond, these girls' relationship is in great part defined by their refusal to play doppleganger for each other. Twins are often asked to be interchangeable, but they are not-they are stuck being themselves. Jeannie meanwhile struggles to understand the motivations of her more troubling double in the film, her estranged business partner Amanda. Jeannie and Amanda are two people who have never seen the world from the same point of view, but as the film opens, what was once respect for each other's differing talents has devolved into acrimony and a complete lack of empathy. I know that I am right, therefore you must be wrong. Once lines like that have been drawn, bridging them starts to seem impossible. And unlike Sully, when Jeannie experiences self-doubt-which she does throughout the film, I think she is driven a little mad by it-she does not have the option of abandoning her own body and switching teams. She cannot become Amanda. She cannot even begin to understand Amanda.
Why-am-I-me-and-not-you has been a core concern of everything I've done and probably everything I will do, but it is right dead center stage in this film. And so for better or worse I am taking the grand existential question that movies help us to address, and instead of exploring answers, I am just reflecting back the question. At the risk of sounding rather grandiose, in doing this...I fear I may have violated one of the laws of cinema.
There are certain things that movies do incredibly well. Say, for example, exploding cars. I have not done any hard research on this topic but I'd be willing to wager that, in the history of the automobile, more of them have blown up on movie sets than off. Without any doubt there are more exploding cars in the medium of cinema (and we'd have to lump in television as well, let's say "moving pictures") than in all other media combined. So one of the ways we define cinema must be: It is the medium we use to explore the experience of automotive explosion. I'm sure it goes without saying that Beeswax doesn't have any of these, nor does it have a lot of the other stuff that the movies are known to excel at. As you'll see, it's a little bit like a legal thriller-but we removed the thrills and turned it inside out, building a movie out of the spaces between dramatic events and major decisions.
It felt when we were making it like I was trying to push the medium into some places that it didn't really want to go. That's a somewhat perverse endeavor, and not one that I can claim to have been entirely successful in, but again ultimately I was motivated by wanting to see a particular thing on screen that wasn't exactly like anything I'd ever seen before, and not particularly like my first two films either for that matter. I had a dream of what this film would be and then I did the best I could to translate it into practical action. I could keep going talking up here and try to describe what that dream was, but as I said before, when the movie has been made, the dream doesn't matter anymore. The movie is better than the dream because the movie is alive, we brought it to life with love and enthusiasm, and I hope that you feel some of that from the screen tonight. Thank you very much.
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Andrew Bujalski is the director of FUNNY HA HA, MUTUAL APPRECIATION and BEESWAX.
