Upstream Color (2013) is Shane Carruth’s second film. It’s really weird and dolorous. His first film, Primer (2004), is also really weird, but differently—less gloom, more time-travel.
These are a few thoughts on the former film (which is the chronological latter) written in the old-fashioned manner of a conversation with myself…
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[…]
“Yes, really. It’s an occult love story. You just have to see it as a rather skewed love story because it relies on the premise of an universal narcissism to articulate its theme of preternatural cycles of attraction and repulsion.”
[…]
“I suppose you could describe it like that. One, because it revolves around this bizarre conceit—worms and pigs and action at a distance…—and second, because the cinematic rhetoric, which is similar in its obliquity, if not its preciousness, to Terrence Malik’s recent works like To the Wonder and Tree of Life, is majestically obtuse. However, Upstream Color is actually a rather simple tale about how we’re affected by events and forces that lie beyond the purview of our slender Umwelt. I think what plunges it into magic realism, besides the matter of hypnosis and hyper-empathy, is that many of its events are meaningfully and not causally related. It’s not exactly David Lynch-weird, but leaning on an ‘acausal connecting principle,’ as Upstream Color does, strains not only genre conventions but the shared conviction that reality operates only along certain lines of development.
[…]
“What I mean by this is that Upstream Color starts with the conviction that the conditions we take to be relevant and meaningful to our existence are narrowly considered or simply inscrutable as a totality so that we take the descriptive constraints of what happens to us as all there is. Maybe I’d liken this to commodity fetishism. Marx characterizes commodity fetishism as ‘a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties,’ and I’d suggest that we think we are who we are because of the way a certain history of events and experiences gather under the sign of a ‘self’ or identity to take on a meaning by relating the radically social and ecological characteristics of existence to an abstract axiom called ‘life.’ Maybe what I’m saying then is that life is like money. We treat expressions of life as though value inhered in existence itself when in fact it—‘life’ that is—is the measure by which all experience is compared, assembled, and exchanged—valued. Once existence becomes valued for its expressions, and I’ll quote Marx again, ‘it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness,’ it changes into a fetish that we give a name—i.e., ‘David,’ ‘Marc,’ ‘eldritch.’”
[…]
“No, I don’t think I’d put it that way. I think Carruth tries to dramatize what it might be like if you found yourself one day unable to trust the assumptions and expectations that guide you from one moment to the next. What would the business of living look like if you had compose a new set of conjectures and references not from the passive synthesis of existence but the active assembly of ambient information, impersonal mannerisms, and anonymous desires—things that, in a sense, could belong to anyone—or rather, to no one in particular?
[…]
“Yeah, a parasite. Worms, pigs, and orchids. Bizarre way to stage this break. And you’re right; he [Carruth] could have contrived another way to figure such an existential wound. But by making it, as he says, something ‘embedded in nature,’ something that would ‘continue on its own volition’ he avoids conspiratorial or paranoid intimations and creates a situation where we might fantasize how the pulse of our being syncopates with the rhythm of things whose inclinations, tendencies and affinities are their own.”
[…]
“Okay, I’ll try, but it’s going to be a rather flimsy description of the business of worms, pigs, and orchids:
In the roots of a certain blue orchid is a species of worm that when ingested makes the consumer highly susceptible to suggestion. A man we come to know as ‘The Thief’ gathers these orchids and harvests the worms that he uses to hypnotize randomly selected individuals and bilk them of their financial worth. But the Thief doesn’t know that the worm is a parasite. Once he’s finished his vermicularly aided swindle he abandons his victim, leaving the worm to grow inside its host. The next stage of the cycle begins when the worm-human symbiot is drawn to sounds and vibrations being broadcast in a remote location by a man named ‘The Sampler.’ Once lured, the infected are brought into a room where The Sampler transplants the worm to a pig that is, after the procedure, taken to a farm to rejoin a drift of other contaminated swine. The Sampler, we learn has a strange ability to access the psychic and emotional life of each individual whose worm he relocated. And oh yeah, The Sampler is also a composer who writes music using sounds he ‘samples’ from the environment. So, The Sampler not only samples sounds, but also samples impressions of the former worm-host’s current existence (though it’s difficult to tell at first whether these are are past or coeval events). However, pigs, like most organisms, multiply, and the new wormless piglets, although carrying copies of the parasite prove irksome for they have no previous host to be sampled. (Or perhaps the piglets’ parents, being host to the progenitor of the piglets’ parasites, are what The Sampler samples, causing him to experience feedback between the pig-human /pig-piglet axis.) Ultimately, The Sampler commences the final phase of the lifecycle when he disposes of the piglets by bagging and tossing them into a stream where their decomposing bodies release parasitic spores into the water that are taken up by the root system of a tree on which white orchids grow, white orchids that grow progressively blue and are eventually harvested by two women who work for E+P Exotics.”
[…]
“Toxoplasmosis? No. It’s not that, but the parallels are there. Besides, humans are, technically said, ‘dead end’ hosts. The T. gondii virus can only reproduce in cats, and there are no cats in the lifecycle.”
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“Yeah. It’s difficult for sure. Circular narratives invite oversight and introduce all kinds of plot holes, but I think it’s a strength in this case. It allows more to leak out of the story…or maybe more leaks in to it…”
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“Okay, let’s call it the ‘W(orm)P(ig)O(rchid)’ refrain, but don’t get carried away with its significance because it’s really just a plot device, a narrative expedient that lets Carruth explore the spins and stalls of desires that have no moorings or fixed universe of references.”
“This makes me think that The Thief doesn’t merely steal his victims’ will and wealth but also their symbolic investments, specifically those investments sustaining the speculative venture of a meaningful and effective self. By hijacking the mechanisms of volition and self-awareness The Thief puts a wrinkle in the futures of one’s personhood. …Wait…I’m thinking now that maybe life isn’t like money as much as it’s like ‘xenomoney.’”
[…]
“No, Rotman. Brian Rotman.”
“Anyway…What the WPO refrain stages is an occasion to explore the skewed topology of a wound and the efforts that individuals will make to reimagine and redefine who they think they are ‘based,’ as Carruth says, only ‘on information around them.’
“…You know, it’s assumed that being disabused of the fantasy of a self is liberating, but I’m not so sure. I can’t be easy if you have to continue existing in an economy that trades in character futures.”
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“I think so.”
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“Maybe.”
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“Straight-ahead allegory.”
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“Of course. The worm’s passing from person to pig somehow effects a casual connection between its past and present hosts that we see play out in the way the lives of the infected pigs impinge upon a human couple’s relationship. This connection, weird as it is, symbolizes how we’re always implicated in the rhythms and flows of something that lay just ‘upstream’ from the bloated significance of our myopic concerns. For various reasons, which includes bio-physiological limitations and ideologically mannered blindnesses, our sensitivity to and reckoning of the upstream remains more or less obscure, or, as UC depicts, wholly occulted. But what makes UC’s allegorical posture less straight forward is how it explores not only hidden influences, but utterly outlandish influences without attempting to explain their mechanics or contrive a moral from. Everyone’s immanent to the same enigma, even the viewer who has to learn how to watch the film as it evolves. How does he [Caruth] put it?: ‘We already know that weird things happen…so let’s just watch something happen, and let that be it.’ How it happens that the experiences of a pig and person are connected by a parasite is less important than the fact that it happens. The exploration rather than elucidation of the point that much, or maybe even most of the elements of our lives are lived upstream undermines the moral or political imperative of allegory in a way that allows the film’s symbolism, its logic of references, to become the object of appreciation.
And what an object it is.”
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“I think the film tries to do to be what it symbolizes. I read a review by Nicholas Rombes in the LARB where he suggests that ‘Upstream Color‘s elliptical editing and weirdly simultaneous temporal flow have as much to do with what this film is about as the plot.’ It makes a certain sense that a film about cycles and circularity would embody or perform the delirium that it tries to symbolize. Of course it doesn’t have to do this, but it does, and this is what makes UC itself so hypnotic. Shot largely with a shallow depth of field, assembled from a multitude of rapid crosscuts, and presented without exposition—speech is almost always background to the sound design and music, which are themselves affective actants—UC amasses a significance from its formal organization, a significance that’s ‘not logically discriminated, but is felt as a quality rather than recognized as a function.’ This of course is how one of my favorite thinkers, Susanne Langer, formulates the kind of significance that artworks have, a significance that’s based on the way artworks symbolize patterns of sentience and vital activity that we experience as a way of feeling. For example, certain formal arrangements have a way of symbolizing activity contours like ‘swelling,’ ‘resting,’ ‘rushing,’ ‘hesitating,’ etc. In this respect the vertiginous quality that UC symbolizes is its import. The dizzying manipulation of images and the exquisite sound design produce a semblance of complex durations and shared intensities whose significance is felt as a quality, the quality of what it’s like to not be your own existential commodity. (I’m thinking especially about the sequence where sound takes the lead as we watch The Sampler gather and transform a variety noises into musical elements that slip in and out of the diagetic frame. On its own this is cinematically interesting, but the succession of events is made even more delirious when The Sampler’s ambivalent music-sounds become contrapuntally entangled in another series of diagetic resonances that are introduced by a string of cross-cuts made between between Jeff’s, Kris’, and The Sampler’s lonely milieux.)
[…]
“What’s that? Cab’s here? Okay, one last thing. I’m still thinking about how this break in personal narrative is so difficult for Jeff and Kris. Clearly they’ve been traumatized, but for them there is, in effect, no experienced break in their personal narrative. Something’s just gone awry and they’re trying to make sense of it while being pummelled by these intense feelings that they can’t quite qualify. As I was saying earlier, it can’t be liberating to lose confidence in the reasons that justify what motivates you, which, frankly, were probably never entirely justified in the first place. You can’t be at ease with not being who you thought you were if you’re still in the habit of trying to be you.”
[…]
“Okay, I couldn’t be at ease not being who I think I am. But you have to imagine that it’s difficult for Kris and Jeff because they’re not actually free from the fact that they’re still nodes in a circuit of exchange that’s always producing them as vital commodities to be traded for future states of themselves. The problem isn’t that there’s a lack of ideas or feelings for them or any of ‘The Sampled’ to become invested in—there’s clearly a surplus of distractions that one could bond with (although maybe this abundance is actually something that hinders attachment…). The problem is that no one can willfully cleave to the desires that flow through them because the desire for desire is something that’s passively contracted, like a habit is. Remember Benjamin talks about habits? They’re forms of behaviours acquired through a state of distraction, a state of nonconscious perception. In a sense, a habit describes a nonconscious loop in vital activity that gives organic processes a temporal orientation, and with this, a sense of past and future satisfactions. Until you’re infested with habits, literally crawling with unconscious desires for desire, you can’t cling to anything. All you can do is dream.”
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“No, I don’t mean that Kris and Jeff are literally dreaming. Because their post-hypnotic selves are in the process of forming new habits, of passively growing another swarm of successive and contiguous ‘me’s,’ they don’t have a set of convictions whose commanding form they can intuit and rely on to get through day-to-day activities. However, what they do have is a faculty for actively formalizing their existence by implying and leaning on a multitude of non-local connections between successive moments. Their image of life, of their own existential fetish, is assembled from an unstable constellation of signs, signals and coincidences. This is what it means to dream.”
[We speak of our “self” only in virtue of these thousands of little witnesses which contemplate within us.]
“Yes, the worm is a habit.”
~ Priest