It all begins the same way: “I was born… Until one day..”
Long ago, in a screwball world, the movie wooing was easier. The “hero” met-cute with his “heroine.” She stole his golf ball. He slipped on a banana peel. They ripped each other’s party clothes. He was fearless when faced with her wild cat. They lived happily in a world of pratfalls and hapless aunts. Done. Angst-be-gone. Roll the credits. Click here for more insight into that world.
In some cases, the guy just leaves the screen, with nothing more than a dream, a pith helmet, and a free-wheeling (and unscripted) feeling of desire. If only dating matched multiple viewings of The Purple Rose of Cairo..
Love is not so easy nowadays. We have the internet, paranoia, STDs, the sense of closure before the fact, the opportunity to layer our realities in cyberspace. We tweet, wink, click to the next photo, save, delete, pause. The eyes lie. Expectation can be manipulated, edited out. Modern romance is a constellation of talking heads, a medium-meld, a million immediately distant choices. It’s the click-and-drag easy access “I love you, buts..” I can drag my perception of you over you until it becomes you, like a second skin or a Juicy jumpsuit.
Connection is like a dance, and we capture it on film to prove that it exists. Me and You and Everyone We Know exist at 24 frames a second -- attract, repel, chase, collide, meld. Don’t try this at home, kids:
In film, like life, the act of browsing humans has become second nature. We can post a picture, put that person in our “cart” and continue shopping. A world of thought lies cramped in our back pocket. Every possibility has a different password. Without ever speaking, we connect.
Four Eyed Monsters, a film by Arin Crumley and Susan Buice is also a term used to describe a couple. A lovey twosome becomes “four-eyes, two mouths, eight limbs that wrap around themselves in narcissistic self admiration.” The story is pulled like a photographic shadow from a real romance, happening in real time, unraveling light reflected between eyes, and projecting it outward.
It takes place in New York. Crumley is a shy videographer of weddings and Bar mitzvahs. Buice is an artist waiting tables. Online dating brings the two together. Boy courts girl via interactive stalking. They decide to communicate through artistic mediums, never speaking directly, existing in partial-sketch, scribbling notes back and forth like post-it subtitles, leaving a paper trail of modern love. Here’s the trailer:
Four Eyed Monsters, like love, is funny and exquisitely ragged. It was a huge hit at film festivals but failed to snag a distributor. Undeterred, the filmmakers found a way to reach audiences themselves. Crumley and Buice attached Web episode podcasts like a head and tail to the body of the film, extending the storyline. It morphed into a bigger monster with four-eyes and feelers. Audiences could watch the episodes and respond to them, demand that the film come to their hometown, become a part of the community, and the experience. The world could pet the monster.
In Monsters, an art teacher warns his students: “Be careful of the orifice here that you’ve created.” Tripping into one another’s self-actualized orifices is a hazard we cannot avoid. And now we have the vast cyberspace orifice to fall into like Alice down the loophole (to a wonderland filled with clean and lick-able subway pole fantasies). Bigger orifices allow for better digital connections (or multiple connections). And yet, couples rarely look out into the world as one, as two sets of eyes that see the sun set the same way. They don’t see the sky. They fix on one another, lovingly, critically, and in this case creatively. Those four eyes become one monster. Check out this clip from Hedwig and the Angry Inch about “The Origin of Love”:
Most of the “meld” is just wishful thinking and a collection of shared moments, existing in time like rain or scars or pixels of light making clear the many talking heads of MySpace. You can bookmark them and revisit them later.
Check the abstract and click here to read about the psychology behind relationships 2.0.
To “date” is to shop from an assembly line of limbs – eyes and feet and fingers and bottles of dye, body oil and hope. The ideal romantic “setting sun” postcard image is edited on a loop, running repeatedly on the insides of our eyelids, trickling down our consciousness, reality, soul, spine, screen. We live in a time when four eyes -- clear as day -- drip with icicles along the iris, screen-lit, wide. They watch one another and no longer blink. Watch this trailer from the film, Me and You and Everyone We Know:
Another film that straddles reality, speaking to issues of love and connection is Henry Jaglom’s Venice/Venice. Check out the trailer:
And Jaglom talks connection and loneliness with Orson Welles here:
In the ever-evolving world of the film love story, four eyes multiply and become a million. New communities replace old loneliness via YouTube. In this way, Monsters is a monument to love and a testament to change, an undulating creature, suspended in cyberspace.
Four-Eyed Monsters Episodes 1-8 are now available online. Episodes 9-13 are available on the DVD after the film. You can watch the first eight podcasts, buy the DVD, and discuss here.
You can also follow the film on Twitter.
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