Aplicaciones de las teorías del desarrollo

Upstream Color is a “difficult” film by most any measure, both aesthetically and narratively. Let’s start with its style. As many critics have noted, the movie bears in some respects a resemblance to the work of Terrence Malick, whose The Tree of Life we took up in Chapter 3, and whom Carruth cites as an influence.4 _{Like Malick, Carruth is drawn to the natural world, his camera sumptuously taking in} leaves and stones and sunshine peeking through tree limbs. Another similarity: throughout Upstream Color, Carruth frequently employs close-ups of outstretched fingers feeling their way through grass, water, or the air—imagery straight out of the Malick playbook (I’ll have more to say on this point momentarily). Be that as it may, unlike Malick, Carruth’s serene shots of nature are punctuated by restless, precise editing.5 What’s more, Carruth often foregoes the wide establishing shots favored by

4 _{Jeff Shannon says the comparison is “obligatory,” and Carruth’s film, according to Andrew O’Hehir, bears the} “unmistakable influence of […] Malick.” Wesley Morris sees Malick’s “ellipses and earnestness” as resolutely Malickian, though Dargis finds it more in Carruth’s lyrical, poetic visuals. Jeff Shannon, “Upstream Color: Arresting Visuals Flow in Puzzling Sci-fi Romance,” Seattle Times, April 11, 2013,

http://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/lsquoupstream-colorrsquo-arresting-visuals-flow-in-puzzling-sci-fi- romance/?syndication=rss; Andrew O’Hehir, “Pick of the Week: The Year’s Most Divisive Wannabe Cult Hit,”

Salon, April 4, 2013,

http://www.salon.com/2013/04/05/pick_of_the_week_the_years_most_divisive_wannabe_cult_hit/; Wesley Morris, “Now Playing: Seven Movies to See or Skip,” Grantland, April 12, 2013, http://grantland.com/hollywood-

prospectus/now-playing-seven-movies-to-see-or-skip/; Manhola Dargis, “Worms, a Botanist and Pigs.”

5 _{A wonderful line from Kim Newman on this point: “[I]magine a Terrence Malick film edited by Roger Corman, so} that three hours of languor is ruthlessly cut down to 96 fast-cut minutes.” Kim Newman, Rev. of Upstream Color,

Malick, relying instead on shallow depth of field and fragmentary, meticulously composed close-ups to only gradually reveal the environs.

Sonically, Carruth’s approach also departs from Malick. Rather than dense orchestral scores, Carruth’s music, which he composes himself, is minimalist, electronic, and quiet to the point of almost lulling. Often this music covers over most if not all of the noises of the diegetic world. And unlike Malick, Carruth largely eschews voiceover. Upstream Color, therefore, is a film of few words, standing in stark contrast to the “vococentrism” of most mainstream cinema.6 _{What dialogue we do hear is often} slightly muted and meant to convey the tone or cadence of a conversation more so than its actual content. Important lines, however, are slightly more prominent in the sound mix, though they are frequently doled out in tiny, elliptical fragments that are intermittently repeated for emphasis. Taken on the whole,

Upstream Color is perhaps the quietest film in recent American cinema, a cinema somewhat notorious for its noisiness.

Carruth’s aesthetic is thus one of audiovisual juxtaposition, though not strictly in the contrapuntal manner of, say, Godard. Rather, the mismatch has more to do with rhythms: swift, elliptical cutting occurs against a calm, languid soundscape. Much of the movie’s hypnotic quality is owed to the net effect of these contrasting aural and visual tempos, their “relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness.”7

Carruth’s aesthetic and narrative inclinations dovetail to form a highly fragmentary, “anti- expository” style.8 The director seems to have taken to heart the filmmaking adage of “show, don’t tell,” as evinced by his forthright mistrust of dialogue:

I absolutely do not like exposition. It feels to me like every time I need it, it seems like there must be some other way to get around this. We cannot have a scene where Jeff Goldblum explains Chaos Theory [as he does in Jurassic Park]. We cannot do that. [….] The script probably had a line or two in it that would technically have been exposition, and those were excised out once the visual language started to really develop.9

6 _{Chion, Audio-Vision, 6.}

7 _{Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 266.}

8 _{I take this phrase from William H. Gass’s description of his own writing style. William H. Gass, “Finding a Form,”} in Finding a Form (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997): 46.

What is most odd about this position is that Carruth makes films—his earlier, debut film Primer (2004) is an impenetrable time travel movie with a sizeable cult following—that are almost inscrutable: they withhold exposition from elaborate plots that would seem most in need of it.

So elaborate is the narrative of Upstream Color, in fact, that nearly every reviewer admits a certain degree of bafflement with it.10 _{Many in fact praise the film even as they struggle to describe its} plot. One critic, for example, notes that the film “edges close to absurdity,” a sentiment echoed by another who concedes that his inadequate synopsis makes the film “sound impossibly silly and arch.”11 _Critic Scott Tobias gives it a valiant (and humorous) go:

To describe the plot of Upstream Color is an exercise in comical futility, but here goes: Amy Seimetz stars as an effects artist who is abducted and implanted with a

bioengineered grub that holds her in a hypnotic trance. By the time she recovers—via some sort of pig-related resuscitation process engineered by Andrew Sensenig (see: comical futility)—Seimetz has no memory of what happened, but she’s mysteriously drawn to a young, disgraced trader (Carruth) who seems to have gone through a similar experience. The two share an intimate relationship, spiked by mutual fear and paranoia, and their memories and identities start to muddy and converge inexplicably. (Also: Something something orchids; something something [Thoreau’s] Walden; something something triggering sound effects.)12

9 _{A more recent example of a character whose presence in the film is solely expository: Ariadne (Ellen Page) in}

Inception (Nolan, 2011), whose ostensible function within the narrative is as the “architect” of the film’s dream- worlds but who in fact serves as a proxy for the viewer by asking questions of other characters, a device that in effect reiterates to the audience the “rules” by which the film’s world(s) operates. Jack Giroux, “SXSW Interview: Shane Carruth on Upstream Color and the Future of Film,” Film School Rejects, March 13, 2013,

http://filmschoolrejects.com/features/shane-carruth-upstream-color-interview.php.

10 _{In contrast to someone like David Lynch, who categorically refuses to elaborate on the “meaning” of his films,} Carruth is remarkably forthright about how Upstream Color’s pieces fit together, giving spoiler-filled explanations in various media outlets around the time of the film’s release. See, for instance, Charlie Jane Anders, “Director Shane Carruth Explains the Ending of Upstream Color,” i09, April 17, 2013, http://io9.gizmodo.com/director-shane- carruth-explains-the-ending-of-upstream-475087719.

11 _{Manohla Dargis, “Worms, a Botanist and Pigs. Sounds Like a Love Story,” New York Times, April 4, 2013,} http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/05/movies/upstream-color-directed-by-shane-carruth.html; Michael Phillips, “Follow-up a Beautiful Muddle by an Interesting Filmmaker,” Chicago Tribune, April 13, 2013,

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-04-13/entertainment/ct-mov-0412-specialty-screening- 20130413_1_upstream-color-shane-carruth-amy-seimetz.

12 _{Scott Tobias, “Upstream Color,” The AV Club, April 4, 2013, http://www.avclub.com/review/upstream-color-} 96044.

Do not be misled by Tobias’ tone, though, for his review is unquestionably a positive one.

Upstream Color, he concludes, is “the type of art that inspires curiosity and obsession, like some beautiful object whose meaning remains tantalizingly out of reach,”13 which testifies, I think, to the conviction with which this ludicrous-on-paper film is mounted. And it’s not only Tobias who thinks so: one online review aggregator estimates that 84% of critics regarded the movie favorably.14

All of this is to say: writing about Upstream Color is no easy task. It will require a longer than normal recounting of plot events in order to take stock of the implications of, to paraphrase Scott Tobias, its strange network of humans, pigs, worms, and flowers. I therefore ask the reader’s patience as we move through this complex film. In the first half of what follows, I suggest a material basis for the subjective interconnectedness the film’s central characters, while in the second, I consider the circumstances of how these connections were forged. As one might guess from the above excerpts from the critical reception of Upstream Color and the general thrust of the dissertation to this point, sound plays a significant role here. How, however, is a question that we will have to set to the side for time being.