In Drive with Persephone, found footage artist MilleFeuille reframes the Greek myth of Persephone through the surprising vehicle of “learning to drive” video blogs made by American teenagers. By reassembling fragments of these tales of the growing pains of ordinary, contemporary kids, along with other evocative bits of online video from myriad sources, MilleFeuille is aiming at something larger than simply a novel way of re-telling a classic myth. The film shows us how these banal artifacts of the everyday unintentionally tell a deeper story, a story that has been around as long as there have been mothers and daughters.
The clips are often both funny and touching, as the youngsters approach this contemporary rite of passage, driving a car by themselves for the first time, in the special manner of adolescents: mixing bravado, wonderment, and sheer terror in equal measure. Since I happened to learn to drive myself this summer, at the age of 62, I was primed to respond to their elation as well as their fear. Operating an enormous machine while speeding along with other enormous machines, knowing that one wrong move can end in disaster, is an awe-inspiring experience at any age, even if at my age I lack the blithe confidence of a teenager.
Watching the worried, proud faces of the mothers, as they watch their kids on their fledgling flight into adulthood, we are indeed pulled into the mythic realm of the separation from the mother which is the dramatic center of the Persephone myth. (At one point, we actually see a bird that has fallen out of the nest.) Splicing in POV shots of people driving tractors and plows, surrounded by bountiful crops, MilleFeuille sets the story among the abundant gifts of the earth, the realm of Demeter.
The film is accompanied, throughout, by the haunting evocative music of Natalie Trayling, an Australian street musician in her 80s, whom we occasionally see, looking like the prototypical wise crone, as she leans over her keyboard on a Melbourne sidewalk. Mother and daughter may be suffering a tragic separation, but this wise, grandmotherly spirit seems to watch over the drama with serene inner wisdom.
The driving footage is also intercut with scenes from an elementary school production of the Persephone myth, in which the children’s impassioned, artless rendition shows that they are lucky enough to have a brilliant teacher, someone who has found a way to make Greek mythology come fully alive for kids, as they physically embody the terrifying story of a kidnapping by dark forces.
Just as in the myth, the story of these teenagers and their first driving experience soon turns dark, as they encounter difficult weather, unpredictable drivers, and, inevitably, law enforcement. Several of these kids are pulled over by cops, and in some cases, things turn terribly ugly. They have been dragged down into the underworld.
Some kids immediately react to being stopped by the cops with resistance and defiance, sometimes in completely looney ways. One boy argues with a cop that he’s not breaking the law by driving without a license, because his car “is not a motor vehicle,” and a girl patiently explains to a cop that he has no authority over her because she “belongs to the earth.” It may be that, as a result of the Black Lives Matter movement, some kids have decided that standing up to cops is part of a righteous struggle for freedom.
Adults, who have long since accepted their own compromised relationship with our authoritarian society, will cringe while watching these sequences, and who can blame us? What possible good can come from these confrontations? They won’t move the needle on the struggle for a more free, more just society, but these youngsters very well may end up getting themselves killed. At the same time, there is something inexpressibly touching about their irrepressible longing for a freer world based on respect and trust rather than domination, even if they express this longing in completely wacky, incoherent ways. On some deeper level, these kids are sensing an important truth: in an ideal voluntarist society based on mutual aid rather than coercion, compliance with common sense measures like traffic rules would surely be higher.
Millefeuille’s comparison of Persephone’s capture by Hades with teenagers confronting the police deepens this point. No longer solely under the sheltering embrace of maternal authority, in which blood ties are (ideally) guiding the relationship through love and compassion, they are experiencing their first confrontations with the darker forces of state power. The film links this power with a destructive force which seeks to dominate nature through violence, by cutting to military clips and scenes of forests being clearcut. As we watch trees being uprooted, we are watching the fall of nature. We’re entering the dark season, the time of the mother’s grief. Millefeuille has a masterful touch at visual storytelling. The clips we see from the young drivers here are wordless, as these normally talkative, boastful kids stare through their windshields, overwhelmed by sheer dismay at the world they’re encountering.
In telling the story of Persephone through these social media posts of young people Millefeuille is illuminating the mythic roots of everyday, lived experience. Drive with Persephone shows us how the ancient story of growth and decay, death and re-birth, runs like an underground river, from ancient times directly into the suburban roadways of America, where every day young men and women are both baffled and exhilarated by their first taste of independence and power in a seductive, dangerous world. It’s a magical cinematic act, allowing the brilliant spark of poetry and myth to emerge, unexpectedly, from the most mundane images.
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