Review: TORREY PINES at ArtsEmerson

Torrey Pines is the latest online installment of ArtsEmerson's Together Apart Series which brings virtual programming to viewers through ArtsEmerson's blog. The piece was part of ArtsEmerson's 2018 season, in which the animated film was accompanied live by a punk band who performed all of the nearly constant underscoring.

Beginning in darkness with the sounds of the sea, we launch into a film that directly serves as a companion to a well-constructed soundtrack. Seattle-based director and creator Clyde Petersen opens the autobiographical work with a delightfully familiar reimagining of a coming-of-age story cliche. A mother and child arguing in a car as the mother drives down the highway. The scene, and nearly the entire film, refrain from use of spoken English, substituting instead a garbled, nonsensical language as images pop out of characters' mouths. Never shying away from a bit of nostalgia, Petersen delivers a throwback to duets of 'Heart and Soul' on an electric keyboard, a clear plastic phone, and even a reminder of the finer etiquette of communicating via upside-down calculators with phrases like '07734' and '5318008'. Sweetly choppy stop-motion is executed with cut paper colored with broad brush strokes which direct us away from the aesthetic of South Park and instead into an often grotesque, emotionally-fraught riff on Eric Carle.

The color palette is warm, centering us in the California city of Petersen's youth. However, the style presents communicative limitations. Nearly the entire hour-long film features staunchly-defined iterations of three simple layers of cut paper: foreground, middleground, background. Whether we are watching a child ride a bike through a Californian suburb past peaks of a red picket fence, panning across a cut paper Grand Canyon, skimming past oil rigs in middle America, or watching the crowd at a Whitney concert, there is little visual variation to differentiate the many stops on our road trip. No matter what region we are in, the content changes, but the overall composition on our screen feels monotonous.

That said, the moments when the animation veers either closer toward presenting the vacuous space of the desert or the daedal layers of green rushes in front of two herons snapping at fish, are refreshing and memorable. Particularly, the simple animation of a sunset over a pink range of mountains is a treat which breaks up the oneness of the visual design. Ultimately, the piece feels like it leans on the excellence of its instrumental track and often leaves the visual world as a drawn-out afterthought. (Of course, this framing may be different were I able to review the piece as it was originally intended, but as a virtual piece, this is what I got.)

The narrative itself, riddled with the intense specificity only an autobiographical piece can afford, raises questions in my mind. I firstly, think of Shia LaBeouf's Honey Boy, a movie he wrote and starred in last year based on his own childhood and relationship with his father. As is explained in the screenplay, he began the project as a tool for coping with PTSD while in a rehabilitation program. I fully endorse the undertaking of such a project. However, my first impression of the movie was how poorly the dialogue seemed to be written. Director, Alma Har'el and cinematographer, Natasha Braier along with strong performances from the featured cast salvaged what, otherwise, would have been a hum-drum, un-worthwhile endeavor. The act of writing the screenplay may have had therapeutic properties, but what was gained by the major Amazon blockbuster production?

I question at what point the subject of the autobiography gets too involved in their own process to be able to relay a gripping narrative. This score is cool and I think it's cool Petersen wants to explore his story and his queerness through this medium. But the narrative itself is unremarkable-- or unremarkably conveyed at least. We stagnate a while in Torrey Pines, California before embarking on the roadtrip which is the major plot device of the film. The trip itself is straightforward. We see clear indicators as we pass through regions of the continental United States. Most of this extended sequence feels tangibly like a framing device and gives us little to latch on to, stranding us in a rut of passivity.

The Queer community, and I would argue even specifically the Trans+ community, have finally ascended to the place in our culture where cliches can exist in the narratives we share. Even if the cliches haven't seeped into the mainstream zeitgeist of Fun Home or Moonlight, an entire subversive universe of culture exists. Zines, graphic novels, Instagram accounts, scores of memes. These narratives are being shared widely. Because of this, the overtly queer character arch explored in Torrey Pines felt like a baseline examination, as well as a heavy-handed, too-literal commentary. I know I'm not alone when I say that I have my gay-dar on scanning even dated works for queer references or inadvertent innuendos. Having grown up without access to a lot of explicitly queer media ('explictLY queer', not 'explicit queer'), this is how my mind is trained. I'm not sure that I needed to see a young person who is visibly being socialized as female railing against the idea of wearing a dress in order to pick up on the queerness of this narrative. There are some more nuanced, visual representations of dysmorphia in the film, but some feel unnecessarily literal, pandering, and seem to take away from the intricacies of the piece. (To be fair, I don't need every artistic representation of dysmorphia to rival 'Ring of Keys' but I think there are some Marlo Thomas-isms we can retire at this point.)

The highlights are some of the specific images of national landmarks or natural phenomena that Petersen has austerely created. If he animates a National Geographic special, I'm all there. Memorable images of a birds-eye view of a city or of Arlington National Cemetery will stick with me. An enjoyable hour all in all, and an intensely fascinating artist whose work I will certainly explore more.

Torrey Pines can be viewed here until May 10.

Photo credit: Clyde Petersen

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