Shane Carruth Deserves Better Than He Got; or, “It Aint Easy Civilizing this Motherfucker”

I want to talk about Shane Carruth but first I need to talk about David Lowery. Here are some statements about David Lowery:

1. He’s bald.
2. He’s the director of Pete’s Dragon, Aint Them Bodies Saints, A Ghost Story, the upcoming The Old Man and The Gun, and his first feature was something called St. Nick.
3. He came out of the Dallas independent movie scene, which is kind of unusual, and his non-feature pre-breakthrough credits are kind of standard for someone who was helping out on his friends movies however he could: some editing, some DP-ing, etc.
4. Before making ATBS (his first real movie, with like famous people and stuff), he was the editor of Upstream Color, the second feature of one Shane Carruth, who is also from Dallas, although his debut, the cult classic Primer, was made with basically no help from anyone and he was not, at the time, a member of the Dallas independent movie scene.
5. He has made two movies in the past with Casey Affleck, and does not appear to have any qualms about doing so in the future, considering he’s currently making another one, and Affleck and Rooney Mara were in super low-budget ATBS and A Ghost Story so it kind of seems like they’re friends? Although conclusions about who’s actually buddy buddy with each other just based on the people they work with all the time isn’t necessarily accurate. You can draw your own conclusions from the facts on the ground, but I think at this point it’s at least noteworthy.
6. Sometimes he has a big mustache and sometimes he has a kind of groomed all-over stubble.
7. After directing ATBS he got called up by Disney to direct their Pete’s Dragon movie which disappointed financially but had a somewhat surprising critical following.
8. He’s currently in-development with Disney on the Peter Pan live action remake, which probably makes you roll your eyes now, but I’m guessing when it comes out it will be hailed as a thoughtful meditation on childhood wonder and innocence and possibly even story-telling itself (??). Just calling my shot there.
9. I’ve only seen A Ghost Story and I thought it was pretty good, although for some reason I’ve spent a year trying to convince myself not to like it, I don’t know why. It’s inventive and ambitious and very strikingly “weird” which is always something I approve of. There’s something about the philosophical matter of the movie that just feels both navel gazing and a little shallow to me, although I like generally like the way that’s executed. There’s also this essay, which I don’t think is entirely on point but isn’t wrong, either, and is at least great fun to think about. This is just to say that I have neither the expertise nor the inclination to say that, actually, David Lowery is a hack fraud and should be exiled back to Texas, and that’s not what this is about.

Okay, let’s talk about Shane Carruth. Here’s what I think about Carruth: he’s maybe the only working director interested in accurately interpreting and reflecting the condition of life under post-modernity or late capitalism or whatever it is you want to call the state of society in which we live and his work is both “important” and incredibly affecting in the way that things called “important” usually aren’t. He became well-known when Primer, his first movie, won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2004. This is all the more exceptional when you remember that Primer, a) was made for about $7,000 dollars, and a lot of that probably went into shooting the movie on film (there’s at least one scene in the movie that’s completely fucked up because they exposed it wrong or stored it wrong or something) b) absolutely no one famous is in it, which was less of a rarity for Sundance in 2004 but is absolutely unthinkable now, and c) Primer is legendarily, beautifully, unintelligible.

Unintelligibility is the quality that comes up most often when talking about Carruth. Usually people say his movies are “confusing”– almost the same thing, but I think calling something confusing implies accident or incompetence, so I’m going to stick with unintelligible even though it’s a mouthful. Primer is famously complicated, a fact which has fueled its cult following and spawned a ton of graphical explanations and charts, absolutely none of which make the film any easier to understand. You are, of course, not supposed to understand what’s happening, because the main characters of Primer, Abe and Aaron, two garage scientists who invent a primitive form of time travel, don’t understand what’s going on either (no spoilers here, but you should really watch it).

Carruth, by his own statement, makes movies about subjective experience, in which the drama of the film comes from characters trying to understand the unexplainable and unintelligible events happening around them. Maybe the most exemplary scene in Carruth’s two-movie oeuvre is in Upstream Color (you should also watch that, I think it’s on Netflix), when the two protagonists played by Carruth and his wife, Amy Seimetz, are being psychically tortured, essentially, but someone they’ve never met in a way they don’t understand. They pace around anxiously, get in fights, look for something they think they’ve lost, and eventually are reduced to cradling each other in a bathtub, terrified and devastated for reasons they don’t understand, other than that they’re both feeling it together. Carruth’s movies, likewise, try to put the audience in a place of feeling without understanding.

And that, I think, is what makes Carruth’s a more clear-eyed and honest observer about the present in a way that no one else, other than maybe David Lynch, to whom he’s often compared, really is. Our lives are shaped by factors that are not only beyond our control, they are so completely arcane as to be indistinguishable from total chaos. The strings of the world are pulled by people we’ll never meet and have probably never heard of. National politics has descended into either complete farce or irrelevant sideshow, yet is somehow more important to our lives and emotions than ever. There is one basic phenomena central to Shane Carruth character’s, Shane Carruth audiences, and every single one of us all the time: the feeling that something very bad is happening, but we can’t understand what or how. In Primer I think the link is clearest. In theory it’s possible to map out the plot completely, every time loop, every Doppelganger, every replay, but to do so is to almost to be made completely insane and obsessive through the act of deciphering. the people making plot charts just as unintelligible as the movie itself might as well have cork boards of strings connecting the Bilderberg Group to Leonardo Da Vinci to the Freemasons.

If in a Shane Carruth movie, absolute knowledge or understanding is unattainable, the only way forward is emotion and instinct. The audience must become guided by the forces by which his characters persevere (okay here are actual spoilers). In Primer, it’s the conscious-bound Abe listening to his deteriorating body and his lingering sense of ethics to break with the mercenary Aaron and try to shut down the original machine and undo what’s already gone wrong. Aaron, meanwhile, leaves the country and is last seen constructing a massive version of their machine in a foreign country, for purposes that remain stubbornly unknowable to both the audience and Abe. And in Upstream Color it’s the couple, Kris and Jeff, following the clues of their unexplainable personal impulses to track down and kill the man who trapped them in the cycle to begin with. In a world where objectivity is impossible, an embrace of subjectivity is the only escape. It’s a perspective that could be nihilistic or hedonistic, but, as I think the end of Upstream Color demonstrates, is ultimately hopeful.

But the thing about Shane Carruth, the final layer of irony, is that he, himself, is basically doomed by the vicissitudes of the Hollywood. Carruth is famous for writing scripts that are basically un-produceable. Between Primer and Upstream Color he worked in Hollywood on a project called A Topiary. The script was an inconceivable 245 pages long and nearly every line of dialogue was chock-a-block with ellipses, uhs, ums, and all the other filler they drill out of you the first week of screenwriting class. Now he’s supposedly in development on a movie called The Modern Ocean about “trade shipping routes on the ocean.” The list of attached above-the-line talent is incredible. Keanu Reeves, Daniel Radcliffe, Anne Hathaway, Jeff Goldblum, Tom Holland, Chloe Grace Moretz, and Asa Butterfield are all attached. I do not believe this movie will ever be made. It’s been “in development” since 2013, and given Carruth’s noted idiosyncracies, the prospect seems dim. To be honest, I understand. If I was seeking a return on investment of several million dollars, I would not give it to Shane Carruth.

Because this is the entire sliding doors tragedy of Shane Carruth and David Lowery. Because despite coming from the same city at similar times and achieving similar (but slightly different) kinds of indie-filmmaking success and critical acclaim, one will go on to have a long and successful career balancing big-budget Disney remakes and star-studded indie features and the other will be trying to convince financiers to fund his unintelligible, epistemological allegories. Whether it’s true or not, I’ve come to think of Carruth as a kind of savant; he’s a director that is not only unwilling to make movies the normal, regulated, Hollywood way, with clear cause and effect, 110 page scripts, relatable protagonists, but perhaps unable to. His limitations are his art. Lowery, on the other hand, succeeds through his flexibility, making mumble-core thrillers for no money, making CGI heavy family films for a lot of money, and then back to shooting 16mm art pieces.

As the avenues of advancement and success in Hollywood become more and more monopolized and ossified, that quality of flexibility will become the only thing consistently rewarded. “One for me, one for them” will become the only way to make anything “for me” at all. And some directors will never want to, or be able to, make one for them. I think I resent Lowery somewhat for having the will and the ability to pull off what Carruth hasn’t. Something about knowing that the road to A Ghost Story only goes through Pete’s Dragon is so disheartening it taints the entire endeavor for me. I could call Lowery all sorts of things like “careerist” or “sell-out” or “upjumped journeyman” but my heart just isn’t in it. After all, I liked A Ghost Story, well enough. In a good mood, I might even find it in me to hope that his success will help some of his more un-civilized peers find their own niche. After all, he produced Alex Ross Perry’s Listen Up Philip and Dustin Guy Defa’s Person to Person (Defa’s another hard case, but I’m at 1700 words already). And hey, look at who got a credit for additional editing on A Ghost Story, who David Lowery credits with the “greatly liberating discovery” of the film’s flexible, some might even say subjective, experience of time: you guessed it, Shane Carruth.

Still from Upstream Color, 2013