Staring Into The Neon Abyss Of I-BE AREA

Y’know, as a genre fan with a taste for the bizarre, I sometimes delude myself into thinking that there’s nothing that can truly shock me, nothing that can peel through the layers of psychological desensitization that have been built up from years of giallo movies and AQUA TEEN HUNGER FORCE reruns. Then, something comes along and reminds me that my media-based journey down the rabbit hole of mankind’s collective unconscious has only just begun. In this case, that something is the avant-garde anarchy that is Ryan Trecartin’s I-BE AREA.

I was introduced to this 107-minute long digital freak show via a friend who had stumbled upon it by finding out a portion of it was sampled on the Death Grips song “@DeathGripz”. The film has no discernable plot to speak of, but judging by my tepid steps into Trecartin’s oeuvre, he doesn’t seem to be concerned with telling any straightforward narratives. What I-BE AREA lacks in terms of a plot or conventional pacing, it makes up for with frenetic editing, sloppy yet colorful set design and makeup, and dadaistic dialogue that makes all the characters spout gibberish that somehow has several meanings if your mind can take the time to process them. One example out of the multitudes: “My CD is on frickin’ repeat basically-I KNOW-rewind- I could leave any day, and just go.”

Scenes begin and end with no real indication of why we’re being shown the information we’re getting. Characters appear and disappear in a flurry of mid 2000’s-era digital effects and random zoom-ins. Most of these maddened people with pitched-up voices are caked in garish makeup, their countenances distorted by a splattering of neon colors and specialty contact lenses.

The film, which was released sometime in 2007, has a deliberate lo-fi look and appears to be a product of DV-tape and now-outmoded forms of Avid or Final Cut. Random post-production effects, like cheap digital trees, will obscure characters as they talk. A frame will suddenly be boxed by pink or green borders, and before your eyes can adjust, it’s been radically altered again. While all this goes on, interchangeable cabals of these fast-talking glitter mutants all seem to be having discussion after discussion about adopting kids, unseen art projects, and email addresses and websites and Dear God what am I watching I’m trying so hard to make sense of this.

From what I can gather based on watching this film (and other videos Trecartin has up on YouTube like A FAMILY FINDS ENTERTAINMENT or WHAT’S THE LOVE MAKING BABIES FOR) the name of the game here is sensory overload. Trecartin wants you to be stunned and overwhelmed by the audiovisual assault he’s mounted against any potential viewer.

The result is a stilted nightmare that plunges you into a plane of confusion and never offers you a way out; you’re never really able to gain any kind of footing as you watch this movie move at a rapid pace from one incomprehensible set up to the next. It’s like Tim & Eric on some high quality coke while a demonically possessed DJ stands in the corner of the room playing 90’s dance hits sped up to the highest BPM possible.

Watching this film will challenge the most hardcore cinephile and probably scare off most outsider art dilettantes. Trecartin’s work has a schizophrenic energy so draining that if you’re like me, you’ll only be able to get through one of his films by splitting it into intervals to be viewed over the course of several days.

You might be tempted to dismiss his work as total trash; weirdness for weirdness’ sake that could only exist in a world where the internet and digital filmmaking tools have made it possible for anyone to shoot something and plaster it all over the web. And yet, I-BE AREA has been screened at prestigious museums like the Guggenheim. There are respectable people out there who recognize value in his work.

Myself personally? I’m not sure just yet. I’m still exploring this one. But I can already feel parts of my mind irrevocably altered, for better or worse (time will tell), and now I feel that is my duty to infect as many others as I can with this particular strain of video virus. So don’t keep on reading my words, check out this nonsensical nightmare for yourself…