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.
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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.
