(It’s a #WhatThomWatched milestone: 10! plus 5 Glances...)
Living in Oblivion
(Tom DiCillo, 1995; Sony Picture Classics disc)
Writer/director DiCillo won a well-deserved screenwriting award at Sundance with a knowing insider script that sought to satirize the pretensions and travails of its contemporary independent film movement. It contains three distinct sections structured around dreams; the first is a frazzled director’s anxiety dream about trying to complete a scene in his film; the second is his star actress’s dream about filming a different scene; and the third is a real-life attempt to shoot yet another scene — of course, a dream sequence. As each segment develops it presents additional obstacles to the filmmakers: the usual host of technical glitches with sound, cameras, lights, or blocking; low-budget problems like a poorly run craft services table or a lack of qualified personnel to run a smoke machine; the varying level of commitment of the actors between multiple takes; a preening actor who wants to educate the director; or a half-baked scene that the director has trouble helping his actors realize.
Does the movie satirize “indie films” inherently, through its form (beyond its clearly satirical plot points and characterizations)? The obvious first example (and the reason this question surfaces to begin with): The film begins in an inky, grain-filled black-and-white, as if it’s laboring under a microbudget (and looking like a murky version of the Jim Jarmusch movies on which DiCillo got his start as a cinematographer, such as Stranger in Paradise). Even after the reveal that the movie proper will be in color, it continues to use black-and-white in a playful way: the first segment’s film-within-a-film is in color; the second segment is color while its film-within-a-film is (pretentiously) black-and-white, and in the final “real” segment the colors of the dream-sequence set are highly saturated. The second clear example is Oblivion’s use of the extended dream sequences, eventually mocking the overuse of such sequences in “stupid” (read: indie) movies to try and bring an edge or an unearned sense of mystery and meaning to an ultimately ridiculous set of events and images; Peter Dinklage’s famous rant about the use of dwarfs to indicate “weirdness” can easily be extrapolated to indict these kinds of movies in general.
Finally, DiCillo uses well-established indie actors and has them play to type, evoking other then-contemporary movies and roles; Steve Buscemi (as the director) freaks out and goes on a hilariously profane rant, James Le Gros (as the lead actor) is an ultimately vacant pretty-boy, Dermont Mulroney (as the cinematographer) is brooding and self-serious, and so on. Yet these typed scenes more often than not turn out to be in the other character’s dreams, and the actual performances are subtle upon reflection. The movie depicts the pressures of low-budget indie filmmaking as a nightmare out of Kafka, and yet in the end the efforts of a set of artists result in a single sublime finished scene, better than anyone could have planned, and a feeling of satisfaction after a day’s work and promise for the next. Even that wide-eyed excitement itself might be intended as a bit of self-parody — after living through unrealized dreams and another hard day of disappointments and compromises, the cast and crew gets just enough of an uplift to drag them on to the next day of work. The closing “thirty seconds of silence” to “record room ambience” seems, at first, like a gimmick or a forced conceit (reminding us to consider each character’s point of view). Yet when the time ends and no issues have popped up to spoil the recording, and everyone seems genuinely gratified, it feels moving and meaningful.
Reminds me of:
Any number of other movies feature a film-within-the-film and behind-the-camera footage documenting multiple takes of the same scene, such as Boogie Nights or The Stunt Man . . . . but here, the repeated takes of that two-actor conversation in the first segment strongly recall the great Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (directed by William Greaves). In that head-bending mind-game from 1968, Greaves plays a director of a fictitious movie who is shooting some test footage in Central Park, and we see two actors rehearsing the same scene over and over again, with variants (not to mention conversations among crew members and other actors, just as in Oblivion).
The vain actor with no self-awareness played by Le Gros is said to be modeled on someone DiCillo had worked with in the past. He’s a vicious dead ringer for early Brad Pitt, who had starred in DiCillo’s previous film Johnny Suede. But DiCillo has gone on record denying that Le Gros’s “Chad Palimino” is parodying Pitt; he even claims that the part was supposed to be played by Pitt himself but that he was committed to Legends of the Fall instead. So as a public service experiment, I urge you to watch the second segment of Oblivion and not think of Pitt. Good luck!
But then — the guilt!
I try to be as catholic in my watching choices as I can be — pulling film and television from anywhere and any era — but I can’t escape the fact that my early days of falling in love with movies (and having the time to pursue them) were marked by that 1990’s surge of independent filmmaking. At that time, when Sundance and Slamdance sought out the new talents and New Line, Miramax, October and others fought to distribute them, Oblivion was a comment on and a tribute to the movement. There was a comfortable rhythm to these movies, reliable patterns (albeit self-styled as quirky patterns), and I and my friends sought them out at college screenings, the couple of arty theaters still in town, or the back corner of the last non-Blockbuster video store. It took a few years to admit it to ourselves, but a healthy percentage of these movies were dreadful. For every Quentin Tarantino there were ten Tarantino-esque imitations; for every Hal Hartley or Whit Stillman or Steven Soderberg there was a rookie filmmaker with half of their insight and none of their restraint. So it’s great to revisit a movie like Living in Oblivion, but I’ll understand if it’s lost a lot of its resonance today. The masterpieces of the indie era will continue to live on, but the dregs — and along with them some of DiCillo’s targets — have mercifully washed away.
Pitch:
This was Dinklage’s first film and it’s easy to see why he became such a popular performer; he’s completely appealing and funny as hell. The sight of his Tito popping out of the “dream doorway” and trudging around Keener — while, as Buscemi directs him to, “laughing” — is hysterical.
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