LOOP (2007)

November 28, 2007

by Nathan Shumate

Written and directed by Pericles Lewnes
Starring
- Pericles Lewnes
- David Ridenhour
- Shannon Devido
- David Arthur
- Momo Nakamura
Produced by Lisa LeLucia Lewnes

If you know the name of Pericles Lewnes at all, you know him as the director of Redneck Zombies (1987), one of the first shot-on-video feature films, and one of the best of that inaugural class. In the ensuing two decades he’s had only a few credits; he directed a couple of other films that I’ve never heard of, and worked in other capacities on a handful of Troma-made or Troma-style films. (You may also simply think that his name is so cool that it must be a pseudonym. This I can neither confirm nor deny.)

The present film, which Lewnes offered after reading and appreciating my review of Redneck Zombies, will not benefit from association with that older title. There are no zombies in LOOP, nor rednecks. There is no camp and precious little humor of any kind. It’s a serious, sincere, mindbender of a feature; the only other movies reviewed on this site that might be considered its kin are Darren Aronofsky’s Pi (1998), or possibly Reflections of Evil (2002) minus its pop-cultural musings.

“Don’t tick while I’m talking!”

The theme of the movie is summed up (though not transparently) in a pre-credits title card bearing the famous quote from Ron Suskind on the “reality-based community” from the Bush Administration. And then things start off with a bang, literally; a gunshot. And our protagonist, played by Lewnes, jumps up from his couch… and begins to wonder where he is.

He sees a refrigerator covered with dated announcements of performance art by someone named “List.” He instinctively rummages in a medicine cabinet, though he doesn’t know what he’s looking for. And before we get tired of watching a silent solitary figure wander around, he finds he has a companion: a big bald guy (David Ridenhour) who wasn’t in the easy chair a moment ago, but is now. The bald guy is in no better position to help, because as he goes to great pains to explain to our protagonist, “I am you.” A portion of him, to be precise: one of the three levels of his psyche which has somehow been sundered from his two associates. Neither of them has any idea what’s going on, but the bald one at least isn’t as confused; there must have been “an event,” something which traumatized him and dissociated him from his own history.

Remember: We carry because we care.

A history which apparently includes a wife (Shannon Devido), who rolls into the room in a motorized wheelchair, her body shrunken by disease. When she realizes that He — “Joe” — is acting strangely and doesn’t have “his meds,” she immediately leaves to fill his prescription, leaving him alone with the fragment of himself, who isn’t too keen on being medicated into pliability again; are the drugs part of the solution, or part of the problem? Is there a “them,” trying to keep down someone who (as the bald guys insists) bears the seeds of greatness?

The degree to which any of this is taking place in the real world is fluid and always debatable. Joe encounters boxes of rats that attack his head; he sees a tangle of Yukio Mishima novels mixed in with Newsweek covers on terrorism. His bedroom bureau bears, among other things, a Sigmund Freud action figure and an LP of Orson Welles in “Donovan’s Brain” and a George W. Bush jack-in-the-box. He descends into the basement, to discover the bald guy and a bong-smoking black man (David Arthur), another facet of his psyche, sitting in an improvised hookah lounge. They are watching a continous video loop: A kimono-clad Japanese girl repeatedly proffers a tray of sushi and asks, “O-sushi, tabemasu?” (Roughly, “Have some sushi?”) In the center of the sushi tray is a gun.

Invisible crosswalk.

And when Joe tries to leave the house, the world is a nightmarishly speeded-up place, as he races uncontrollably past blurred individuals who take no notice of him, until he ends up in a quiet green place, where a man named Dobbs (Adrian Bond) has apparently been smoking cigarettes continually time out of mind. Dobbs is also ignorant, though he suspects that he too is a victim of whatever claimed Joe’s memory and fragmented his reality. And it’s here that Joe first takes out his wallet and discovers that he is the performance artist whose old shows are advertised all over his refrigerator: Joseph Neal List. “Joe Nihilist.”

All of this is the first half of the movie, and it’s very impressive; using admittedly primitive technical means, Lewnes has constructed an illogical (or meta-logical) narrative with the off-kilter visual and audial consistency of a fever dream, almost flawless in every respect. However, the second half loses ground with me, for it’s here that Joe remembers — or re-experiences — some events which led up to, or will yet lead up to, his “event.” Without giving too much away, I can say that it’s expressly political, tying the life and works of Yukio Mishima (the post-WWII Japanese novelist who commited suicide over the lost of proud imperial Japanese culture) into Joe’s own reaction to the post-9/11 political climate.

“Hello, I’ll be your requisite spooky-ass Japanese chick tonight.”

This strikes me as a misstep for several reasons: One, it date-stamps the production; it takes what was up until that point a very disconnected and thus more universal portrait of psychological alienation and links it to a particular transitory cultural-historical attitude. This is no longer an everyman story, or even an everywhen story. And two, it posits a baseline apocalyptic anxiety among its characters — specifically Joe and and Emad (George Brown), Joe’s Lebanese-American cameraman — which seems particularly assumptive, a sort of left-leaning impotence that belies Joe’s rhetorical question of “What’s a man in the middle supposed to do?” (Or course, it’s emblematic of current American political myopia that every stratified political group, from the Moral Majority to the Daily Kos crowd, thinks of themselves as the “real” middle.)

There is also an added ambiguity in the latter half, and though like a good postmodern I can embrace ambiguity critically, this is the kind that has me wondering whether the “author” of the “text” really meant to say what he said. (I know, I should simply cling to interpretive theory and assume the integrity of the text to be either a perfect reflection of authorial vision or an holographic record of culture “transcribing” itself via the artist. I’m a heretic.) It’s one thing for Emad to hear Joe’s empassioned plans for a new performance art installation (one that moves past Joe’s self-characterization of his earlier work as a “Dada prop comic”) and dismiss them as “pretentious, minimalist bullshit.” But when Joe proclaims that “My government has lost its mind — an artistic statement has to be made!” well, I don’t think I was supposed to laugh out loud…

“I’ve got rats in my hoody, and bats in my belfry!”

I will say this, though; any movie, especially one of such impoverished means, which forces me to open the dusty vaults of my academic past in order to criticize if properly is a movie which lives up to the oft-mouthed and rarely-realized ambition of being “thought-provoking.” My criticism of the latter half in no way should dissuade anyone with the opportunity from watching Loop; in fact, I hope it intrigues viewers enough that they will be doubly encouraged to watch and dissect it on their own. Political stumbles aside, it’s a powerful piece of visual narrative (or “visual imagery in sequence,” if the former term implies too much causality), which works almost perfectly within its material means to maximum effect. In fact, I can point out only one production shortcoming; the leaflets on the refrigerator were too obviously produced with contemporary desktop publishing technology to be believable relics of performances dating clear back to the late ’70s. (Although I might be able to convince myself that it was a subtle commentary on the similar problems with “Rathergate.”)