Upstream Color

Shane Carruth’s 2012 film, “Upstream Color,” is an icy exercise that resembles a David Cronenberg horror movie, minus the thrills and the melodramatic narrative. Let me pause for a moment to unpack this simile. Cronenberg’s horror movies are, themselves, heavily aestheticized, constructed on the contrast between a classically deliberate, symmetrical, and objective style and gory shocks. Carruth carries this a’pproach several steps closer to pure abstraction -- although “Upstream Color” invokes horror film conventions, the picture seems to be some kind of remote and abstract allegory, a parable about genetic determinism. Shot elliptically, using an editing style that confounds interpretation, Carruth’s film is designed as two parallel stories that periodically intersect, although in baffling ways. Some sinister scientists, operating from a suburban home, grow larvae in the roots of orchids. The larvae are harvested and, when dissected, seem to contain kernels or cells of vivid blue color. A young woman is abducted from a bar and one of the worms is forced tinto her mouth. The worm acts to transform the woman into a zombie so that one of the scientists or cult-members (or whatever they are) can steal from the worm-victim all of her assets and, even, cause her to mortgage her home. (This part of the film is unconvincing and Carruth pretty much drops all references to the thefts perpetrated on the woman as the movie progresses.) The woman soon develops alarming symptoms and worms start squirming through her flesh, burrowing through her pale epithelium. She tries to extract the worms with a butcher knife, wounds herself badly, and ends up on an operating table. Through some kind of sinister process, the worms are removed from her body and injected into a baby pig. The pig represents the parallel plot (or, if not a plot, the parallel situation), an allegory involving animal husbandry. An evil farmer, qua mad scientist, is raising mutant pigs. In his spare time, he collects odd sound effects -- an aspect of the film that is totally opaque. The mad farmer is breeding the larva-infested mutant pigs for unknown reasons -- although when he harvests two piglets, traps them in a burlap bag, and, then, pitches the animals into a stream, the effect is to engender spectacularly blue orchids -- the orchids spring from some kind of biological agent released when the dead pigs' decompose in the creek. Whether the creation of these blue orchids is intended or accidental is unclear. The young woman wakes from her zombie state in her car parked on the edge of a freeway. She meets a young man who falls in love with her -- this is also inexplicable since she does nothing but sulk and brood. The young man is apparently a larva-infected mutant himself and he tries to breed with the woman, although she is barren as a result of the removal of “inner organs,” apparently a hysterectomy accomplished when she was in a coma due to the worms wriggling in her innards. The man and woman somehow learn that they are mutants created by the evil sound engineer/swineherd, go to the man’s farm and shoot him. Then, the lovers free the piglets and, even, embrace them. A horde of similar mutants converge on the farm and its pigs --- they are summoned to the place by receiving copies of Thoreau’s “Walden” in the mail, a peculiar plot point that seems derived from ”The Manchurian Candidate” (ordinary folk turning into brainwashed automatons when they receive a post-hypnotic cue). It is hard to determine how much of the plot is paranoid delirium, a fantasy of either the young man or young woman, or intended to be real -- the whole film is dreamlike, shot in huge close-ups, and filled with images of pulsating, worm-infested inner organs. As far as I can ascertain, the thesis of the movie seems to be that sex is a kind of biological experiment, that we are all the victims of manipulative genetic tinkering -- the mad swineherd may be God or Science or Evolution, who knows? Why the mad swineherd is also obsessed with collecting weird sounds is completely unclear -- although the scientist’s avocation leads to some impressive and disturbing drones and roars on the soundtrack. (The lovers apparently track the swineherd to the huge pen where he rather humanely raises his piglets -- it’s a very nice farm compared to the industrial pig production sites that I have toured -- using clues embedded in CD’s that the swineherd has obligingly recorded under the label “Quinoa Farms Rec Co.” Carruth may be asserting that love, and sex which underlies love, are a kind of biological determinism and that no one has any free will when it comes to such matters. If so, this is a rather trivial message to embed in a film so complicated and arduous as this picture. Unfortunately, the characters are ciphers. They talk in whispers and we couldn’t care less about them. The woman looks like a young Sigourney Weaver and I kept expecting the alien larva to start erupting through her porcelain skin. The handsome young man, taciturn, needy, and profoundly stupid, is played by Carruth and the role is pure vanity -- he broods and sulks like his lady-love and looks great in the thousand big close-ups that he enjoys. This film was a big hit at the Sundance Film Festival and it is certainly strange and hypnotic. But the basic concept is dimwitted and the confusing narrative style seems intended to disguise the fact that the idea on which the film is based are laughable -- or truly horrific. But Carruth is too sophisticated and ironic to deliver either humor or horror. All we get is mumble-core acting with some pretty pictures -- an incongruous blue orchid sprouting from the tissue of a decomposing piglet.