Deci­pher­ing Don Hertzfeldt’s ME

America’s fore­most exper­i­men­tal ani­ma­tor, Don Hertzfeldt, has built a legion of fans for the emo­tion­al dev­as­ta­tion and dead­pan humour he loads into the dai­ly doings of sen­si­tive lit­tle stick peo­ple. Yet ME is a for­mal depar­ture, even by the avant-garde stan­dards set by his only fea­ture, It’s Such A Beau­ti­ful Day, Oscar-nom­i­nat­ed short The World of Tomor­row, Simp­sons sofa gag and vast back-cat­a­logue of macabre com­ic miniatures.

At 20 min­utes ME has the sweep of an epic and the opac­i­ty of an uncom­pro­mis­ing per­son­al trea­tise. I watched it three times and still can­not say with con­fi­dence what it’s about on a con­ven­tion­al nar­ra­tive lev­el. Instead of plot and dia­logue, there are images, themes and a pep­pi­ly inhu­mane per­cus­sive theme titled ​‘Din­ner at the Sug­ar Bush’ by Brett Lewis.

Over the course of the three watch­es, I – a Hertzfeldt devo­tee who put It’s Such A Beau­ti­ful Day on my Sight & Sound Best Films of All Time list – had cause to ask myself whether I was com­pelled to reverse-engi­neer a pos­i­tive review based on my pre­vi­ous self-iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with his work. This myopia makes me kin with the doomed lit­tle peo­ple in what can only be clas­si­fied as a despair opera. ME is full of casu­al­ly species-evis­cer­at­ing images and sequences, such as a man sit­ting on a rooftop under the stars pulling out a hand mir­ror to look at him­self instead of the infin­i­ty of space.

This lit­tle man ded­i­cates his life to invent­ing a piece of tech­nol­o­gy for which he even­tu­al­ly wins an impor­tant award. The cat­a­lyst for this all-con­sum­ing project is the birth of his first child and, ever-after, he blocks out not just his imme­di­ate fam­i­ly, but the bod­ies pil­ing up in the streets where he lives. I nev­er thought I would watch a Hert­fzfeldt film in which the man­gled bod­ies of stick peo­ple are unloaded into mass graves. ME has a polit­i­cal back­drop, one that the pro­tag­o­nist blocks out as he stays glued to his all-con­sum­ing gad­get. It doesn’t take a rock­et sci­en­tist to read the res­o­nance with our dig­i­tal­ly-con­nect­ed-yet-emo­tion­al­ly-atom­ised world and the vio­lence we sanc­tion as we cleave to our self-impor­tant goals.

This arc is the most leg­i­ble one with­in a film that also con­tains the birth of a sec­ond child that looks dif­fer­ent to the first one (for it is an eye on legs!) and a giant opera singer with blood spurt­ing from her head trudg­ing through lakes of lava. Hertzfeldt’s approach to knit­ting every­thing togeth­er is as slip­pery as an eye­ball and attempts to impose coher­ence is a fool’s game.

Instead, it is best to let ME wash over you. Dia­logue is all but stripped away, with char­ac­ters com­mu­ni­cat­ing in punc­tu­a­tion marks in speech bub­bles –“?” And “!” Their inabil­i­ty to con­nect with any­one except ver­sions of them­selves gives rise to an atmos­phere of bleak­ness and a mov­ing irra­tional strain of hope. ME feels like Hertzfeldt stack­ing all his chips on this Chekhov quote: ​“Man will become bet­ter when you show him what he is like.”

ME is avail­able to pur­chase now via Vimeo.