Train Your Eyes! This Guy's Also Dissolving
On to black-and-white, a surveillance aesthetic and apparatus, the somewhere else that's not here. A cat passes through, and that's the something here that's living, keeping the place presenced.
Observe the difference between the cat's body's felicity and the lumbering bulk of the character Nick (Adam Craycroft), eyes fixed to the computer. And He Just Comes Around and Dances with You — a nice title, funny, pulled from later on in the picture during a dispute that's comical and harsh. But also a reminder we're somewhere between the lands of the living and of the dead, where he just comes around and dances with you. Everything's washed in brushed-aluminum greys, like the waters seen from the ferry.
Or a CTA train. Dateline Chicago. A passenger's got a stud off-center beneath her lower lip. Nick's agaze. He's a stocky and beaten Richard Garriott. As much as he'd like it to be his eyes can't operate independent of that twisting mouth, he's a mouth-breather on the inside, like how nowadays folks drink milk only inside of the movies. He does a bad job of spying on himself — what does Nick think he's putting forward when he evades a neighbor that passes in the stairwell with "I kind've been lookin' forward to gettin' dinner on, so.", or hunkers with his cell to tell Jessica, who's in England, whose apartment he's either sitting for or squatting at, "So you know what babe I think I'm gonna get ready for bed."? This man with a moustache like the pedipalps of a spider who cuts things short. This man with the expression like he's not sure whether he just shit his pants.
It's a lead-up to later — he's Sour Disgust-Puss as he audio-iChats the girlfriend about a guy who's "teaching her how to dance" ("a real whiz on the dancefloor"), and the "fuckin'"s start to flow like leachate. It's as though the caller to the talk-radio show's managed to teleport in-studio, moustache an extra frown above his lip. Bad-humor's quantum with this guy, next you know he'll be in your kitchen, and he'll be drinking your milk, and what's more he'll be doing it in an inside-out t-shirt, motherfucker. Kentucker Audley knows that two-gallon jugs are the dumbest-looking containers and that a marble counter can help exploit this reality.
The movie ends on a dream-sequence — well, not really, it's more another 'manifestation' in-film, another interzone. A woman's on the train-platform speaking in Spanish. Nick — or Craycroft — is wearing glasses now and reacting in stammers, his face ping-ponging confusion and (at last) focus. Inside and outside, here and not here, reacting but wanting: one expression vacant with wondering re: a tax refund and the other seeming serious to convey: "Stop the Genocide of the Tamils in Sri Lanka."
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