Jan 6, 2014

Watch Chris Landreth's Subconscious Password and read his exclusive film guide

This post is courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada In this animated short, Oscar-winning director Chris Landreth ("Ryan") takes a common social gaffe (forgetting someone's name) as a starting point for a journey through the unconscious world. After this, Landres offers insight into who is who in the film.

"Subconscious Password" begins when a man named Charles Langford forgets the name of a friend at a party. In the deep uncanny valley of the unconscious, he becomes a contestant on his own game show, "Subconscious Passwords," and struggles to guess the correct password (his friend's name).

The actual game show "Password" (hosted by Allen Ludden in the 1960s) featured a number of "special guest stars" who were staples of mainstream pop culture at the time: Carol Burnett, Jerry Lewis, Elizabeth Montgomery, Bob Denver, Betty White, and many others.

But in Charles Langford's subconscious mind, his guest stars are in a much stranger, dreamlike world. They are archetypes, icons, distant memories. In his confused mind, many of these guest stars come from nowhere (as characters do in our dreams) and then drop out, morph, or literally dissolve into other guest stars.

It is impossible to describe Charles' (or anyone's) subconscious guests. But at least a brief profile of these characters can be presented. They are archetypes in Charles' world and real people in ours.

One of the original members of the Fluxus art movement of the mid-1960s. Even before she met John Lennon, she was a rising star in what became known as "performance art." She claimed to have a housefly as her alter ego. Her most infamous performance was kneeling on the floor and asking the audience to cut off her clothes until she was naked; through over 60 years of performances and installations, she became the "matron archetype" who gives voice to our collective id. That is why she is not far from Charles' mind.

An Irish writer, considered by many to be the greatest modern writer in the English language. His most infamous novel, Ulysses (1922), is an epic, rambling monster story about a typical day in the life of a man named Leopold Bloom. It is arguably the first book in history to tell a story from the subconscious of a person. Subsequently, the book became quite lewd, vulgar, and often incoherent. When "Ulysses" was first published in England, this lewdness led to obscenity charges, and the book was banned for decades afterward. Charles never understood "Ulysses" despite reading it daily.

An American novelist, he was one of the founders of the so-called "Beat Generation" of the 1950s. Known for "Junkie," "Nova Express," and "Naked Lunch," Burroughs' work is impulsive, experimental, mean, cruel, and (like Joyce's) highly subconscious. Burroughs was a complex figure. He was a heroin addict and wore fancy three-piece suits. He was also a collector of firearms. And he really said, "If you learn to relax and wait for the answer, your mind will answer most questions. I love him for that.

The monsters that rule your nightmares are the inventions of Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Today he is considered one of the greatest horror fiction writers of all time. He created the "Cthulhu Mythos," a world populated by Cthulhu (a real-life creation, as you can see in this movie) and the "old ones" (monstrous dependents who seek to drive humanity to extinction through madness). His writing is delightfully offensive and overwrought. He actually uses adjectives like "unspeakable," "protracted," "eldritch," and "reprehensible" over and over again.

Perhaps my hardest character choice to explain in the film. Ayn Rand, a Russian-American author best known for her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, preached a philosophy she called Objectivism. She condemned altruism and empathy (in other words, being kind to others for no particular reason) as human weaknesses. Today, she is a hero of the "1%" and is embraced by Tea Party members, Republicans, and frat boys in the US and economic sociopaths around the world. Charles is a little confused when he sees her in his subconscious. The reason for this is not clear.

The superego is a part of our inner mind first proposed by Sigmund Freud in 1922. Your superego is the part that tells you to sit up straight, tells you to sit up straight, makes you feel guilty when you drive to work instead of biking, and admonishes you to donate to Amnesty International. Charles has a superego that tries to keep things straight, and with his crew cut and matching tie and handkerchief, he looks a lot like Allen Laddon. He's a decent guy, but he can also lapse into self-righteous egotism.

The id is, in Freudian terms, the "other half" of your inner mind: the id is the animalistic, instinctive, impulsive, chaotic, decadent part. When Woody Allen said, "The heart desires what the heart desires," his id is speaking. Charles is a bit repressed, so much so that his id resembles a statue of Picasso in downtown Chicago, near where Charles grew up.

Charles Langford is a likable enough middle-aged man, aspiring to be a great writer (he is obsessed with the works of Burroughs and Joyce, perhaps to a fault). His subconscious hasn't done a decent sweep since grade school. In short, he is a lot like you and me.