Mealworms are birthed beneath the soil of a plant that gives off a purplish residue on the top of their green leaves. After they are placed on a sieve you can pour liquid on over them (like Absinth) to trigger the effects, which apparently includes a puppet/puppeteer reflexive motion within the parties involved. It’s almost like a form of hypnosis, but one that allows one person’s mobility to sync up with another’s. It’s almost as if this chemical connects one human’s motion responses involuntarily to another’s. This leads the innovator, or discoverer, to knock a woman out and force her to ingest one of the mealworms. From here he plays games with her, bending her reality to the point in which she is completely under her control. She writes him checks because he has convinced her that men have taken her mother and demanded a ransom. He is her Murder Legendre, she has fallen deep under his hex.
It’s clear that Shane Carruth is a smart guy, a very smart guy. I hesitate to say that his wit works to his disadvantage because that can just as easily be construed to mean that I would prefer to think and learn less when watching a film. I had to beg my brain to hang on tight and somehow still try to be absorbed in UPSTREAM COLOR’s rhythms, atmosphere, and hues. The film looks crisp but lacks a distinct visual stamp (the editing style brought Soderbourgh to mind, does that makes sense?), though I’m questioning myself here thanks to some primordial shots of mealworms crawling through innards, or microscopic organisms scurrying through a glass of liquor. But these are ideas first, brought to life by a director who leapt stylistically in his sophomore effort. Watching the worms do their thing brought to mind those moments when you yawn and stretch to no relief, it’s like you need to pop joints or break bones but your body lacks the elasticity.
The fear of organisms crawling beneath my skin has kept me paranoid since I can remember. It probably started with ALIEN, somehow I was convinced that the noodles Hurt was eating were responsible for what came directly after. Cronenberg wouldn’t have had to work hard to freak me out, my body was a horror film before I ever encountered him. Anyway, the kidnapped woman attempts to remove the worms herself (via cutting herself up) to no avail, she ends up with an ostensibly omnipresent man who happens to have a pig strapped to a table and convinces him to give the pig a worm transfusion. Somehow this works.
I guess you could break it down this way, a woman is drugged and manipulated. She is under a spell that causes her to do things against her will. She awakens, the remnants of this forced pill to swallow dwelling within her and attempts to mutilate herself in order to remove them. She reenters the world a different person, a scarred one and almost immediately gravitates towards another just like her. He’s a former addict, a man whose slow transformation caused his divorce. After they have sex the camera shows some footsy, revealing identical marks on the lover’s ankles. It appears their union was inescapable.
It also appears that he has some skeletons hiding away in his closet. He says that he was careful not to lie but recklessly omitted certain things about himself. He should be in jail but his bosses covered for him. This act of mercy comes with a minor price, glares and stares that she doesn’t send his way…. yet. The editing style here avoids being caught up in a moment, always cutting away and constantly moving. Altman’s camera was constantly moving in THE LONG GOODBYE but it at least stayed in the scene at hand, making the interactions all the more crucial to the story. As persistent as this technique is, I think it adds a bit to the stupefaction these characters are experiencing. They too are unable to be completely present, and words are just words. Even actions seem to mean very little to them.
It’s clear that the pigs are surrogates for the humans, a fact made literal when she announces she might be pregnant. The scene cuts to our god farmer, who has just found out that one of his pigs (I’m guessing the one who took a worm for the team) is also expecting (though we find it’s something else altogether in her case). The film plays around with these juxtapositions, clean people with immaculate clothing and rooms cut to pig pen with mud and slop. Or how about the scene where the couple drinks wine at a diner while eating burgers that apparently aren’t that good?
Identities begin to amalgamate. Who is the grackle and who is the starling? A bag of dead piglets sends a blue liquid upstream, changing the white pedals blue. Deceptive beauty? Or does all beauty come from something evil? Kill god as an act of civil disobedience. Become him. Witness the intermittent spring. You have more lives to live, don’t spare anymore time for this one, leave the forest. The final shot of this film is equal to Kiarostami’s. It punches just as hard. Carruth can now be reckoned with.
PS, I dug the score, a sullen rush and roar.
