At the start of The Special People, Erica Schreiner’s brilliantly original feature film, we find ourselves in a world of people staring intently into clear plexiglass cubes. The image is instantly recognizable as a reference to the role of smart phones in our culture. The fact that the cubes are transparent and empty is a perfect visual metaphor: the cubes are a space for endlessly interchangeable “content,” purportedly a neutral space for information, but actually highly manipulated devices for social control. Their supposed neutrality masks their ability to render us docile, willing victims in the schemes of the elites. (The Special People is cast in the form of allegory and myth, so the elites pulling the digital media strings, the Klaus Schwabs and Bill Gates’ of this world, are referred to in the film as “The Overlords.”) These empty cubes, filled with ambient light, are also black holes, sucking the addicted viewers into hypnotized compliance. The plastic cubes merely reflect their owner’s image back at themselves. It’s a world of people staring into the void.
That ambient light is very much to the point in Schreiner’s world. The set she has hand-built uses enormous quantities of iridescent, glittery and translucent fabrics of all kinds. The film is set in a forest of hand-made trees, with leaves and fruit that likewise seem to radiate light. She has learned to use the low resolution of VHS videography to full effect, to blur and blend these reflective surfaces into a mesmerizing, scintillating surface. Aided by the soft, lulling sounds of Johnny Dydo’s music which gently repeats a Brahms-like melody, this ambient light offers a world that seems suffused with joy, with love, with beauty. This tranquility greatly amplifies the bizarreness of the addicted behavior of the cube-watchers. How can they remain mesmerized by these empty cubes, when they are surrounded by a world so bountiful and welcoming?
Three people, named Apple, Violet and Bird, somehow become un-addicted to the cubes. (It’s not hard for them to identify one another: they’re the only people looking around and observing their surroundings.)
Apple and Violet try to gain the attention of various cube-watchers. They try shaking them, waving their hands in front of their faces, but nothing can wake these people up from their total absorption in the cubes. As a person who has never owned a cell phone of any kind, this sequence presents an almost literal representation of my daily experience of the world: surrounded by stupefied zombies, finding myself unable to communicate with them or even get them to see what’s in front of them. It can be an overwhelmingly lonely place to live, and The Special People is the first work of art I’ve seen that even refers to this experience.
The three friends lie on the glittery forest floor, feeding each other grapes. In their edenic bliss, they do seem newly created. It seems no accident that the film’s protagonist (in an engaging and nuanced performance by the filmmaker) is named Apple, which is at once the forbidden fruit of knowledge and also the name of the company that makes the most coveted cell phones. There are many voices in our world seductively promising to awaken you with special forbidden knowledge, but the most observable characteristic of the online world is the astounding degree of fabrication and illusion. Surrounded by a forest of alluring plastic fruit, Apple’s dearest wish is to taste an actual apple.
One of the film’s most beguiling creations is the occasional scenes depicting the Overlords, looking like Ancien Régime aristocrats in powdered wigs, gorging themselves on cake which they dig into with their hands. Their indulgent lifestyle rests on their ownership of the Master Cube. (It wouldn’t be a Schreiner film without an orgiastic eating scene, as viewers of her previous feature Satori will know.) The viewer will have to be of a certain age to recognize the sound of a dial-up internet connection which forms an aural layer in this scene of the primal origins of our phone-addicted world. Apparently, all the Overlords need to do to keep the orgy going is to keep the Cube running. Let them eat cake, indeed.
The residents of this world have all had their voices surgically removed as children and are mute. At first it seems a strange choice for representing our hyper-connected world, a world in which everyone on earth has had their voices amplified to a deafening degree, creating a worldwide cacophony of voices clamoring for attention. But in this most political of allegories, it soon becomes apparent that what the citizens of the forest have given up is their political voice. They have no way of expressing feelings of dissent from the prevailing power structure, even to themselves.
Apple, Bird and Violet communicate through telepathy, their dialog shown in subtitles. For a film without spoken dialog, there is actually a tremendous amount of dialog in the film. Their telepathic communication also has certain elements you might not expect from a silent form of discourse: the ability to whisper secrets, or to notice people speaking “with accents.” Apparently, these unspoken words can even be recorded and played back, as we see later in the film.
There is a striking contrast between Schreiner’s earlier feature Satori, in which she is the sole performer, and The Special People, which is filled with a large cast of varied and quite interesting individuals. In Satori, Schreiner investigated a purely interior world, in which the allegorical story told of an internal struggle between different elements in her psyche. It’s a dreaming world, whereas the world of The Special People is fully awake, full of the complexity of real-world interactions with people and political structures, with all of their disappointments, sloppy misunderstandings, and rare moments of profound connection. It’s as if the heroine of Satori had left her artist studio/playroom and entered a wider world with a bewildering variety of people in it, where she finds frustration, self-doubt, but also a deep sense of purpose, a guiding mission. It’s also worth noting that the key moments of inspiration and guidance in the film still come to her in the form of dreams.
Tellingly, Apple and Violet struggle to remember which band recorded Enjoy the Silence. The ability to look up information on The Cube has robbed them of the ability to remember things on their own as well as, apparently, the ability to enjoy the tranquility of direct sensory engagement with the world. Slowly, they remember how to enjoy the silence.
As in any good myth, Apple embarks on a heroine’s journey, to free the people from the cubes. Her mission sends her to a land named Josephine, where reportedly the drinks cost $20. (Maybe it’s named after New York’s Chez Josephine.)
Myth and allegory always simplify a story in order to make it archetypical, yet Schreiner presents a very complex view of the dissenters, the different kinds of people who aren’t addicted to the cubes. Along the heroine’s journey she meets many dissenters, known as the Conformists, the Complainers, The Comforts, and the Comparison Monkeys. It is implied in the film that the damage caused by the cubes is deep and insidious, with long-lasting effects, and that most of these dissenting people are exhibiting different kinds of addictive behavior as they withdraw from the cubes. Some are addicted to alcohol, and some simply to nihilism, depression, or self-isolation. Anyone who has spent time in “alternative” communities will recognize this phenomenon. In the film, they are also referred to as Obstacles, a key component in any heroine’s journey.
Schreiner is an artist who avoids easy simplifications, even in a simplified form like allegory. She prefers to portray the nuance and ambiguity inherent in moral quests. It would be easy to portray all the citizens of this world, both on the cube and off, as misguided, lost, or dangerous, but Apple also meets a few people along the way who are genuinely wise and generous. She finds soul-mates, and this makes all the difference on her mission. One of them is Kalpa, a wise and helpful woman who tells her that the real problem with the Obstacles is after you encounter enough of them, you become skeptical of everyone you meet. We live in a world completely dominated by trickery and fakery, but if you succumb to cynical distrust of everyone, you’re dead in the water. Not only will you feel completely lost and unhinged, but you’ll miss all the observational data around you that will help you on your mission.
The story, of course, has a happy ending, although there is a heavy price to pay. The purpose of art, like mythology, like friendship, is to re-inspire. As Violet reminds us, the cunning traps of the Overlords, who addict us and then sell us back our addictions, are exhausting. We need all the inspiration we can get, and The Special People provides it in abundance.
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