Week 8 made me realise how much I need two classes a week to keep me and my writing active and progressive. Monday’s class felt really good; the practical, time-limited writing activity held by Alex Heller-Nicholas helped push me out of my anxious, I-hope-nobody-reads-this stage and forced me to get something down. Oddly enough I felt OK about what I wrote and managed to find an angle with which to tackle the short that lent itself well to my writing style. Cool cool cool. Attached.
“In a marriage of the high concept and the colloquial, Lucas Testro crafts a comedy caper around the possibilities and inherent problems of time travel with I’m You, Dickhead. Signposting the film’s ridiculousness in the opening fade, the quotes of French philosopher Blaise Pascal (“Man’s greatness lies in the power of thought”) and American actor Jeff Goldblum (“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should”) sit frame by frame, a clear-cut warning of the farcical nature of the premise: “a man jumps back in time to force his 10-year-old self to learn guitar so that he can get more ladies in the present day”. The paradoxes of time travel and the spacetime continuum and all the brain-scratching conundrums that come with them are not simulated for clarity or some existential mapping out of science, but played (and replayed) for laughs. Where this film finds its quality is in the casual, Australian-ness of its humour, as if concocted in the playground by a bunch of blokes who once heard about black holes from their stoner mate, or watched Back to the Future while a little tipsy and wondered what would happen if Marty really had followed it through with his mother — “This isn’t about music, Richard. It’s about tits”, one of the time-travelling versions of Richard tells his younger self. Small things like the hilarity of thin moustaches and the comical image of egg chairs are just few of the things wrung for humour: while travelling back to the 80s, we are treated to a montage of the fads of the time; rubiks cubes and fairy bread are treated as if they are icons of worship; Transformers’ names are butchered; and the ability to give the kid who stole your crush the finger as an older, more cynical version of yourself is cherished. When Richard appears as a bushier-moustached version of himself and gives the BttF reference a good shot, we understand where the absurdity of it all—the male desire for sex, even if it destroys the spacetime continuum—will eventuate as it reaches its climax. The predictability here doesn’t matter: the film is more focused on filling in the cracks between the big spacetime puzzle with as many laughs as possible. Bodyguards trusted with removing the copy of yourself left in the travelled-to timeline are deadpan heroes, and with a conversation in the time-travel waiting room bookending the film and documenting how futile the jumps back in time become, the film delivers its kicker: man will jump back in time to fix anything.”
Not having a Wednesday class left me in a slump and I felt like everything I wrote this week just went around in circles. David Lynch’s Absurda was interesting though. Good to have him back in my weekly schedule.
