Heart of a Dog

An icy, other-worldly glow emanates from Laurie Anderson's documentary meditation on death, The Heart of a Dog (2014).  Overly explicit, I think, in some of its sequences, the movie, nonetheless, operates as lyric poetry -- it's an anthology of recollections, aphorisms, and Tibetan Buddhist doctrine unified ultimately by Anderson's voice.  By "voice", I mean both Anderson's actual way of speaking, her ice-cream pure timbre that is one of the great instruments in the world, and, also, her sensibility.  The film's parts, each of which is perfectly lucid in itself, are unified by the framework of obsessional images that Anderson uses -- in this way, the film seems to me similar to some of the documentaries made by Chris Marker, particularly the brilliant, if maddeningly digressive, Sans Soleil. 

In the film, Anderson reflects on five deaths -- she recalls the pall of ash descending over lower Manhattan after 9-11, a kind of mass dying that dusted the streets with its cinders, connecting this to the death of her rat terrier rescue-dog, Lollabelle.  She begins the movie by recalling the death of her mother, a theme to which she reverts at the end of the film -- Anderson seems to have learned her glacial composure from her mother and tells us that the dying woman greeted "the animals" as she passed away.  She describes the death of the sculptor Gordon Matta-Clark and, in a harrowing passage, recalls small children who had been badly burned dying in a ward where she was treated when she broke her back in a diving accident.  In addition to these five explicit instances of death or dying, Anderson's film in all of its parts, and in every frame, is also a response to the death of her husband, Lou Reed.  Anderson recognizes that to make the film explicitly about the rock star's death would be a form of sentimental pandering and, so, she mentions him only in the dedication at the end of the picture.  (We see Reed briefly sitting on a beach and he plays the part of a sinister doctor in one recreation from Anderson's memory.)  The film does not feature any of Anderson's distinctive music -- we hear a song by Lou Reed over the closing titles.

The visual aspect of the film is "hand-made" -- Anderson shows us scarred 8 millimeter film from family movies and the film's digital imagery has been manipulated to give it a patina, sometimes bronze and metallic, sometimes scored and twitchy with blemishes, sometimes gloomy and leaden.   The patina on the images, with Anderson's distinctive voice, is also a unifying factor in the film.  There are many images of snow falling through the barren limbs of trees -- pictures, I think, that also recall the descent of the white ash that Anderson describes covering lower Manhattan after the attack on the World Trade Center.  One of the touchstones in the film is Goya's late painting, a mural from his Quinta del Sordo ("the villa of the deaf man")   , showing the head of a dog at the base of a great void of glowing yellow-bronze light; some people think the dog has been buried in a pit up to its neck -- Anderson says the dog is climbing a steep slope.  The image of glowing this brass-yellow and bronze void is computer-superimposed on many images -- we see through this haze derived from the Goya painting (as we often look through glass streaked with rain)  and, in other instances, the filmmaker puts this brazen, metallic field into the sky itself.  Anderson cuts into the film swaths of surveillance footage -- she makes a few politically correct and abundantly obvious remarks about the surveillance state following 9-11 but (thankfully) drops that theme almost immediately.  Her use of the surveillance imagery is poetic -- earlier she has told us that dogs see mostly in ill-focused blues and greens, and the ghostly infra-red footage of people aimlessly moving around seems to signify two things:  first, we are seeing the world through the eyes of a dog, a blue-green haze, and, second, we are seeing the world at an eerie distance, an out-of-body vantage point that Anderson, I think, equates to the Bardo state.  In many respects, the film is structured as an exercise from the Book of the Great Awakening through Sound or, as it is often called, the Tibetan Book of the Dead.  That religious treatise is an ars moriendi -- a book on the art of dying and assisting the dying in leaving this earthly plane of existence, one of the models for the film as well.  Anderson tells us that after someone dies, they linger in a spectral Bardo-existence for 49 days before they have been purged of their connection to their past life and can be reborn into their next existence.  For Anderson, it seems, the Bardo-plane, at its oblique angle to our actual life, is an image for art -- the way that art takes a different vantage on life and the way her cool, precisionist narration establishes a distance that separates her lucid compassionate intelligence from sorrow and grief.  "It's okay to feel sad," Anderson says that her teacher told her, "but you should not be sad."  The bardo-plane seems to operate as a recollection of life that may make us feel sad, but that is not intrinsically sad -- it isn't being sad, because it's part of a process of awakening.  The film's chill gathers around scenes of the young Laurie Anderson ice-skating in Glen Ellyn near Chicago where she was raised.  The cold in the air also relates to the frigidity in Anderson's mother -- a central confession made in the film is that Anderson never really loved her mother.  And the lack of affection seems to have been mutual as well as decisive in Anderson's art -- we hear the cold and impassive voice of the remote mother in Anderson's utterly objective and dispassionate phrasing, the remote lucidity of her aphorisms, the exact, logical clarity of the things that she says.   I remarked the some parts of the film are overly explicit, too explanatory, for my taste.  At one point, Anderson describes the work of her friend Gordon Matta-Clark in which the artist sawed through and divided houses into two parts -- "no one mentions that his parents were divorced," she says, "and he came from a 'broken home'."  This draws a very clear line between Matta-Clark's artwork, an oeuvre that is quite complex and that has inspired much learned criticism, and his personal life -- a connection that, I think, the artist might disavow.  Another overly explicit moment in the film is when Anderson's rat terrier is beset by a hawk and realizes suddenly that instead of being the predator, she might be the prey.  "From that time, Lollabelle had a different relationship to the sky," Anderson says, "she was always looking up to see if death would come for her from above."  This is a nice moment, but Anderson, then, takes it to the next step, explicating her remarks as specifically applying to the people who lived in her neighborhood in downtown New York. 

The film is not as grim as I have made it sound.  Enlivening the picture is Anderson's affectionate portrait of her pet.  Anderson clearly regards Lollabelle as a wholly sentient being and there are some traces of humor in her attempts to teach the dog how to speak English.  Later, we see that when the dog went blind, Anderson taught the terrier to paint -- she shows some of Lollabelle's works in the film.  She also had a music teacher instruct the dog in how to play piano and, from time to time, we see the frail, blind-eyed dog tapping with her paws on a keyboard and, periodically, yapping at the camera.   Anderson's sensibility, which some might find bewilderingly remote, seems to draw no distinction between the death of a human being and Lollabelle's death -- possibly, this viewpoint arises from Anderson's sense that all beings are invested in one another by the laws of karmic destiny, and that death is really just a process that leads to another incarnation.  Lollabelle was a human in previous life, perhaps, and will be human in the future as well.  (I wonder if Anderson is not also suggesting that her icy mother will be reincarnated as an animal -- is this what is suggested by her dying mothers greeting to the unseen animals?)

Before watching the film, I looked at a music-video of Laurie Anderson's "O Superman", her big hit in the UK (it charted at number 2).  The work is seminal in its use of electronics and vocoder.  Anderson chants:  "If love fails, there is justice / If justice fails, there is force / If force fails, there is mom."  When she was a little girl, Anderson took a short cut home across a frozen lake.  She was pushing two of her baby brothers in a perambulator.  (She had seven siblings).  The ice broke and the babies plunged into the icy lake.  Anderson dived into the water and saved both of them.  Then, she ran home, one of the babies under both arms.  At home, her mother said to her:  "Why Laurie, I didn't know you could swim so well.  And I certainly didn't know you could dive."