Beyond Interpretation

On the occasion of The Civil Dead’s theatrical release in the UK, courtesy of Beyond Interpretation and Bulldog Film Distribution, I thought it would be a good idea to put words to screen about the film, quietly one of my favorites of 2023. I first encountered The Civil Dead in early 2023 while looking for titles to program in this series. I hadn’t programmed an outright comedy before, and thought it would be fun to do so in the contexts I had originally envisioned for the series when it took the form of my grad school final project. At that time I was interested in two things: First, programming small, independent American films outside of America, with a special focus on films without UK distribution, ensuring that they would reach an audience they otherwise would not have had a chance to reach (vice versa for audiences in the UK coming to see the film); and second, exploring the role of paranoid and conspiratorial themes, feelings of anxiety and uncertainty, and expressions of disruption and precarity in these films as statements on, but certainly not limited to, artistic creation on the margins of the industry.

The Civil Dead presents probably the first natural challenge to these goals. It stands in especially sharp relief to some of the more serious films I programmed as a grad student (though I love them all, subconsciously I think this time around I was searching for films with a little more levity). Its creators, Clay Tatum and Whitmer Thomas, certainly don’t take themselves too seriously. One only needs to follow them on social media, listen to their podcast, peruse their other film and television work, or have a more than 5 minute conversation with them to know that. What, if anything, could their first feature film together have to say about the high-minded subjects Beyond Interpretation set out to confront?

As it turns out, a lot. In The Civil Dead Tatum plays Clay, a freelance photographer in a creative and professional rut. He’s in the kind of funk all too common among freelancers – apparently for Clay the guarantee of future opportunities is so uncertain that somehow a bold new haircut, comically outdated and to which his face is not suited, seems like a more promising business strategy than calling people who might be able to help him. Not even his famous acquaintances (Andy Samberg is named dropped more than once) have any work to offer him, or so Clay says. When his wife, Whitney (Whitney Weir, brilliant, grounded), who is far more understanding and forgiving of Clay’s foibles than he deserves, goes away for the weekend, she asks him to at least go out and take some photographs, just as a creative exercise. He dutifully agrees, but not before taking advantage of his alone time by drinking copious amounts of beer, moving their mattress into the living room, giving sham tours of their apartment to prospective renters to make extra cash on fake application fees, and generally vegging out.

Clay’s photography captures a generally grim view of Los Angeles, mounds of detritus littering the streets and unloved empty spaces fill his frames. It’s perhaps telling that the first real proof we see that Clay is a professional photographer, a published book titled “Trash in the River”, seemingly filled with similar images, is shown at a used bookstore where Clay exchanges books for extra cash. The brief scene of this exchange is characterized by a distinct coldness in the editing, which links Clay’s photography book, Clay’s face, and the bland, anonymous books he exchanges for money in a quick succession of isolated shots; their linkage inflicts a sense of bitter disappointment, a feeling that what he’s made is ultimately disposable and impermanent.

It makes a cruel kind of sense that Clay unexpectedly runs into an old friend, Whit (Whitmer Thomas), with whom he’s lost touch, while taking one of these seemingly disposable photos. The pair’s awkward reunion begins while Clay photographs an undignified pile of junk, specifically a dusty mattress with the words “5G KILLED MY DOG!!” emblazoned across it in red spray paint. Whit appears as might an apparition; the moment it happens and the space from which it occurs is unclear. Like Clay, we don’t notice him until he’s standing right in front of this pile of junk, blocking the shot. If John Wayne in The Searchers bursts forth from the frontier landscape as if he is the landscape itself, then there’s something to be said about Whit here, a similarly lost soul emerging out of a particular image of Los Angeles, himself a representative of Clay’s grim view of the city, and his presence in front of this abandoned garbage indicative of his own fallen state. This, of course, is no coincidence, and it is in this scene – this microcosmic encounter with and treatment of what has been forgotten, discarded, left behind – that the film’s thematic weight resides.

It turns out that Whit is a ghost, and only Clay can see, hear, or interact with him. It’s unclear just how long Whit has been dead, and the film doesn’t attempt to figure that out, but it’s been long enough that he’s not about to let go of this opportunity to feel somewhat human again. Tatum told me in a conversation we recorded for the film’s preview screening on 10 January in London, that The Civil Dead’s whole premise is based on a simple bit he thought was funny: what if you met a ghost, and instead of haunting you it just annoyed you? And it’s in this premise, and ultimately the way Tatum and Thomas go about embodying these characters – one miserably apathetic, the other desperately lonely, and both equally insecure – that the film’s comedy and tragedy arise. How do two men at odds with each other as much as they are in need of each other deal with the rapid fluctuations between these two states? And what, ultimately, will we do when faced with a choice to serve our self-interests at the expense of others?

– Chris Cassingham, Beyond Interpretation programmer

Sissy St. Claire is dying to be known — not unlike Jesus, she tells us in the opening seconds of her first-ever primetime spectacular, Give Me Pity! The two have much in common, she insists: their industry savvy, their iconic looks. Over the next 80 minutes, she’ll even mount a sort of psychic crucifixion for our attention and, hopefully, our love.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, the musical variety television special — a precursor to the music video, the same format that would ultimately murder it — reached its zenith. Key entries of the time often rested on the X-factor of a single triple-threat, especially zanier divas with an album to promote and only so much shame, from Olivia Newton-John to Diana Ross, and Cher to Ann-Margret. (These days, such projects only really appear on the impulses of idiosyncratic stars like Lady Gaga^* and Mariah Carey, and exclusively around the holidays.)

To gorge oneself on the half-century’s worth of specials available online, as director Amanda Kramer spent months doing in 2019 and 2020, is to be equal parts entertained and unsettled by the vulnerability — and sometimes debasement — at play here. Over and over, performers spend months or more self-disciplining and finding new ways to lay their creative selves bare, then present us with an hour of song and dance belying those sacrifices. We’re not here for them, anyhow.  

Making its London premiere via Beyond Interpretation is Kramer’s 2022 feature Give Me Pity!, the eventual product of her YouTube deep dive. Her film funnels a beautiful nightmare of industry rot and self-loathing through this magical, would-be comforting, inherently deranged TV tradition. Give Me Pity! was conceived in part as a bare-bones filmmaking fantasy of Kramer’s: five days, small budget, even smaller team. “I love control,” she told Filmmaker of shooting it on a contained set at Mack Sennett Studios in 2021. “I don’t understand Terrence Malick … I don’t want to know if it’s raining and I don’t want to know if it’s sunny. I don’t want to think about anything that God has anything to do with. I want to be God in that moment and say, ‘The lights go on and the lights go off.’” The film and music video director has voiced many gripes with the state of mainstream Hollywood filmmaking, from our infatuation with seeing an actor’s pores in 4k to the sheer number of bodies needed for a single day’s work, and her quote further fleshes out a laundry list of industry desperations and difficulties.

Sissy’s own road to this special has been “desperate and difficult,” she says — baggage that will reveal itself to us in pieces as her personal demons become her supporting players. Give Me Pity! begins as a mostly straight parody of the variety format, its central diva puppeted by a dynamic Sophie von Haselberg. Sissy moves through the musical numbers and bizarre conceptual vignettes expected of her, from a Donna Summer-esque sex worker sketch^** to a cover of the classic march “You’re a Grand Old Flag” by way of Giorgio Moroder. The latter is a joke on the compulsory dose of weird patriotism these specials tend to include,^*** but a particularly haunting earworm given how much of the film is visually grounded in the early Reagan years — nothing if not a showbiz second act, and one remembered largely for its bootstrap ethos of “making it” at whatever human cost to the nation.

But while things begin looking and sounding mostly as they should — the film was degraded and distorted in post-production to more closely resemble its references — both show and star verge ever-closer to unravelling. The question is who’s pulling the thread… a Phantom of the Soundstage? Our domestically anxious host? (Some viewers may be just as inclined to think mommy issues due to von Haselberg’s uncanny resemblance to her real-life mother, Bette Midler, who’s won multiple Emmys for this sort of work.)^† Underpinning Sissy’s performance is a sense of both precarity and paranoia that often looms over artists, especially the forward-facing ones and especially the women. At any moment, this could all disappear. That we’re encountering her name for the first time only heightens that idea; we’re left to guess what preceded her special (she seems to long for something of a total brand reset), the stakes involved in it going swimmingly, and what she’s possibly traded in for it (a baby?).

As she deteriorates before us, so does the picture itself. Original songs give way to an extraterrestrial synth bassline. What’s glamorous — satin you can feel through the screen, the idea of radical reinvention — stifles and even nauseates. Kramer is a filmmaker not just comfortable with risk (another of her decidedly un-Hollywood sensibilities) but indeed insistent upon it, and she forces our gaze here with an unnerving wink.

*Kramer has named 2011’s A Very Gaga Thanksgiving, specifically the “Hair” number, among her references

**See: the “Bad Girls” sequence from 1980’s The Donna Summer Special

***1988’s Olivia Down Under manages a whole hour of this

†The first for 1977’s Ol’ Red Hair Is Back, the most recent for 1997’s Diva Las Vegas

Sydney Urbanek is a Toronto-based editor and writer specializing in popular music on screen. Since 2020, she has self-published the newsletter Mononym Mythology, where she covers music video culture with a bent towards pop stars.

When I came up with the title “Beyond Interpretation” for my thesis project last year, my view of its meaning was limited. Guiding my curatorial choices in the program was an interest in paranoia and conspiracy, themes which never left the final product despite incremental changes during the months it took to put it together; an interest in unconventional narrative structure, a playfulness with form, and a sense of confusion and mystery, elements I though might resonate with audiences in a post-pandemic context. But most importantly, guiding the project was a preoccupation with how a certain kind of film – small, precariously funded, narratively unconventional, outside the system – might (or often might not) find an audience outside the circle of people closely associated with it. Watching the films in the first iteration of Beyond Interpretation with these ideas and interests in mind, which I did over and over both out of pleasure and out of a fear of (for lack of a better word) misinterpreting their key ideas and making a fool of myself in front of a discerning audience, opened my eyes to Beyond Interpretation’s other meanings.

I wrote at the time, in an article for Little While Lies, that Beyond Interpretation was not just a potential description of the films’ plots or deeper meanings – all the films played clever tricks regarding narrative structure, character development, and other conventions of traditional cinema that could, and often do, frustrate the viewer. In one sense, these films were beyond our own means of interpretation. More importantly, however, the title was a call, not so much to action, but to surrender. I saw the five films in the program as invitations to the audience to free themselves from the seeming requirements of mainstream cinema to solve a problem, to answer a question, to complete a mission. The worlds explored in films like Slow Machine, Topology of Sirens, She Dies Tomorrow, Happer’s Comet, and The Plagiarists, which I programmed back in January of this year, while a step or two to the side of the one we live in, ultimately express real truths about our own. In them, answers don’t come easily, problems are rarely solved at once, and missions are less about the goal than the journey.

Beyond Interpretation, then, is an invitation to free oneself; to seek pleasures beyond the mere intellectual satisfaction of deciphering meaning, and instead become acquainted with the primal, elemental feelings that ground us in everyday existence.

But where to go from here?

Starting at the end of October, Beyond Interpretation makes a return to London, the city it originated in. I continue to program this series in London, despite no longer living there, because I still feel it is important to help the small films I’m interested in play outside their immediate circles. The regional, independent film festivals that dot the American landscape are familiar with all the films I plan on screening. The challenge these films face is how to travel beyond those circles. As a programmer, I feel a responsibility to use the platform I’ve been given at the ICA as an avenue these films can traverse to find new audiences. My ultimate goal is to facilitate the mutual access between films and audiences, unique interactions that, due to the disadvantage these films find themselves in compared to mainstream Hollywood films, might not have otherwise occurred.

As the next iteration of Beyond Interpretation gets off the ground in the coming weeks, I look forward to sharing more about the films and the contexts in which they were made. And I hope those reading this and visiting this website, who have the ability to do so, come to as many screenings as they can.