SKINAMARINK: Experimental Film and The Point of Patience (Patreon)

So you’ve probably noticed, but I’ve spent a lot of time writing about tenets of storytelling and how to construct tight, moving, and meaningful drama. I do this because I think it’s an incredibly important value system to apply to blockbusters, genre pieces, and intimate dramas all the same. It’s even important for baseline tension in comedy! But the thing that I hope is also clear is that I’m often applying these metrics to films that are aiming for those same qualities (and often simply misfiring on a few tactics). But every film is NOT trying to do that. Because there are also films that throw caution to the wind and fully dive into their more experimental aims.

And I very much like some of those films, too.

For instance, I don’t know how much you know about Andy Warhol’s work, but the experimental films he made at The Factory is often quite wonderful. They thrive off juxtaposition of the absurd and the mundane, often using both shock and patience to test the bougie, conservative world that surrounded them at the time. There’s an especially puckish sense of inversion and points to films like Blowjob. But perhaps nothing exemplifies Warhol’s experimental mission statement quite like Empire, which, to go to wiki, is “a 1965 American black-and-white silent art film by Andy Warhol. When projected according to Warhol's specifications, it consists of eight hours and five minutes of slow motion footage of an unchanging view of New York City's Empire State Building. The film does not have conventional narrative or characters, and largely reduces the experience of cinema to the passing of time.[1] Warhol stated that the purpose of the film was ‘to see time go by.”

Typically, it’s the kind of film you appreciate in theory. And more practically-speaking, it’s the kind of thing you could see playing in the dark corner of an art museum somewhere. The kind of experience where you wander in, start watching, see if anything will happen, spend the amount of time you consider respectful, and then nod to who you are with and walk out. There are some who would exit and then marvel with indignation that this is clearly just a waste of time. And in one way, they’re not wrong. But in another way, they’re completely wrong. Because the function these films serve is hugely important… but before we get to that function, first, you have to establish “the contract.” And that starts with conveying the right expectations to the audience.

If one were to walk into Skinamarink expecting, say, the latest schlocky January release that was full of cheap scares and buckets of blood, you will be disappointed. But the good news is that you will be disappointed immediately, because the film communicates what to expect from moment one. We get long static shots of a mostly empty house, bits of slow drifting upwards, and almost no introduction to a single “character” for 10 minutes. But it does all that because the film never goes into a traditional scene at any single point. Really, this entire film is almost wall to wall shots of rooms and dark corners and a few moments of textural bumps or unsettling direction or imagery. It’s experimental film work from top to bottom. Which is why the opening is important because all about establishing a contract with the audience. It’s saying “this is what our film is doing” and if you’re not into it? Cool, hit stop and do something else. It’s okay if it’s not for you. Or wait til you're in the mood if you want to try again. Or hell, go get your money back. There’s nothing stopping you. But the thing I can’t imagine is sitting through minute after minute of this film and to keep expecting “a real movie” to start. I mean, what convinces someone to do that? Why keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result? And more importantly, you can see the incredible anger that bubbles up in response from some people when encountering a film like this. It feels like the kind of anger that always feels awash in disdain and the need to insult. Here just a sample (and I’m not tagging because I’m so over any kind of online dunking), but note the obvious overlaps of comparison:

-“skinamarink is like watching a paranormal activity film where the family were dogshit at setting up the home security system and the screenwriter quit”

-“Skinamarink is like if there was an A24 version of Paranormal Activity"

“…Paranormal Activity [from] 1st yr art student who has discovered video is a "discipline". A 20min short stretched way beyond its means, for all its pretentions to be tense & unsettling it relies on tacky cliches to hold attention"

-“Skinamarink is a movie where someone watched paranormal activity and thought "I can make this artsy and lame”

There’s always certain language you see repeated in comments like like this. That the work is arty, pretentious, and often taking potshots at other things they hate (A24, whose general approach could not be more different, but I guess people like to punch things). And I’m half bewildered by the ubiquitous Paranormal Activity comparisons, as they also could not be more different in approach. I mean, this film isn’t found footage for one, but hey, the mildest aesthetic similarities to the most popular thing will always be what sticks out I suppose (and to that, I’d argue the film actually has way more aesthetic DNA in common with Poltergeist). But the real thing underneath these comments is that there is always just this disdain at something that skews non-narrative. It’s a simultaneous anger towards anything the least bit academic, while simultaneously assuming it’s an “un-gettable” thing that we (the people who like it) only ascribe meaning too in order to seem cool or smart or whatever.

Luckily, this is the reason we have the discipline of semiotics, which has basic rules that help us make concrete arguments as to the meaning of more abstract-but-symbolically films like Mulholland Drive or Under The Skin. But what’s kind of fun in this case is that Skinamarink isn’t really doing that either. Sure, there’s some stuff you have to piece together, like okay that’s the boy talking to the sister, or figuring out where they are, or what this mysterious entity seems to even be doing, let alone when it’s present in the shots. But it’s also telling you this doesn’t matter. You don’t really need to unpack any of what you’re watching for it to still work… Wait, don’t You also dislike a lot of festival films that use obfuscation tactics? I do! That is to say that I do if it clearly has those Lynchian aims and is aping the hallmarks of semiotic symbolism and yet is completely hiding the meaningful theme part of them. But that actually doesn’t apply here because this film is really going full experimental.

Instead, the film is deeply experiential.

That is to say the film is entirely about placing you into a space of feeling. It commits to this with every fiber of its being. So often you don’t understand what you’re looking at, rendering you a static, entranced viewer, always unsettled by POV, as maybe you’re the observer, or the character, or maybe the entity itself. It’s all dream logic. And no, not in the boring “was the end of Tar all a dream?” way (which I won’t even get into). But something much more nightmarish and visceral. For so often it’s about your relationship with even how you’re watching the frame itself. How much are you looking into the corner of the frame? How much are you trying to find an image in the dark? How much are you clocking the use of fades? Even how often are you looking away from the frame itself? You could argue, “yeah, but doesn’t that mean it’s basically a super long version of the video from The Ring?” But even that feels completely different from what they are trying to capture here because the imagery is so much more mundane.

After watching the film I read about how writer / director Kyle Edward Ball got started on youtube where he would make shorts that recreated commenters nightmares. Some people apparently are bringing this up as a slight? It’s not. I think it speaks to what seems to be most engaging about the cinematic effect of watching this work. It’s the allusion to homes that feel familiar. It’s the essence of sleepwalking. The haziness. The familiar images of dark rooms and strobing TV lights. The childhood toys that go from fun, cherished objects in the daytime to total nightmare fuel when touched by soft spilling light of night itself. One that feels more and more palpable as windows, doors, and all things that give us an exit are removed, forever trapping you in the nightmare itself. And perhaps most of all, there is a complete lack of the ability to sense time. Have you been asleep for five minutes? An hour? Ten hours? It all bleeds from image to image, as if disorienting you on purpose. But it’s the last subject of timelessness that seems to be a key point in the larger debate.

Because there are some folks who don’t mind Skinamarink’s approach, but who also seemed drained by the larger runtime and thus talk about how it could stand to lose “twenty minutes or so.” Now, is it audacious to go for the film to go the full 1 hour and 40 minutes? Yup! And I really do get the inclination around the statement. But any time you start talking about runtime as this grand universal arbiter, it sort of gets into a whole problem. Like, okay, you want to cut the movie down, which shots do you lose? Just less of X? I suppose you can get into it with a real editorial mindset, but I imagine we’re talking about something more general and unspecific. Which matters because we’re already talking about an experimental horror movie whose first scare comes 35 minutes in, so what are we trying to nip and cut here? The whole thing in general just so we have to spend less time with it? To me it’s kind of like saying “I really like Empire, but it could stand to lose 2 hours.” The length is often part of the point. And if you already have established the contract with something, sometimes it’s okay if you’re in for a penny so in for a pound. Especially because often, the attempts to shave down something is really just a sneaky attempt to turn it into something it’s not. Like, why wish a Papaya was an Orange? Isn’t the whole point to have a less-common (at least where we are) Papaya?

Few pieces of fine art sum up the whole nature of this length contradiction better than the two Solaris films. Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpiece is a hypnotic, slow, careful, nearly-3 hour saga that crawls up inside you and sticks forever. But Steven Soderbergh tried to turn it into a tight 99 minutes and it became one of the few films to get an F cinemascore. Don’t get me wrong, I kind of like a lot of stuff about his version and there’s many things that make the two films different, but it all a fundamental part of the general argument. It’s not just about how you establish the contract, it’s understanding that the things that make a piece of art feel long are often odd and sometimes purposeful. Because sometimes, making something feel long creates a space where your mind participates in all sorts of additional games - and which, given a certain hallway sequence, is part of Skinamarink’s clear intention. But again, so much of this depends on you being okay with your experience of what’s happening on screen.

For example, did you know it’s totally okay for your mind to wander during a movie? Sometimes it’s even the point! I know that’s sacrilege for part of the movie-loving populace that seems to worship being “in it,” but that’s not the be all and end all. Seriously, with some movies you can think about other stuff. It’s often best if it’s related to the movie, but it doesn’t actually matter. You can totally start thinking about your grocery list or what you’re doing that weekend. Sometimes it’s productive because I’ll think about other movies I’m writing and there’s this parallel story working happening. Heck, I remember having a film school teacher who watched so many movies that he said he now likes movies (whether artistic and populist) where you could fall asleep and wake up and it didn’t matter that you did because you could still follow. That was something that kind of stuck with me because it’s incredibly freeing of your relationship to what’s on screen. Because sometimes it’s not about the didactic nature of what a screen commands you to feel…

Sometimes it’s about fostering reflection.

And that’s something often that’s at its best when you find yourself tangent-ing with the film itself. In Skinamarink, I found myself thinking about my haunted-ass old New England house. Memories of VHS players and dark corners and noises burned into my brain. But unlike many pieces of modern media, it didn’t seem like it was using these old touchstones as some nostalgia-laden checklist material, but something more intrinsic. It felt like a psychic connection to a raw, ugly, unedited beating heart of youth. Something that tapped into bad memories and the very real human ghosts that linger. And when ruminating in that space, there’s this funny thing that happens where a movie’s set-up for something scary goes on so long that the fear dissipates. But then it goes on so much longer that it comes back with this deeper feeling of dread again. Because it’s a space where your mind starts crawling, confused, waiting for the thing to happen and playing all kinds of tricks on itself. This is often the most dangerous and upsetting space, which brings us to the whole rub…

Because that’s exactly why people get so angry.

There’s that clip I always reference from Regular Show where they talk about doing something really scary and suggest renting some genre films and then one of the characters goes: “or we could go to bed early and be alone with our thoughts!” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQPyczrRKZc&ab_channel=GK Which is not just a monster joke, it’s getting at the problem with human nature completely. So often, we go to films (especially horror) as some kind of escape that pokes and prods our senses, but when when we go to something that’s this experiential and thus depends on what WE’RE thinking with our own minds, well that’s pokes and prods most of all. Some get riled up with anger at having to do this in general, which is why we have a society built on constant disruption. But can you imagine a piece of art that makes us face that state of being alone with our thoughts??? Cue more angry tweet examples like “I want to hunt down the guy who made Skinamarink and make him squint at a wall in a dark room for 2 hours while nothing else happens” and the other simultaneous generalized ones who hate the film for “not being scary” (which is always a boring discussion). As silly as it sounds, sometimes confronting the wall in a dark room is incredibly important. Or at least a valuable tactic. Because for many people it becomes a new terrifying canvas from which to draw on, which is why so many other people seem to be talking about the movie being so damn scary to them. Because it’s not just dramatizing the intended dreadful feeling in others… it IS the dreadful feeling itself. And that is where you can find its greatest value if you are open to it. I know many reject it on the most visceral, intrinsic level and I get it, but I also think it’s important to also get what the film is trying to do in turn, even if it’s not for you. Especially because the film is so deeply aware of the conflict.

“Can we watch something happy?”

The young boy asks that question near the end of Skinamarink and the answer is clearly no. You’re stuck in this. You’re “in it.” There’s no escape. And what is so valuable is the fact “it” captures something much terrifyingly familiar. No, it’s not just the lingering haunt of a nightmare, where certain images stick inside us (the eyes of the phone in the dark is outstanding-ly horrible), because the film knows those images can quickly dissipate like they were never really there at all. Thus, I’d argue that the whole of Skinamarink knows how to capture something much worse… because I’m hard pressed to think of a film that better captures the muted, waking nightmare feeling of insomnia better. Something that obscures and unsettles and blends into a complete disintegration of time. And hey, for all the talk of reflection spaces and experimental art, they say we either go to see ourselves represented on screen, or to watch characters go through things we’ve personally never been a part of. So any other highfalutin conversation is probably missing the point: the real nightmare is that your life could feel like that. And thanks to some experiential art…

It can.

<3HULK