by Bill Gibron
At first, the images appear random. Bags of garbage being taken to a dumpster. Two boys on bicycles wandering by. A man drives his car to a local nursery and looks over the available inventory. He comes across a leaf which gives off a particular blue powder. Digging into the dirt, the man finds a wealth of wiggling worms. He buys as many plants as he can and, taking them home, he burns the foliage and keeps the roots. Sifting through the remaining soil, he finds his larva motherlode. Carefully sorting them into symbolically marked jars (happy face vs. sad face), he is meticulous in his work.
Elsewhere, one of the boys we’ve seen before offers a strange kind of tea to another friend. After drinking the potion, they practice a blind pantomime where they effortless mimic each other’s gestures without actually seeing what the other is doing. Somehow, they’ve become linked, and as another potion in being brewed, we see the aforementioned worm added to the water. Quickly, a man is viewed running. Then a woman. Finally, our botanist takes a pharmaceutical capsule, empties its contents, and loads it with one of the squirming parasites.
If this were the world crafted by someone like David Lynch, or David Cronenberg, such an eccentric collection of images would lead to something sexual (the former) or horrific (the latter). Instead, in Shane Carruth’s masterpiece of human suffering and the reclamation of self, Upstream Color, what follows is a flawless example of defiant dream logic. Now, by its very definition, such a creative conceit is a bit of an oxymoron. After all, we consider the visions in our sleeping state as scattered, randomly accessing our subconscious in a way that only occasionally makes sense as a narrative or viable memory.
Shane Carruth as Jeff in Upstream Color
Many directors have tried to recreate such R.E.M. unrealities in their work, with few successes, and with good reason. While Carruth’s film may look like a hodgepodge of hopelessly disconnected ideas on the surface, a closer look at the scripting and structure that begat it, argues for something carefully planned. In fact, the writing is almost magical. Each scene manipulates the viewer’s attention toward something obvious (the events, the interpersonal issues) while simultaneously offering a subconscious internal link to an overall interlocking design. It is only later on when those hidden meanings click in and make sense.
Up front, it has to be said that Carruth does accomplish some of this through editing. His montages, scattered throughout Upstream Color, act as contractions in the cinematic sentences he’s scribbling. They accent a story that’s almost obvious in its purpose. The main narrative thread follows a couple, Kris and Jeff, as they discover each other, connect and uncover some troubling truths about their pasts. In her case, the previously described opening sequence, featuring a man, his worms and a pair of adolescent boys in surreal symmetry, leads to Kris becoming a victim of a major crime.
Upstream Color
The individual carefully sorting his infant insects is actually a thief. He uses the bugs as a means of controlling people. He accosts Kris at a bar and doses her with one of his psychotropic pests. Over the course of the next few weeks, he ritualizes her behavior to the point of practice. He then uses his power over her to drain her bank account, cash out the equity on her house and abscond with her collection of rare coins. All the while, Kris is recopying Henry David Thoreau’s naturalist epic Walden onto construction paper, each page carefully folded and turned into part of a much longer paper chain. It’s the mindless mannerisms of a drone. When he’s done, our thief abandons our heroine to discover what’s happened, his own self-ceremony of taking out the trash confirming the reason for the first scene in the film.
Later, Kris is picked up by someone we will call The Healer. He uses unique combinations of sounds to signal victims of the Thief’s inner infestations. Taking her to a remote location, he removes the elongated worms and inserts them into his pigs. There, they offer their own connection to their former carrier, Kris eventually linked to her porcine counterpart. Once “cured,” she is left to return to her ruined life, trying to piece together the events during her hypnotic trance. Eventually, Jeff walks into her life. At first, Kris is hesitant, but then unconsciously drawn to him. Over time, she will learn that something similar happened him, and together they will try to figure out the truth.
Andrew Sensenig as The Sampler in Upstream Color
Carruth, who also directed the film (as well as starring in it, co-editing it, photographing it, and offering its atmospheric, ambient score), is meticulous in his aesthetic. No scene goes on too long, no sequence takes up more space than needed to offer its important piece of information before giving way to the next. Mapped out, it’s easy to see Upstream Color in movements. Within each specific section puzzle pieces are provided, audience participation and attention are necessary to fit them together and view the full picture. As the story moves along, a tragedy leads Kris and Jeff back to The Healer, his livestock, and the inevitable need to break the cycle of what has happened, and Carruth constantly provides clues to the conclusion.
Shane Carruth and Amy Seimetz in Upstream Color
In that regard, Upstream Color is a really nothing more than a movie about loss and about how we rebound when faced with such strife. It infers a cyclical concept, much like how the psychological community argues patterns of abuse or the repetitive nature of self-destruction. It uses the worms as a metaphor for any outside control—for Jeff, it’s drugs. For Kris, it’s a lack of self-esteem. Together with his chemically discovered deceit, The Thief enters their lives (and the lives of many others) and brainwashes them to do his bidding. In between, Carruth overloads with screen with images that suggest something deeper and less deliberate. His montages celebrate life or living, while the actual dialogue suggests our couple may not be able to survive their situation.
Concentrating on the screenplay for a moment, we can see an immediate pattern to the plotting. While not necessarily fashioned into a recognizable three act structure, there are sections that, when put together, allude to a kind of organization.
Part 1A—“The Crime.”
Part 1B— “The Cure.”
Part 2A— “The Hook-Up.”
Part 2B— “The Problems.”
Part 3A—“The Relationship.”
Part3B—“A Return to Normalcy.”
Part 4—“Tragedy.”
Part 5—“The Truth:” the eventual revealing of the subtextual thread that binds everything together.
This doesn’t suggest that what Carruth does is random. Instead, it argues for how carefully constructed each element of the film really is.
Take the character we call The Healer. When initially viewed, he seems almost ancillary to the story. He’s the one who allows Kris to reclaim her existence and allow Jeff in. The next time we see him, Carruth has the character recording odd natural noises and feeding them into a sampling synthesizer. There, he plays the sounds over and over again, trying to recapture certain feelings and moods. Eventually, we learn that such aural cues connect him to the pigs, which therefore connect him to the lives of those he saves. Through the sounds, he can go back and “re-watch” the path of his patients. One in particular (a man who regrets not taking the time to talk seriously to his comatose wife) provides a kind of cathartic sadness.
David Lynch’s Eraserhead
Now, in a similarly-styled movie like Eraserhead, such a subplot would come to nothing. Lynch is many things, but he is mostly an artist. He doesn’t much care if the concepts he puts on screen make “sense.” Instead, he’s more concerned with reaction, how they cause the viewer to feel and/or respond. Carruth is more considerate than that. Working within a somewhat recognizable genre (the thriller), he appears compelled to find explanations for everything, which then requires his script to account for every freakish flight of fancy. It’s very much like the literary mandate given to fledgling science fiction writers: to be successful in said genre, you have to create a unique world, make up a set of special rules, and then never ever deviate or defy same. Doing so makes your otherwise outrageous ideas seem structured, and therefore, safe. Fail, and you never fool the reader, or in this case, the audience.
Upstream Color does the same thing. It is almost speculative in its style, yet still grounded in a kind of recognizable reality. Carruth creates a written world where a man has discovered the hypnotic powers of certain plant life and the ability to transfer the same via insect larva. These plants come from a place upstream, their color different that other orchids growing in the area. And what makes the blue of these plants so distinctive? Well, it’s derived from the infected carcasses of dead animals that are dumped into the nearby waterway… what animals, you ask? Why pigs, of course. The Healer’s pigs. So, in Carruth’s conceit, the man who has made it his business to track down and cure anyone suffering from The Thief’s action is actually more responsible for the problem than the criminal. In how he acts, the scripted structure and cycle continues.
Upstream Color
This is why, at the end, when Kris makes the connection between his unusual combination of noises and her surreal surgery at his hands, our heroine confronts The Healer, not the Thief. Even as she recites Walden (another deft bit of creative callback within the screenplay) and repeats old ritualistic behavior, it’s not the enabler, but the source she wants to find. It’s all very symbolic and suggestive—as Carruth clearly wants it to be—but it’s also logical. If she can stop the drug lord, why focus on the dealer? Similarly, Kris clearly believes The Healer is behind the continuing nature of these crimes. Without him, and without his need to dispose of the pigs (and occasional piglets) in such unsettling ways, there are no flowers, no residue, no worms and no more harm.
Again, Carruth’s solid story structure keeps us from losing track of such strange occurrences. Even during those times when Kris and Jeff consider things normal, events happen which hint at how much control their pasts have over them. In one well-written incident, Jeff, who we learn stole money from his firm and is now a consultant with a questionable reputation, senses that The Healer is going to do something horrible and takes out his frustrations on two co-workers who have been silently following him. In a gesture similar to one we saw earlier, he tosses his business reports off a balcony, mimicking The Healer when some of the unusual “music” he writes fails to satisfy his need for an emotional connection.
Kris also comes apart before the moment when The Healer commits his atrocity. She ends up getting lost, and when Jeff comes to find her, he learns that their bond is so strong that he can effortlessly guide her through the building she is in without having to be there himself. As the script suggests, without some grand gesture or aggressive action on their part, our lovers will never be free. Finding The Healer becomes paramount, and Carruth carefully retraces his painstakingly constructed clues to allow us, as the audience, to participate in the discovery.
Amy Seimetz as Kris in Upstream Color
As a result, Upstream Color readily defies the logic of dreams. It doesn’t allow for information to flow in a surreal stream of consciousness. Instead, as he did with the equally excellent Primer (a similarly- styled look at time travel), he layers each element on top of the other, carefully considering and then constructing his often obtuse world. He then links back to memorable moments previously highlighted (as when Jeff mindlessly constructs a paper chain out of discarded straw wrappers) to keep it all connected. By using known devices, like allusion and metaphor while concentrating his script on aspects of character or situation that help us through the intimidating imagery, his words and ideas act as a guide to a greater understanding of what the movie really is about.
David Cronenberg’s Videodrome
The end result is a script as suspension bridge, a story carefully crafted so that each part is important to the whole and no section can be removed or modified without destroying it all. Few examples of dream logic can claim that (just try and follow and/or explain David Cronenberg’s fascinating future shock in Videodrome, for example) while others don’t even try. They believe pictures speak louder than words, and while we are talking about film, ideas are also part of the mix. Upstream Color is not overflowing with exposition. Kris and Jeff don’t go over their troubling predicament over and over again. Scripted dialogue is kept to a minimum.
Much of the movie is silent, purposeful aura cues by Carruth constantly reestablishing subjective associations. While it’s safe to say that Upstream Color is a clever manipulation of many mediums to one end, it all has to start with an idea. No one, no matter how talented, can take random images of individuals adlibbing and force them into a film-like structure, let alone one that has goals loftier than being a mere document of divergent behavior. No, they need a road map, especially in light of what Carruth hopes to accomplish here.
It’s the reason why the screenplay here is so important. It’s the blueprint, the basic material from which inspiration can be drawn and reconfigured. When he shot Eraserhead, David Lynch would capture some footage, process it, and then wait for more money or time to continue. Sometimes, such a pause would provide perspective that would allow for the film to surge in an entirely different direction. Upstream Color is better than Lynch’s fascinating first film in that it offers a similarly compelling visual feast with equally thoughtful images all bound to an artfully conceived story. Walk through the world of Henry Spencer for a while and you’ll see all manner of loose ends that don’t quite add up. In Carruth’s case, the plan was always to have a solid center to build from. Kris and Jeff will discover their damaging cycle and break it. Lynch’s accidental dad just has to suffer with a screaming mutant infant.
Shane Carruth in Upstream Color
In taking on one of the most difficult aesthetic tasks a filmmaker can face, Shane Carruth turns dream logic into everyday life. He makes the unreal seem sensible while never forgetting the needs of the art form. Thanks to a script that is clearly well thought out and built to withstand any internal or external critique, he forged a structurefar strongerthan a typical mainstream movie. Within each layer, each piece of screenplay sentience, he moves the viewer closer to the end goal—the allegorical consideration of the torments and triumphs of life. Without a well thought out and considered storyline, Upstream Color would feel just like the narratives of our sleep—troubled, disconnected and incomplete. With it, he creates an experience that’s at once ethereal and yet grounded in true reason.
