Carruth: Upstream Color (2013)

Some ten years in the making, Shane Carruth’s second feature is as elliptical, elusive and fascinating as his first. In essence, it’s about a parasitic micro-organism that migrates from humans to pigs to orchids over the course of its life-cycle, infecting – or perhaps blessing – its hosts with the ability to commune and commingle in the same consciousness. At one level, there’s a clear human narrative here, revolving around a man (Carruth) and woman (Amy Seimetz) who find themselves falling in love after they’ve both been infected. However, Carruth makes sure that the human stage of the parasite’s life cycle isn’t especially prioritised – as with Soderbergh’s Contagion, this is epidemiology from the parasite’s perspective, collapsing human, animal and even plant consciousness in quite wild and disorienting ways.  Nearly all the shots feel disconnected, or discontinuous, but only because they also feel like versions of the same shot, or the same mind, as if the whole film’s happening at once, or apprehending us at once. To watch it is to participate in the condition it describes, and yet a condition of the condition is that once you have it, you can’t articulate it, or anything outside it; the more discontinuous the film becomes, the more it captures the deeper, counter-intuitive continuity of all living things, everything in the parasite’s purview. In the same way, Carruth’s total auteurism – he did pretty much everything – feels less about securing continuity for the film than embracing his own inner discontinuity, his multiple existences as director, actor, writer, producer, designer and composer, none of which can form a meaningful whole without incorporating the entire ecological universe that surrounds and sustains them. In other words, to truly apprehend ecology, we have to become infected by a new synthetic, synaesthetic perception - the parasite breeder is a field recorder and Foley specialist - as if only the most radically distributed consciousness could fulfil the true romance of Walden, which plays a critical role in the parasite’s transmission. And in infecting us, it's probably the most ambitious cinematic natural history since The Tree of Life - except where Malick contemplates creation, Carruth infects himself with it, melting celluloid into cellulose until the grain of the film becomes positively granular, almost too ambient to immerse us in any fixed or stable way, invoking our fantasies of nature only to disperse and diffuse them.