FLICK HARRISON

 

DM Fraser, author of the original 1974 short story, Marie Tyrell

 

 

John LeKay:  When did you first come across the short story about Marie Tyrell by D.M. Fraser and what were your first impressions after reading this work?

Flick Harrison: I came across the story at a street-side book sale on Commercial Drive in Vancouver. The seller spun me a story that the writer had committed suicide, which made the whole thing sound romantic. I found out later that he actually died of "total metabolic collapse," i.e. he chain-smoked unfiltered cigarettes, drank constantly, and hardly ate.

I was most struck by the multiple voices, building a puzzle piece by piece, different, conflicting perspectives on one character. The doctor's report that makes her look crazy - a deliberate political smear - was most compelling. I'd often thought about psychiatry as a political tool, the idea that a certain political perspective is declared "mainstream" and if you stray too far, you're no longer a radical but actually insane.  In dictatorships it's done on purpose, the parameters are set out with very specific objectives in mind. But we all do it in our heads.

Each of us has that mainstream benchmark, for some it's far left, others it's far right. But we all consider those too far from our perspective to be deranged in one way or another.

I also liked the vagueness of her crimes, the unclear picture of her political stance. It made the story harder to pin down, harder to dispute on pragmatic grounds, and more about the status and mind of the dissident. There's a section in the interrogation mode, where Stephen Osborne (friend of the writer) talks about dissidence, and DM Fraser's understanding of socio-political isolation in 1974. It's a painful place to be, and it was educational to hear this voice across the generations, who felt a lot like me - confused but committed, creatively liberated but trapped in a certain self-aggrandizing impotence or self-destructive omniscience.

Marie and Gerard are two sides of a coin: one a kamikaze, the other a cynic. Neither strategy seems very hopeful by story's end.

And finally, the repression / rebellion consumes everything, and includes Marie's relationship to herself. The body and self are both iron-clad prisons (best illustrated by the dream, i.e. the life of the mind, which is the ultimate locus of self, yet which still tortures Marie; and her suicidal decision to face the death penalty, perhaps to escape earthly constraints).

That was a terrifying subtext of the story, that turns the whole "noble rebel" into a crazy mindfuck. How do you revolt against your own being? What would be left of you after the revolution?
 

JL:  The opening scene of the film with the man crying and being comforted and embracing Marie Tyrell, reminds me a bit of  A Midnight Express by Alan Parker. It may be the synthesizer music, the tension, fear and the adrenaline filled environment, also the loud banging on the door by the cops. When you work on something like this scene, do you generally have the music in mind. Or do you work on the music at a later point.

FH:  Thanks. Well, I knew Craig (Huxtable, of Landscape Body Machine) and his music - he shares a certain paranoid sensibility, and likes intense moods in his music. I knew he was going to do the soundtrack before we started - he did, for instance, the music for Freeworld which was my first, student 16mm drama. (about the USA conquering Canada):

http://www.flickharrison.com/freeworld.htm

I was going to get him to compose original music for Marie Tyrell but then I  listened to his newest album, and just decided to splice the tracks into the film. Then I re-cut the film slightly to let the tracks do some of the pacing. He did do all the sound design, so I still put him to work!

 

Sometimes the music comes out of the blue, e.g. in the diary section, LBM had a remix of one song that was light and airy, and it just happened to be perfect for that bit; it gives the film an unexpected burst of cheery pathos. His music makes that scene work. It could come across as heavy and depressing, a doomed child's growing fears. Instead it's a little silly and cute, a teenage girl spilling her forming thoughts. People chuckle at that bit, and thank god for that because otherwise the film might be entirely dark.

The tension remains in the dialogue, but the music elevates it above didacticism, lends hope to her character, which of course makes the hopelessness of the other scenes all the more effective.

(In a teacher's guide I once read, instructors were warned that too much Canadian Literature (canlit) can cause anxiety and depression).

And just to go on a bit, I've never seen M.E., but I have seen Parker's The Wall something like a million times. Nowadays I'm working on some music  videos...

 http://www.dandiwind.com/video/unoose.htm

http://zeroforconduct.blogspot.com/2006/04/radio-music-video.html

And have started thinking about music even before the script for my next  narrative project.

 

Susan Box as Marie Tyrell

 

JL:  You really captured a kind of bleak 70s social-political activism concerning anti nukes and other things and brought it into the present  with the Iraqi anti-war demonstrations mingled with the actors. Where was this demonstration held and what were the demonstrations about in Fraser's book?

FH: That was the F15 (feb 15th, 2003) demo  in Vancouver before the invasion of Iraq. It was the largest worldwide protest in history. Chomsky points out that until the Vietnam war got into full swing, such giant protests were unheard of, let alone before the US even went into action.

There are a couple of interactive probes on MT about / during that scene. Some people were perturbed at our use of a protest for backdrop, including a reviewer in Geist Magazine that called it "disturbing." Infiltrative mise-en-scene was over that writer's head, I guess. Geist had multiple reviewers review it, which was interesting, but they mostly lamented the transformation from text to video, seeing as they're all texties.

Fraser, again, was oblique about specific issues - there are mentions of Marxist theory, and the military-industrial complex. I don't think he would have had to drop too many hints at the time: the movement, in many ways, was one big issue: Vietnam. Colonialism. Labour. Race. Capitalism. Feminism. There were wings within wings, factions vs. factions, but we know what it was generally about.

(As Stephen Osborne says in the interactive doc segments, Fraser and he were disappointed with organized activism because there wasn't enough beer and even less humour).

I think it's similar now with the anti-globalization movement, a big tent with lots of ideas, not all of them compatible. To mention activism and struggle brings all this to mind as an amorphous cloud. In a poetic film, you don't have to tie yourself to a narrow shibboleth that the audience can agree or disagree with. The signs and songs in the demo are a collage of causes.

My work tends to fall by the wayside of activist film circuits; they like propaganda to raise awareness and funds around their causes. I make that stuff sometimes, because I believe in it, but art, of course, isn't always that clear. Sartre's idea of commitment comes into play once in a while --I'm committed to left-wing causes for the most part -- but within that broad spectrum, there's a lot of complexity and confusion.

I like to think of my body of work as a propaganda of confusion; I am definitely trying to manipulate the audience politically, weaken their resistance and insert my own ideas. I sometimes inject clear political statements and other times I express political paralysis. In that, I'm like Fraser.
 

 

Susan Box as Marie Tyrell

 

JL:   The scene in which she is in the cell over-turning the bed as the psychological profile is displayed in the screen is really disturbing. It's as if the state brainwashing has begun. Do you think that most people are basically indoctrinated and brainwashed by society, commercialism, tv, radio education, parents, religion?

FH: Well, I see this as brainwashing us, not her. The doctor's report is for public consumption, she's going to be dead. I was happy with that scene, I got Susan to talk for a long time, sing, do crazy things, tear her clothes. That's Susan Box, the actress - she's really good. Her band July 4th Toilet is on the DVD, they're mental.

 http://www.myspace.com/julyfourthtoilet

The doctor's voice is my dad, he's actually a doctor. Decades ago I once heard him doing dictation and I knew that was the right voice.  Freudians are free to interpret.

As far as brainwashing, yeah, repetitive TV commercials, and now with the internet, the interactivity is more engaging, we have to act on the info in the ads by clicking, it's like training a hamster to press the button for treats.

That's why I think interactivity is just one more kind of Spectacle.

It's hard to say what's indoctrinating us right now, really. There are definitely competing tendencies. For instance, you have the Christian, conservative puritan types who want us to banish sexuality, keep women in the home, etc. But then you have the corporate rapists who want us to demean ourselves in every perverted way possible, as long as the cash keeps flowing (Suicide Girls, for instance, is a very different type of conservatism from Billy Graham). Keep in mind I'm using "demean" and "perverted" as technical terms, not moral ones. You have conservatives calling the mainstream liberal because it's full of sex and violence, while leftists call it conservative because it's all consumerism, sexism and racism.

You can't forget that North America has a culture at least as varied as Europe. You have African-Americans, Haitian communities in Montreal, Newfoundlanders, Texans, Mexican-Americans and all kinds of Latin Americans, French-Canadians, Ottawa Valleybillies, etc. The mass culture is like a giant cement mixer trying to pour mediocrity and same-ness over all that. Just convincing Americans - and by collateral damage, Canadians -- that they are all one culture is a monumental brainwashing job.

That's more basic and pervasive than any specific political brainwashing, but there's certainly plenty of that.

Sleep deprivation; ritual chanting; collective, mindless, repetitive activities - sounds like a week spent working and watching TV.
 

JL: Where did you film the homeless city made up of tents and cardboard boxes?

FH: That was Woodsquat. A homeless tent city that sprung up around the Woodwards building in Vancouver.

It's a historic department store that's been empty for years.  Of course, the city - the "Non-Partisan Association" (a conservative city political party) - and the development crowd all want to turn it into high-cost condos, expensive shops and / or a Walmart. The residents and anti-poverty activists wanted to make low-cost housing for the downtown eastside, one of the poorest areas in North America. Walking around there it's like a fucking war zone; open heroin use and selling, the people are really obviously fucked up, poor, addicted, physical wrecks. Shootings in the streets, painful alcoholics. Mental illness and crime. It's terrible to see. It's a pretty clear picture of the very bottom of Canada's failed aboriginal policy, though red folks by no means make up the whole community.

The homeless groups took over the building, they got forced out once by the riot squad but they made it back in later, set up tents and had a homeless camp that, along with other actions, managed to oust the NPA and insert COPE (the Coalition of Progressive Electors) into City Hall.  The F15 protest, in fact, took place the day after the election - you can see Larry Campbell, the new mayor, in the dramatic footage and in one of the interrogations, talking about heroin and Afghanistan.

Unfortunately, the coalition went to shit, COPE split in half and our Great White Hope, Larry Campbell, took an appointment in the federal Senate instead of running again. Our Senate is like the UK House of Lords, a cushy gravy-train for politicians who are past their expiry date.

So the NPA is back in charge now, four years later.

Lots more info about Woodsquat at:  http://www.woodsquat.net

 

Susan Box as Marie Tyrell

JL: When she makes the cartoon of the broken heart, the image of Hitler wearing a wig. Then the words FUCK  looks like it's at a place where she is really losing it; detaching from herself.  Like the way you made her face leave her head.

When you talk about her escape from her libido, from society, from religion, from life and create a myth (like a suicide bomber); do you think that some people create tyrannies in their own mind. Martyrdom complexes. In other words, could she have been a little off her rocker from the start?

FH: It's hard to say.

There's definitely a socially-composed definition of insanity. I don't think every idea that the collective creates is fascist; far from it. But societies, as I said earlier, have their margins and if you step over them, you're no longer acceptable.

The difference between someone who becomes a suicide bomber because they're crazy and someone who becomes a suicide bomber because of the terrible tragedies inflicted on their family, friends, and community is effectively moot.  The same can be said of the rebel.

In the film industry, if I talk about making films without stars, or not for profit, or for anti-corporate purposes, well, you get the looks that say," Get this guy away from me, he's a little off his rocker." But then, in the activist scene, if I tell them about my Hollywood-type day job (I shoot auditions at Lion's Gate Studios), they look at me like I'm some kind of evil infiltrator.

So split-personality disorder is kind of written on you from the outside, just because you don't fit in anywhere. That's on top of the specifics of your internalized perceptions of your actual differences from either community.

And of course, it's quite possible that if people treat you like you're crazy long enough, you end up actually going crazy. (Crazy being a very context-dependent thing). Again, Osborne talks about the dangers of isolation and resistance in one of his interrogations.
 
JL: . How did you do the psychedelic parts: spirals, Stalin, flags, hammer and sickles?

FH: A technical question at last!

That was a nice mix of styles. I used iconography from all over the place, old stuff I'd shot that I hadn't found a use for, found footage, etc. It was all mixed simply in Final Cut Pro.

The spirals were photoshop and FCP. The really fluid spirally stuff was video feedback. You can tell, if you look closely, that the word "index" comes from the old VHS camera's on-screen display and spirals out in the feedback loop. I'm a big fan of analog effects, especially in my music videos. I love showing kids how to do video feedback.

I almost abandoned the dream, because it was too rich for me, I couldn't figure out how to shoot it and do it justice. Then one day I started messing around with pure, ideological montage, no attempt to literally depict what she was thinking, and it came together nicely. The dream in the story is twice as long; it's a substantial chunk of the text - like a third, almost in stream-of-consciousness - and it turns the whole thing on its head; really feeds meaning into the brief life-snippets we get elsewhere.

Craig made the thing really extra trip out with the audio.  You have to hear it to understand.  I think the whole soundtrack also works as an audio-art piece.

JL:. What else are you working on?

FH: Writing a science-fiction novel called "Home is in the Hard Drive" about a student who is caught up in a revolution, gets captured by Empire, and wakes decades later in a cyber re-education camp. Humanity has been replaced by brains in jars who spend their time at psycho-sexual war games. He has to escape and find out what's happened to his friends. A lot of Bakunin, Hardt'n'Negri, Wikitopianism, Parecon, etc.
               
Had a first meeting today to start video design on a play, with Western Theatre Conspiracy, called Diplomacy. It's sort of obliquely about Lester B Pearson's famous encounter with Lyndon Johnson, when your Prez grabbed our Prime Minister by the collar and shook him vigorously. It was after LBP made a speech suggesting a stop to the bombing of Vietnam, not really peacenik stuff but more diplomatic than the "Nuke Hanoi" line.

Their site is at http://www.conspiracy.ca

Doing a lot of music video work, so far for Dandi Wind and The R.a.d.i.o.

http://www.dandiwind.com/video/unoose.htm

http://www.myspace.com/theradiowaves

Lots of other little things floating around too; getting into acting as a way to improve my directing, make some cash and just have fun.
 

www.flickharrison.com