“Here the cities are mobile deserts. No monuments and no history: the exaltation of mobile deserts and simulation. There is the same wildness in the endless, indifferent cities as in the intact silence of the Badlands.”
—Jean Baudrillard, America
A number of years ago, old Tweed here packed a bunch of clothes, his computer, and a guitar, and drove off to southwest Montana as an artist-in-residence at the Montana Artists Refuge. It was a brilliant experience, worthy of indie cinema: young man in transition hits the open road alone on a journey to self-discovery (it wasn’t nearly as vomit-inducing as all that, I assure you). And the cross-country trip was filled with a surprising gamut of emotion and experience: the nostalgia of solitude, the horrors of loneliness, the beauty and decay of the environment and scenery. For every Badlands, there was a Spam museum. For every smiling small-towner, there was a urine-drenched truck stop.
And nowhere has this experience been reflected back to me better than in Temporary Distortion’s incredible Welcome to Nowhere (bullet hole road) at PS 122. Self described as “part road movie, part fractured memory, part love story,” the six cast members navigate a brilliant weaving of imagery, technology, and narrative. Obviously more in tune with the cinematic than the theatrical (“Fuck you, theatre!” it seems to say), it is a David Lynch and Coen brothers-infused journey across the U.S. A number of times. We’re introduced to quiet-talkin’, emotionally enervated figures who, from the confines of the quirky, claustrophobic installation-set, don’t speak directly to each other, certainly not to the audience, but simply whisper into microphones, contributing to the desperation to remember, redefine, and recuperate memory and desire. This also points to the highlighting courtesy of amazing sound and lighting design, integrated to a T.
All of this action takes place beneath a wide film projection, strategically hovering above the characters’ heads, to further complicate and conflate people, places, memory, and dreamscapes. The amazing film work by William Cusick is supersaturated with color (think Zemeckis’s motion capture technique in The Polar Express or Beowulf), and plays with the presence and absence of characters wandering and sometimes thrust into the flat, American landscape.
Some of the problems equated with middle and western landscapes, however, go unproblematized: violence, crime, poverty, and a wealth of misogyny, are treated as part of the fabric through their supercool filter, and are even made light of at various points. It plays into the American myths of radical individualism, transcendental enlightenment, and gendered pastoral ideals instead of questioning them.
Despite this, Welcome to Nowhere is one of the most beautiful, integrated, and disturbing meditations I’ve seen in quite some time. The conflation of identities and spaces, memories and desires, is expertly juxtaposed to reveal the everywhere and nowhere of the performance, personal, and geographical landscapes.
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