The Transhumane Culture Samples of Upstream Color
Only IMAGES can tell The Story of Film. Children roll their wrists in synchrony. The worm turns in the filter. Worm juice sluices through a sieve. Hands clap together. As at Panda Express, the thief’s agglutinative entry point is a free sample. Wearied as a gender collectively challenged by Piotrekionists “sprung from the soil of unbounded self-love[1]” you’re ran UPSTREAM; independently, I run from something INLAND. We only collide in our emissionary primes.
A thief needs into your body before taking your mind. That’s why Smoke Gets In Your Eyes is crooned in Another Time, Another Place by the eternal Ferry man. Wholes in your soaks are only the preamble to UPSTREAM COLOR in The New York Times
While the plot elements are not hard to glean, many of them boggle the mind. A young woman named Kris (Amy Seimetz) ingests a hypnotic drug that leaves a gap in her memory and a worm in her body, which is extracted in a surgical procedure that involves transferring the parasite to a pig. She becomes involved with Jeff (Mr. Carruth), who may have undergone a similar trauma. Odd as it is, their plight — as the film suggests with repeated cutaways to orchid harvesters and pig pens, not to mention ample quotations from Thoreau’s “Walden” — exists within a larger cycle of nature. More than any of these curious details, the most provocative aspect of “Upstream Color” is the way it unfolds, as a skein of associations and in a barrage of fragmentary images and clipped conversations. Increasingly prone to slippage and ellipsis the film builds to a wordless finale in which, as Mr. Carruth put it, “everything deteriorates into the ether.”
A flat affects tells you all the Turkey Suppers have been poisoned. Something inside you is changed. You are walled-in reading Walden while an extropian explains how your mother’s been TAKEN, explains that they are hurting her. Maternal abduction as medical model extortion will equalize the daughter layer with the reference standard for the obstestructive FREQUENCY. Apophantical “as” it can feel to euphuize, “that which has been disavowed will often form the basis for spectral hauntologies[1]”
Hence Kris can no longer dasein computer-generated-imagery of A TOPIARY. Sein Kris post-parasitical, -paradisical, and -asphyxiational means selling sign-store signage for Orono and Luxbridge and Leskar. “It introduces a lifecycle into which its characters are conscripted, but also a cycle of liberation from capital. It begins with one’s infection—children who become influenced by whatever compound the worm absorbs—and lack of certainty surrounding the parasite itself. What follows is a profound experience of alienation.[2]”
Aliens at this gate-stage, the Libet delay #Accelerates our antennae too late in the day to notice the thief dumping rotten links to the past in a Dempster “all those unfulfilled but possi-ble futures to which we still like to cling in phantasy, all those strivings of the ego which adverse external circumstances have crushed, and all our suppressed acts of volition which nourish in us the illusion of Free Will[3]” all our value extracted and replaced with a hive-fructose solution equal parts addictive and dissatisfying to bee.
In Toward a Continuous Field: Folded Subjectivities and Control in the Affective Networks of Upstream Colour, Kyle Miner adapts and paraphrases Wark,
The Sampler has managed to exercise his own form of information control over and within this system. To adapt and paraphrase Wark, we could say that the organism has installed topology in the world, since it has made all of its subjects instantly accessible and exchangeable through the organism-as-code and The Sampler has harnessed this world through topology. In this he enacts the relationship of corporation-to-individual in a network society predicated not just on constant affective flows but also on persistent commodification and appropriation of one's personal data.
The nature of sampling is to take from everyone. To mix indiscriminately some sense of being a gay fled with the 1s and 0s bled out on the day bed. To leave people doubled over disorientated between what Origen’stated “The power of choosing good and evil is within the reach of all,” and the prognosticon of Mr. Freud with his axe, “after the fall of their religion the gods took on daemonic shapes.[1]”
And so hung up on a Shaply python package geometricizing bikini bottoms and SHapley Additive exPlanations as a A Unified Approach to Interpreting bikini top-down Model Predictions, we marketplace men can merely say, I’m sorry.
And the game-theoretic female reprisal must be, I think you’re using that wrong. Because once the litter is drowned in the lake, bee it a pig’s litter, bee it a bunny’s litter, they remain missing wherever you look. And despite passing the First Response test, you’re told at the hospital, You’re not pregnant, and if by some miracle you became pregnant, The faculties are too damaged to carry a baby to term. Leaving me nothing but the low-empathy VINCENT Price-paying, “I think you’re losing that wrong,” when what really a kindred spirit should say is, I’m married to you right now. I’m marrying you, so that soon after wedding bands Camby worn through the unites and stays on the neo-nodal weird, so that we’ll feel, as if everything has happened. So that it Weil feel “that it is happening again right now, too[2]” as we remember who we’ve been from a future feeding Bach-for-Babies into Kosselleck’s Futures Past, transforming what’s preset in a neo-natal wardened moment of vision that permits us to encounter for the first time what can be ‘in a time.’
What else if he forms a causal connection with an organ-damaged other who’s projected the future and knows it’s only a BRIEF ENCOUNTER that can’t convince MacLeod he isn’t some dirty old Myrtle Bagot. I feign a pronoumenal we while I’m the worst perpendicular of The They. What else to #include in a for loop if one player in the game recognizes all her random starburst of sorrow as the suffering of drowned piglets on some working farm, while the other attributes his star cursed of morrow with relation EL TOPO graphics set forth by a consoomer catalog? What if one player haveth childers everywhere while the other only shares the feeling of a child’s loss to the futurity of having been? Isn’t a zero-sum game when it becomes impossible to idendifine the individuone, when the teamwork can’t be distinguished from the dreamwork, when there’s no stolid ground for an erst solid maniac to stand let alone slander uncertainly upon, but only more and mere specular emergenc(i)es into ever-slightly different people, merging, sorting, and due Lee Marshalled into “the shared intuition that they inherit from the parasite” where “[t]hey communicate without words,” where “Jeff senses Kris’s location,” where “Kris guesses Jeff’s past,” where both or neither, brother or sister, non-diegetically know that, I’ve told you a story, and then you’ve taken it and made it your own.
“These moments are unnerving,” writes Marshall, “because the parasite’s neurological influence is responsible for their psychic storytelling. They are also sweet because being in love means sometimes sharing the same memory.”
[E]ach can situate the experiences in his or her own childhood, with referents to specific family members, geographies, and personal histories. The overlap is never resolved narratively—the memories effectively continue to belong to both characters equally, and this breach of each individual's inaccessible interior indicates a different type of folding in which the subjects do not come into being in response or relation to alterity—but rather by subsuming alterity and folding it into their own experience.[1]
One day we’re fighting over the mud puddle, the next I find my self extracting nematodes to forge a higher fidelity connection to the other, which is you who knew me as nothing more than the extracted nematodes and expected utility of the Conway, this Game of Life, this strategic dominance principle.
Addictive relationships involve sharing memory beneath the outermost onion skein of The Scrawled Heel of the Real. Shane Carruth, forced to fold after self-exposing his negative, resorted to THE STRANGLER things seen in percepto. This STALKER’s “most sincere wish born of suffering” was Tweeted in restrained ardour as the integrated other remained in his hear but was bilocally and integerally else where for a premiere.
After that revelation, the search for images diegetically aligned with noise and sound clues fails every single desevered, aching, Ada Lovelace days. And so one of us becomes fixated upon THE SHAPE OF WATER’s sempipreservative and serpeternal properties. The other sees underwater civilization as an ingressive egress pained. Both of us hope to see something in the starlings.
Are those starlings?
They might be starlings.
it is easy to see that here, too, it is only this factor of involuntary repetition which surrounds with an uncanny atmosphere what would otherwise be innocent enough, and forces upon us the idea of something fateful and unescapable where otherwise we should have spoken of “chance” only[2].
What’s omitted, then
is repeated several times as the scene is replayed in overlapping fragments of varying lengths, shot from different camera angles, and with the editing alternating between Kris and Jeff and the flock of maybe-probably-starlings. For a film about characters who co-experience space, emotions, memories, and often sensory data, this is a clever metaphor presented in a quiet and mundane moment.[3]
I filled my days rewinding these quiet and mundane moments. Seeking the sensory data. Your highly sensitive personality disorder shrieks upon even my most anticipated ARRIVAL. I asked myself if maybe the starlings really were murmuratin’ and scourgin’ as Miner as they were yours:
Flocks of starlings fly in elaborate, fluid formations due in part to a perceptual phenomenon resulting in quick and coordinated movements that would seem to require advanced choreography. This illusion of individual creatures connected via hive mind is especially fitting for Carruth's film, which sees its characters unified across a multi-subject experiential network.
Only you can tell the world what film tries to mobilize our affect toward, how Dark as a Dungeon a posthuman and postcinematic affect can be, how to pity the Miner digging my bones,
[P]ost-cinematic affect as an aesthetic and formal quality […] in […] Carruth's editing evokes conjoined and overlapping subjectivities via simultaneous experience across space, the “correspondences and connections” between various visual and aural elements of each scene “form[ing] something like an affective constellation.[4]”
Standing naked as The Collector before the Head of Family Justice like every leafless tree in A Lover’s Discourse, I’m no longer saying “turn back, look at me, see what you have made of me” but hoping posthuman Krokers making their Exit to the Posthuman Future will leave the collected be. Here in lies the crib-side appeal of brain-computer interface: your mind can be mapped; extant memories sought out; the base thoughts filtered through rose-patterned lace.
WHAT LIES BENEATH the Service Terms, however, are causea efficient thieves installing firewalls around your consciousness to protect an array of parasitic elements. The new old saw gnaws that if mere ice water tastes ‘too good to be true/the product is you,’ coasting the future’s blight on the post, backpropagating professorial defects of ratiocination, the Curtisian self-century of desacralization, indemnification, excommunication, oneiric transfiguration into THE SPY WITHIN, autocorrelation, codetermination, intrapopulation, an overspeculation upon precancellation, dubious Frenchification, senescent syllabification, IFLScience demystification, casualization of Faraday THREADS in the post-irradiation eradication anticipated by Sears, decausalization leering to destabilization, and then Against the Day, after a necessary period of collective desexualization, a miss the glare of all that could come due, angelicization, glaring Bright Eye’d into the ecstastic temporality of girlhood and BOYHOOD in anticipatory resoluteness of “nothing in the past or future” that “ever could feel like today.
*An excerpt from my theory-fiction ‘novel’ in progress. The implications of time travel having pierced the temporal veil comprise The Introductions a doomsday cult presents at their PRISONER’S CINEMA Film Festival.*
[1] Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny
[2] Lee Marshall, Upstream Color: Nature, Love, Survival
[3] Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny
[4] Lee Marshall, Upstream Color: Nature, Love, Survival
[5] Miner
[6] Freud, The Uncanny
[7] ??
[8] Miner
[9] Freud, The Uncanny
[10] Arthur Kroker, Exits to the Posthuman Future
[11] Matt Applegate, Imagining the End of Late Capitalism in Shane Carruth’s Primer and Upstream Color.
[12] Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny
Image by Andrew Brenza