If you’re here, you might have just Googled “Uh… What was Upstream Color about?”
That, or you’re just an amazing person who frequents my page for funsies.
If the latter’s true (and if you just read my previous blog), you know I like film and this entry might not be your bag. Upstream Color premiered at IFC this year, left people head-scratching, etc. Anyway, if you’ve a couple free hours to kill, click here, enjoy it for free, then buy it once it comes to DVD so you don’t have to feel guilty about being a horrible dirty pirate hooker.
Or just wait for the DVD and come back.
Or just stop reading; because this entry will be super confusing for you otherwise.
Okay. Now that you’ve watched it, you probably feel one of two ways: Like a pubescent kid who’s just learned how to play with himself (confused, intrigued, and excited to try it again), or (more likely) totally bewildered and asking yourself WTF you just watched. As I was reading a bunch of comments and reviews on the film, I was surprised to see the latter was indeed what the feedback comprised. Actually, I wasn’t surprised. It wasn’t the easiest film to follow, I guess. But since I personally loved it, I decided to be the awesome Ashley I am, wiki-style synopsis a breakdown for you as best I can, and give you the gist of the plot summary, spoilers and all.
Here it goes:
After enduring a Scopolamine-like experience involving a forcibly ingested worm (which hypnotizes her to do whatever she’s told) and subsequent week-long robbery (by the guy who gave her the hypno-worm), the once professional Kris Fischer wakes up on the side of the road in her car. She finds herself recalling nothing, and penniless. Comic relief moment for me was the scene when she goes home, prepares to call 911, and then stops mid-dial once she sees all the random food and blood scattered over her house… like WTF is she going to tell them? “Hi, I lost a week of my life from my memory but I think I binged, butchered, and robbed myself. What can we do about that?”
Genuinely believing she must have had a psychological break with reality, she turns inward, socially closes off, chops off her hair (like most Lifetime trauma-drama chicks), starts dressing like an androgynous hipster, downgrades to the only job that’ll hire her at a sign shop, takes the train to get there (since the crazy-police revoked her license), and perfunctorily performs daily life routines.
But a much larger, organic force is at play.
Though the worm was used by the thief to hypnotize her and acquire money, it is now being used by another man – called The Sampler – who transferred the worm from Kris to livestock after the robbery and before she snapped out of her trance-thing. Now he is using the connection between the current hosts (piggies) and former hosts (Kris and many others) to capture and feed off the essences and identities of these people.
What’s that? That made no sense? Okay.
Well, lemme try again: by playing samples of sounds he’s recorded in nature (ie – falling rocks or water or whatever) to the pigs, he can tap in on the people’s lives from time to time (because similar style sounds can be found in their day to day lives)
Example – the repetitive sounds of a printer or fax or faucet or whatever sounds like wood scratching on drainage pipe or a babbling brook or whatever. So, anyway, each affected person is thus connected to him through the piggies via sound and sense, as well as a myriad of other elements/people who are helping perpetuate the cycle that goes something like: orchid seeker-gardeners -> gardeners harvest the blue orchid -> worm grows from the blue orchid -> thief who uses the worm on a victim to hypnotize and steal from them -> victim who hosts the worm -> sampler who transfers victim’s worm to pig -> pigs have babies with the worm genes, but get dumped in the river -> the worm cells from the dead piglets travel upstream as they decay -> the flowers upstream assimilate the worm cells from the water -> orchid turns blue -> aaaand we’re back to the worm infested blue orchid again.
However, everyone’s equally ignorant that their actions are propagating the cycle, that a cycle even exists, or that they’re being controlled. Seemingly, only the Sampler really knows that he can control and play invisible peeping Tom to the emotions of others.
As for our main character Kris, although she can totally sense something external is guiding her world and manipulating her emotions, she can’t describe or identify it. So she’s left with the belief that she has no control over her own life… until she meets Jeff on the train one day.
Little do either of them know that they’ve both unknowingly suffered the same worm-hypnosis trauma (since they don’t remember the event itself anyway); but they are initially drawn to one another in this unique push and pull manner – like two magnets being intermittently flipped, repelling and then attracting each other. Although their first encounters are uncomfortable and deliciously awkward (the anti-“meet-cute”) once they finally give in to each other, a mutual symbiosis blossoms between them.
Although Jeff seems more eager to attempt a facade of normalcy, assimilate with society, and ignore this nagging feeling that something awful’s happened to him (along with a powerless belonging to something else), he still empowers Kris to believe she does have control. As a result, Jeff’s encouragement allows Kris to believe her visceral proclivities don’t mean she’s crazy, that they do have a purpose, and to acknowledge and indulge these overwhelming sensations that are drawing her to seek out their source.
Favorite dialogue of the film. Most chicks would be offended, but for Kris, someone was finally encouraging, believing in, and validating her. Paraphrased in colloquial idiocracy language, it was like he was saying, “Shut up. You DO have power and control. Youz a bad bitch, baby.”
And, as you can see, she totally got lady wood when he said it.
(PROTIP: Men, do not attempt this reverse psychology tactic IRL.)
So, their dynamic progresses, and as it does, their emotions amplify parallel to eachother and to the livestock organisms to which they are now unknowingly bonded. They start remembering eachother’s memories as being their own, experience eachother’s physical pain, and even psychically know where one another is at a given time. Meanwhile, at the pig farm, when their parallel porkers suffer the loss and sorrow of murdered offsrping (spoiler alert – baby pigs drown), so do they. Without understanding from whence the rage, pain, and fear they suddenly feel comes, they both throw shit fits at work, rush home, and hunker down in the bathtub with an axe, gun, and flashlight.
Anyway, as with any real hardship, overcoming tragedy means awakening in them a fortitude and resolve they didn’t realize they had since before the hypnosis event they don’t even know happened.
Without so much as a map or destination, the two set out on a quest to unmask this puppeteer identity-voyeur of unknown origin or name, and reclaim their own identities, using only this super-heightened intuition they’ve both assumed via a macrocosmic connection to which they are now part, and the universal language of senses – especially sound, sight, and touch.
I won’t give away the ending…. Hah. I’m lying. Yes I will:
She finds the pig farmer sampler guy by following sensory clues. First she learns he’s been selling and making music based off sound samples he obtained by tapping into their worlds and sampling from their lives. But, as you may know, it’s kind of hard to sue someone for plagiarizing your “essence” (although I think Kim Kardashian tried to do it once). Anyway, Kris and Jeff listen to these CD’s and experience the nuclear mind-blow you would too if you could and did ever hear your very own identity being played back to you on full blast. Now that Kris knows where he lives, she pays that mofo a visit at his farm, blows his heart out of his chest, finds a box of files on all the other victims he’s “sampled”, reclaims her identity, and helps all the others do the same, too.
Although I’m not psychic like Kris or Jeff, I’ve a feeling that synopsis might have left you more confused than the film itself. If I’m wrong, and you’re actually stroking your imaginary beard, saying “Mhmm… I noticed that too…”, then aside from my wiki-style summary, my review about this film, in a word, would be: Amazing.
Symbolism is always fun, but here especially, the use of yellow and blue to distinguish between self empowerment and being Pinocchio’d by some invisible Svengali was quite powerful. While it’s easy to sit back and call it “just another crazy science fiction” piece, that’s just a bit dismissive. I mean, you might laugh when I say it, but the film really hit close to home for me. In fact, Shane’s (the director) own mission was to indeed exemplify (in a unique artsy way) that feeling of waking up out of some sort of fugue and being like, “WTF am I doing with my life? What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I stop feeling like my soul had a lobotomy and a black hole lives where my chakra should be?!”
So, naturally, the message then becomes this: we all should hunt down our own metaphorical pig farmers (emotional parasites in our lives – like those catty bitches you hate at work) and reclaim our own independence by bringing in a sawed off and blowing their brains out.
Metaphorically.
I think.
xoxo
<3~A