The Mirror Neuron is Tommy Becker’s latest video pop opera, a hybrid form he’s developed which is somewhere between a video concept album and an essay film. Each of these films features a song cycle on a theme, coupled with visual explorations of each song’s themes, supplemented by transitional material. His songs match sparse, poetic lyrics with garage rock, folk, industrial, power pop, often ingeniously combined within a single song.
The title refers to an “empathy neuron” in the human brain which is activated whenever a person directly experiences, by sympathy and imitation, the feelings of those around him. The film explores the demise of empathy and compassion in our screen-mediated world, while serving at the same time as a poetic meditation on the sun, the source of all life on earth, but which threatens, in the age of climate change, to become a destructive force as well. Becker appears throughout the film, using a variety of visual and musical strategies to try and empathetically imagine what it would be like to actually be the sun, and in the process revealing something about both the role of the sun and about the role of imagination in engendering empathy.
The film’s prolog opens on a shot of the artist’s studio, a somewhat unkempt collection of music and video gear. We slowly zoom in to a cheap schlock art painting of a sunset on the opposite wall, a bit like a solar version of the zoom in Wavelength. As we pull in to an extreme closeup, we see a Good Will price label stuck to the painting, which Becker removes with a fingernail, laboriously. It’s funny, but also ominous and unsettling.
Although the film is structured as a series of music videos, the images tend to comment obliquely on the song lyrics, rather than simply illustrating the words. When the word "virtual" comes up in one line of a song, we see a woman wearing VR gear. A song about the need for empathy is illustrated by footage of clouds, shot from the window of a plane.Then, we see Becker standing in front of a wall where a film of the clouds is being projected, and, in a stylized dance gesture, he tries to "climb into" the image. It’s an indirect but powerful image of what we do, mentally, when we try to "project" ourselves into the situation of others and imagine what they're feeling. Yes, you can't fully experience someone else’s sensations, just like you can't climb into a picture of clouds and start flying, but you can still learn something about others, using your imagination.
You can think of this as a creative use of substituting the map for the territory, temporarily. In another shot, however, we see a vase of withered, dead flowers, placed underneath a painting of the sun. There are limits to the imagination; flowers can’t get nourishment from a painting, and we can’t imagine our way back to ecological balance.
While the content of the shots comments obliquely on the lyrics, the editing rhythms of the shots mirror the rhythm and structure of the songs quite precisely. As viewers, we respond to coordinated rhythm of the shots and the music with a visceral, body sense, so one could say that Becker’s editing strategy helps connect us to the songs by activating our mirror neurons.
During one song, Becker tries to embody the churning energy of the sun by painting his hands yellow, and then sticking them through a hole in a painting. His churning hands hover in the sky of the landscape, and a video blur is sufficient to turn the image into a credible animation of the sun in the sky. Becker intercuts this finished animation with shots of him shooting it, in which we see how a camera on a tripod is capturing his hands sticking through the painting. The creative process remains linked to the product, and the real subject of the film remains empathy, his efforts to embody sun-ness.
In another song, he tries to embody another aspect of the sun: the fact that it’s found in the sky. He films himself, dressed in yellow and jumping repeatedly into the air in front of a blue rectangle, and then edits the clip so only the moments where he hovers in the air remain; a yellow human ball in a blue backdrop, an editing trick that allows him to imagine himself as the sun in the sky. The pulsing guitar chords which accompany this section also somehow also evoke the sun’s rays.
A later song has Becker holding a series of yellow objects, such as bananas and yellow extension cords. Each object starts out in front of a grim reality: a pile of garbage or a homeless person's tent. Then Becker lifts the object up to the blue sky, creating a literal image of transcendence, of rising above our problems to a higher plane. But the song's chorus brings the final irony: instead of "harnessing the sun's power" and switching to solar power, we are polluting the earth's atmosphere, we're destroying our ability to protect ourselves from the sun, so the sun changes from being a source of life to a source of misery, disaster, poverty, destruction. It still burns, but now it burns too hot. He sings the chorus: “the sun turns, and burns, and burns, and burns” and the images change to news footage of forest fires, with refugees fleeing for their lives. For a Californian like Becker, the idea of a sun transformed from Creator to Destroyer is not abstract.
The film ends with an epilog, a witty but depressing picture of catastrophic failure: after Becker’s repeated attempts to imaginatively become the sun, paintings of the sun are shown falling off the wall, one by one. Empathy fails, and catastrophe ensues. The only thing remaining on the wall is a mirror, which might be our last hope, if it represents our power of compassion and empathy, but this too seems to have failed,and Becker removes it from the wall. It's a fit ending to a film which starts out with the removal of "Good Will" from the world of art.
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