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Anomalisa

8 years ago1,067 words

While searching for a random film to watch last night, one I'd never seen or even heard of before, I stumbled upon Anomalisa, which seemed like the sort of thing I'd not usually watch but which intrigued me as it was animated. Turns out it contained a surprising amount of explicit puppet sex! But it also resonated with me quite deeply as it explored themes of alienation and isolation. It's the sort of film that'll likely stay with me for longer than most Hollywood blockbusters do, and the sort of art that I wish I could make myself; a true inspiration.



It's about a middle-aged self-help guru going through a mid-life crisis, characterised by the feeling that everyone else in the world is dully homogeneous (depicted brilliantly by giving everyone but him the same face and voice), and that he's the only one who's not just some soulless machine.

While this was inspired by the ∞ Fregoli delusion ∞ - a neurological condition where the sufferer believes that everyone else is essentially the same person is disguise, leading to feelings of paranoia - I feel that it also serves as a vivid visual metaphor for the feeling of alienation that I myself am all too familiar with.

In the film, the protagonist's deep depression is pierced by overhearing one voice which actually sounds different to the others, and follows it to find a young woman called Lisa, who considers herself an anomaly (the title emerges from the obvious portmanteau he gives her as a nickname).

She considers herself ugly, boring, stupid... She can't understand why this man - whose best-selling book she's a big fan of, and who she traveled to the film's location just to see the presentation he came there to give - would be interested in her at all. It's been eight years since she was last with a man, she says, and even then he was almost sixty, overweight and married anyway. Characters with stories like that speak to me so much more than the ridiculously beautiful, perfect superhumans who populate most of Hollywood, as they make me feel better about my own life rather than worse. And of course they make me care about them in a way that I find more difficult when the issues character's are completely unrelatable ("I have to find this legendary weapon, but I'm possessed by a ghost and have to defeat the dragon in the way!!" isn't something I think about myself on a daily basis).

I've never really been a big fan of fiction set in the real world, always preferring fantasy... But I suppose things like that make me rethink that. Maybe it's a part of getting older? I wonder.

Speaking of realism, for a film whose cast are stop-motion-animated puppets, it contains one of the most realistic sex scenes I've ever seen in any media, with all the awkward comments, incompetence, fumbling and accidental pain that gets omitted from the eroticised fantasy sex between young people with the toned, tanned bodies of gods that the media so often presents to us as the norm. Uncomfortable though it was watching a flabby, pasty middle-aged man-puppet's small genitalia jiggle explicitly as he got out of the shower (I wonder what was going through the mind of the animator(s) in charge of that!), or hearing the loud slurping as he had his head between her legs, it was gripping in a sort of illusion-dispelling way. I mean, it's nice to see something more like your own experiences for a change, instead of something far 'better' that your experiences seem inept or unsatisfying when compared to. And of course feelings like "oh, so that happens to other people too" are quite soothing, especially for one as naive and fretful as myself.

I found the reviews interesting. Most praised it for the same reasons I have: its stark realism, its emotional resonance, its relatable themes. For example:



'Introspective cinema' indeed. Stories about the internal goings-on of the mind appeal to me far more than pointless, violent action scenes. 'Stuff happening'.

However, one of the ∞ less flattering reviews ∞ said this:



I find it interesting looking at reviews like these as a creator myself, and as one who's curious about the working of minds in general. I get the impression that those the themes speak to might have had experiences with isolation, alienation or depression themselves, while the person who uses terms like 'obsession with self-absorption' and 'pity party' strikes me as the sort who's probably always been comfortably one of the crowd and relatively happy, so this sort of thing seems off-puttingly alien to them. That reviewer judges the protagonist as a 'megalomaniac', who sees everyone as the same because he doesn't care about anyone but himself.

It makes me wonder whether the film resonates so much with me because I really am some kind of narcissist. I know that - for all my talk about how empathising with others is the best thing ever - I do have this constant feeling that everyone else is essentially an unremarkable 'NPC', that everyone else gets along better with each other than I can with them, that there's something about me that sets me apart, and not necessarily in a good way.

I'm reminded of a quote from Adventure Time (of all things) which went something like:

[quote Banana Man]I feel like there's this instruction manual that tells you how to talk to people, and everyone got a copy except me.[/quote]

Things like that really speak to me too. A common thought of all outsiders, perhaps, or maybe it's an enneatype 4 thing? I wonder.

Anyway, I've felt exhausted all day, so I feel my thoughts are a tangled, incoherent mess at the moment. I just wanted to write about this while it's fresh in my mind, though, as I feel it'll probably go on to inspire the way I approach the game I want to start developing very soon.