Barber Westchester structure (Patreon)

Ideas rattling around in my head for years so I decided to write them out.

Barber Westchester is essentially a narrative about a character who is tormented by the narrative, and the resolution of their "arc" is to disengage from it. The resolution in the film is anti-resolution, and the structure itself is anti conformist. A lot of questions are raised that intentionally do not get answered because Barber's story is about disengaging from the questions. 

I've said before many times that I find a lot of the rules of story structure in animation to be inherently fascistic and conformist. By telling Barber's story I wanted to do something where the narrative itself is this sort of "evil" element. This is the reason why I found including the musical scene with Winsconsin to be important beyond entertainment value. Winsconsin is the only character in the movie to have a traditional way of communicating her perspective, via a Disney-esque musical number, but shes also essentially committing genocide and singing about creating an imperialist oligarchic hedonistic space society. 

The idea was to intentionally subvert traditional animation story structure and ways of communicating information in a way that reflect something I've experienced in my life, and a lot of my animator friends have as well. Barber's relationship with space and NASA is an exaggerated version of my relationship with animation. The animation world is an actually shockingly structurally conservative and traumatic place for anyone on the margins (especially neurodivergent people or anyone with mental illness). Many people come to animation because they want to be a part of the thing they used as an escapist tool when they were younger, and are completely emotionally and mentally unprepared for the reality of what actually is going on. 

I started the film in 2019 with the concept of making a "horror movie about being alive", because I was tormented by my own brain, my own feelings, and all of my choices. I felt like the world and my own mind was out to get me at all times. When the path to make the film independently became clear, I didn't realize how much doing it would change my life. Leaving everything behind to make this film for 2 years was the best decision I ever made. The film now reads to me as a direct documentation in the shift in perspective I had from 2019-2021. 

The world is fundamentally the same before and after Barber finds their resolution at the end. Barber doesn't expose NASA, Barber doesn't save the world. Barber talks to their brother. Barber makes eye contact with their dad. Barber takes out the trash. Barber takes a deep breath. These moments that might be read as "nothing" in a story class are actually the most important parts of Barber's entire life.

The goal of the film is that you feel relief at the end, not because the story has a satisfying conclusion, but because there's more to the world Barber lives in than all the things that had been tormenting them. They can look at the ocean and see the ocean, look at a plane and see a plane, look at a parrot and see a parrot, and that's enough.