#53: Upstream Color (2013) (dir. Shane Carruth)
Coming up for air after swimming. An orchid. A thief. A sampler. A life lost, then found. Trying to piece together a mystery that can't be solved. Whether it's about me, the director, the film itself.
I haven’t watched this in seven years. I’ve been afraid to. I knew this would particular piece would get messy, indulgent, weirder, unyielding…
What if I wrote in the style of this movie was the first thought that occurred to me sitting down to write. I could make it Walden-esque, choppy, random, edite…
Cut to me trying to reckon with the fact that the filmmaker, the mind behind this movie was…
Yeah, that was harsh, difficult, challenging to process. I am going to write about that too, not just the film. Not to mention the fact that I was emailing with him for a little while. And he also forwarded my email to his partner at the time, the partner that would later place a restraining order and…
I am having trouble writing about Upstream Color. It’s inevitable. It’s so perfect. Ineffable. Fucking overwhelming to me. I almost liken it to Christopher Nolan and Terrence Malick but I’m pretty sure those comparisons came up time and time ag…
We don’t know what’s really happening inside the mind of another person, but we try through communication, through writing, through podcasting, through our jobs. It’s about having a subjectivity, or a window through which we view the world, aware that we are acting on very limited information.
We received a lot of information at one point to where Carruth posted photos on his Twitter account of a restraining order (!) in the background that seemed so gross and inhumane. Why do I have to remember those things… Why can’t the movie just be what it is?
“They could be starlings.”
Do you think people writing about this movie today should try to work through their feelings like this? I shouldn’t question this, I should keep going. It’s an exercise in futility searching for answers in such a complex equation when it comes to power dynamics, misogyny, gaslighting, posting on…
Fluctuating emotions. Words. What are the right ones? Can I make sense of everything surrounding this film and what it means to me? That’s the purpose of this Substack. Yet - should I take the time to dissect the work of a bast…
Jim, what are you doing? You’re writing about a work of art. Take this seriously. I wish we could separate the art from the artist because that’s really what film writers do. They sit down to watch a movie, maybe take notes (my preferred version are sloppy mental notes) and try to coherently form ideas, thoughts, analysis, and emotional responses in a way that compels the reader. (To quote Steve Martin in Planes, Trains and Automobiles, “when you tell a story, have a point”). Every thought feels invasive right now. Must find clarity.
Memory itself is elliptical, edited, a roller-coaster of ebb and flow that interrupts before the sentence is finishe…
I don’t know if there’s a clear point to writing about Upstream Color or not. Especially since it’s not easy to just state everything in a limited amount of time. I sat down with a notebook, put post-it notes on my wall, listened to an audio commentary, watched a couple of video essays, and read a few articles. It’s one of those films that now makes me more upset than anything. I want more from Carruth as a writer, filmmaker, composer, but we’ll never get that because of his horrible actions. I tried to come to terms with his presence on social media at one point as he was having some kind of nervous breakdown or a manic state especially when he posted what he posted on Twit…
Why dwell on that? Let go. It happened. Social media is a parasite in of itself sometimes. Well, it’s hard to not acknowledge it since there’s an element to this movie that really leaves one more uneasy now. Before, I chalked it up to an acting performance but what if Carruth wasn’t playing Jeff in Upstream Color, he was playing a version of himself. Trying to piece together the puzzle and meaning of his abuse or possible trauma, whether he experienced it or inflicted it. Should we care what he has to say?
I’d like to think he was working through whatever darkness he held inside, manifesting it into a challenging artistic statement that some people dismissed as pretentious nonsense. Why did I feel like it was everything I wanted from a movie at one point in time? It was the ultimate “stop making sense” experience, just let yourself be intoxicated by the mind-altering parasite on display before your very eyes. Let that score embed itself into your psyche and then…
There is hardly any dialogue for the actors, in fact there is none in the last 20 minutes of the film, my favorite portion. But I also can’t shake how intense Jeff is towards Kris at times. Why does he cut her off? Why does he seem to be controlling or demanding? Perhaps they both have different reactions to the same trauma. Is this all filtered through an altered perspective as a result of what I know about the ‘real’ person? Who was the ‘real’ person emailing me back in the day when I wanted to interview him on my podcast about Upstream Color? He seemed both nice and intense. Honestly, I’ve never gone back through my email to read what he wrote. Should I?
The audio commentary on the Blu-Ray release from Umbrella Entertainment does not go anywhere near the allegations, the charges, the abuse. So why should I? The movie exists on its own and the commentator respected that. He didn’t look at the scenes of verbal out-lashes as reflective of an abusive figure. Again, Carruth may be playing a character. A character named Jeff.
Amy Seimetz is playing a character named Kris. This is not a representation of their relationship as it exists in reality. She Dies Tomorrow, Seimetz’ film is likely not a reaction to abuse. It is a film about anxiety, fear of death, coming to terms and so much more. Perhaps there is a fraction of her personal experience contained inside of that story. That’s another film that really got to me. Upstream Color on a fourth viewing, gets to me even if I don’t get it.
This is a film about taking control of your own destiny. The theme is littered not only through the story in which Kris gradually makes sense of how her money and her consciousness were stolen from her, but also within the films symbolism and intertextuality. The obsession with Walden - a book that is explicitly about freewill and taking control of your own future- away from the shackles of society. Civil disobedience. To the pigs and the way that they're used and abused by the sound engineer. People like to control other people. To control nature. Society likes to control us. The thief just wants Kris' money, but the sound engineer wants to control Kris, he makes her life hell by interfering with her mind through sound. By the end of the film, with the help of Jeff, somebody who has also been infected by the worm, she finds a path to redemption. To control. To be free. It's a profoundly moving film told through expressive imagery and emotional cutting. I wish there were more films being made that experimented with the form and took bold risks for the purpose of telling stories visually - Dylarama
Upstream Color is an enigma. It came out the same year as The Act of Killing. It came out the same year as Stories We Tell. Movies that had a profound effect on me in ways that almost feel like scars, thinking of the time and place I watched them. Thinking about how I would soon be moving back home. Mental collapse. That was a worm that infected me. It took control of my mind until I was losing grasp of what was really happening.
Somehow Upstream Color made sense in a way that felt a little scary. I was like, “Kris starts out working in front of computers, feeling disconnected, then encounters a random criminal, has to recover and the only way she can actually survive is by living off the grid on a farm with animals, with pigs. Who knows if she survives with Jeff? It’s about her connection to the outside world as being as vital to her inner self.”
I find it challenging listening to this old episode of my podcast, Director’s Club: Episode 65 (Parts 1 & 2). Normally, that’s not the case. The year that Patrick and I revealed our favorite films and we agreed that Upstream Color was by far the best - it is a masterpiece. I loved that we agreed. But you know what? I was fucking miserable and drank way a lot of whiskey too that night. I know we had a lot of laughs, but I was in such a dark dark place. I thought, I need to quit what I’m doing, I’m not healthy. I’m not here. I’m choosing to lose myself in the world of podcasts and movies and avoiding the outside world. There needs to be a balance. What was the point of being where I was? I needed to figure out why I couldn’t function in grad school or at my day job.
I got very sick at one point living in Michigan. Physically, mentally, and there was a time and place of mental collapse. I was even put on painkillers for the Shingles and gave up on therapy. I put my roommate through a lot. Upstream Color was some kind of psychedelic, mind-altering substance without the nausea. It was telling me to move back home. Or maybe it just lead me to come to that conclusion. That’s what I did. So where am I now? Watching what I consider to be one of my favorite movies while in a much better place about a decade later.
You can see that I can’t just focus on the film entirely. You’ve gotten this far though. Maybe it’s because I am conflicted about Carruth. He made two extraordinary films and then all this shit came out and I was more mad than disappointed. Wasted potential, him giving up on the industry. Just being arrogant to where opportunities he had, he likely sabotaged due to his behavior. But this is only due to what I read, I can’t sit here and know for sure what transpired. Suffice to say, I believe those who spoke up.
Why should things be easy to understand? Including art. Why is this whole world going to collapse sooner than I’m sure the Earth had planned on? How can I analyze a movie where I now hate the lead male character’s despicable behavior at times. I didn’t think that way so much initially. He did seem a little curt, often gaslighting or coming across as demanding. Yet the two of these people fall in love due to shared trauma. Maybe the universe brought Jeff and Kris together to set things right, to give them hope when inside, they feel hopeless. Perhaps they were meant to meet on the train.
Similar to the fate of Celine and Jessie in Before Sunrise only this relationship isn’t built so much on dialogue, it’s built on a feeling that they probably can’t comprehend. It just exists. But after they start to understand the horror of what’s happened in their past, how do they move forward? The only proper course of action is to let all the victims of the “identity thief” know what happened. The final act of this movie is liberation, catharsis, learning to breathe again even if it means killing the source of how this might have begun (“the sampler”).
There’s no clear way to properly deconstruct a movie that is possibly designed to confuse, perplex and remain purposely obtuse. So you can easily sit down to watch or rewatch Upstream Color and get frustrated at how nothing is perfectly clear. It’s maddening. It’s up to you to make sense of it. Right now, if I were Carruth’s therapist (and I hope to God he’s in therapy), I’d look at this movie differently too. I’d be looking for a deeper meaning in it all. It’s a Rorschach test of a film if there ever was one. My mind goes into the light and the darkness as a result of what he’s done as an artist, as a person.
Carruth's history of abuse is troubling, as the message here of relying on others for strength now feels more like a gaslighting tactic—rely on me, Carruth says, I'll bring you peace!—but what we've been reminded by this terrible situation is that he is just as fallible as the rest of us. No singular individual can bring us the peace we crave; our community must be more diffuse and holistic than idolizing our teachers. Take the film as a Wittgenstein's ladder, discarding Carruth once we've used his ideas to climb up past him. Unfortunately, the details of his abuse make it unlikely that I'll be able to enjoy this film again anytime soon (I watched it weeks ago, before the news broke), but for posterity I'm leaving it at the five stars that I've felt for it in the past. It's still a great movie, even if the person who made it is awful. Shane Carruth is The Thief, but we can use his own art to criticize him - ScreeningNotes
I’ve been concerned that I find agony to be delightful because it’s fuel to a broken fire. I keep aching for the embers and perhaps I’ve been perpetually unhappy, that is until I discovered film and music. It lit the flame to keep me warm. But Upstream Color is a Blu-Ray that exists on a shelf against my wall now. It’s a thing. An important thing, but not something that I can be in conversation with like a person. People should keep us warm, as flawed and hurtful as they can be.
The best re-framing I can do when I think back to that episode of Director’s Club is not think of it as “drunken self-indulgence,” I was having a thoughtful conversation with a friend about why it meant so much to us. I love the arts, but I have to also learn to love people including myself. People can be so great (while acknowledging how horribly selfish they can be too, presently company included). It’s just hard to figure out what’s the right way to approach analyzing something that seems to exist in a different time, in a different place. Before I knew what I know now.
It’s easy to focus on the negative - the time, the place, the mind-altering liquid that now tastes like battery acid to me. Why not try to place myself in a positive light? Focus on the movie, the words that were shared with my co-host at the time. And the fact that maybe others downloaded it not knowing how miserable I was, and found interest and entertainment by listening. So instead of harping on Carruth’s actions in real life, should I sweep his behavior under the rug and look at the film separately? Why does that feel so hard to do?
The narrative follows Kris (Amy Seimetz) who is leading a normal life as a film editor when she is kidnapped by a Thief outside a club who forces her to ingest a parasitic maggot that allows him to hypnotize and control her, ultimately stealing everything she has, a true identity thief. Days later she wakes up disoriented while the maggot inside her has grown into a worm-like entity horrifically coursing through her body. She can’t get rid of the bug. Unsure of what’s happened and after failing to remove the worm from inside, she is drawn to The Sampler (through rhythmic, pulsating sound waves that sound like the ones Jodie Foster heard in Contact) who ultimately performs surgery to transfer the worm from her wounded body to a pig.
No longer physically infected but still influenced by forces as well as a psychic bond with the pig she doesn’t understand, Kris encounters Jeff (Shane Carruth), a man similarly broken inside, and together they struggle to reassemble their lives and make some sense of what has happened to them. Ultimately how Kris and Jeff rediscover themselves, and what are the repercussions of it, is what you will get to experience in the film. There’s a reckoning and a reconciliation by the end. Perhaps they were meant to destroy their creator and find a life of peace in a society of their own making. On a farm. With animals. With each other since they’ve had a shared experience that is hard for others to fully understand.
Early on, a character listed in the film credits as Thief poisons Kris with a parasite that makes those who are infected highly receptive to hypnotic suggestion (Jeff, too, is poisoned, but we only learn about this later). Thief uses the parasite to fleece Kris of her entire savings before leaving her, as she suffers through increasing difficulties brought on by the parasite. She finally finds relief through another character credited as Sampler, a figure whose functions are even more obscure – we know that he runs a pig farm and that he is an obsessive recorder of sounds, such as that of a rock sliding down a drainage pipe, which he manipulates and remixes in digital processors. Sampler ‘cures’ Kris (and, off-screen, Jeff) by driving the parasites from her body into a pig, but there is a price for this remedy, a psychic link to the respective animal that enables Sampler to drift in and out of Kris’ and Jeff’s consciousness at will. The couple meet and grow closer, as the movie progresses, and they get by as best they can – although, in one sequence, they find themselves utterly bereft when Sampler drowns a litter of piglets from Kris’ pig. Their decayed corpses leach the parasite into the river, which mutates a flower, collected by some botanists, who then sell it at their greenhouse to none other than Thief – thus completing for the viewer the cycle that has been at work all along. Other characters, also previously infected, are visited from time to time, but the narrative mostly follows Kris and Jeff as it progresses. The pool scenes come late in the film, where the two continue to cope with their shared trauma; the second visit to the pool signals a breakthrough, one that leads Kris to track Sampler, both physically and psychically, in order to kill him. (That there is a final confrontation, and that the one here is so violent, suggests that under-girding the meandering, oblique plot is the spine of a more classical narrative.) At film’s end, Kris and Jeff, along with several people who are similarly recovering from the same fate, move to Sampler’s farm, which they take over and where they care for their porcine others, to whom they are still linked and presumably will be, in a strange kind of harmonic life that the film views with a surreal and unsettling attitude that is nonetheless hopeful as well - David T. Johnson
Some things are meant to remain a mystery. They are built that way. Upstream Color remains an enigma, a code without a code-breaker though many will posit theories. I sure have. Yet I also want to let it wash over me at the same time, devoid of intellectual engagement. You can tell me it’s about nature on a macro-level, you can tell me it’s about a form of inception, you can tell me it’s about relationships on a micro-level. I’m not sure what it all adds up to. But it makes me ecstatic (and angry) that it exists. I want movies that feel like anxiety dreams to parse and overthink. They should be enveloping, surreal and hard to immediately appreciate. Granted, if you look at a list of favorite movies of mine, there are plenty of examples of films with instant pleasures (like a romantic comedy or an action flick).
The cycle-of-life continues. People will mate, the world will grow old. The Earth was never meant to last forever, just like human beings. Just like the piglets. We place way too much emphasis and importance on survival when it’s likely that the planet is ready to move on to a different species. Maybe we’re aware of that and it fuels our fear of AI. Meanwhile, we have to focus on free will, compromise, and the response to a crisis whether it’s happening to us personally or it’s happening to the entire world in the face of those hungry with power, eager to control us all. Perhaps the parasite, the worm in this film can be anything - a person, a capitalist structure, a President, a religion, or hard liquor.
Imagination is much stranger than we can ever comprehend. One person’s perception of the world, of a relationship, of themselves is contained inside of them and even control freaks with anger issues have an altered state that we can’t access. We only get it through communication with them. They may manipulate us, they may be truthful. The pessimist in me says that a lot of people (including Carruth) are out to destroy and harm, the optimist in me wants to believe in the resounding hope that the ending of this movie brings to its characters and to the viewer who finds solace in its final image. I do. Evil doesn’t always prevail.
We’re full of ugliness, darkness and terrible mistakes that have hurt other people. But we’re here in a state of ever-changing connectedness to the outside world. Perhaps it is to just one other person, or maybe we’re lucky enough to have a love of animals too. I can’t help but cry at the sight of Kris going through some form of self-actualization and attachment to a piglet at the end of Upstream Color. You can tell she’s been through a lot (heck, her hair style has completely changed too) but she’s found some kind of comfort in the world she has chosen to be a part of.
That’s also what I hope for Amy Seimetz, one of possible several victims of Carruth’s abuse. Let’s hope she’s okay. Let’s hope he is getting help too. Obviously, I interviewed her once before knowing the truth. The second time it was for her incredible film, She Dies Tomorrow. In the end, I can sit here and say that Upstream Color is still one of my very favorite films which is why I’m not going to brush it under the rug due to what we’ve learned about the mind behind it all. My relationship to the film has changed, it’s complicated now. I’m looking at it differently than I did the first or second time. I cry harder than ever at the end because I’m thinking about myself, the character of Kris, the actress Amy Seimetz and to some extent, our bruised planet.
I’m trying to be empathic towards everyone involved, even its creator. I want to believe in the good. I’m trying to work through my own madness to a degree each time I sit down to write - film does often hold up a mirror to try and understand ourselves and humanity as a whole. There’s so much passion in the world and it should not be used for self-gratification, but for growth. Carruth created this bizarre anomaly that means so much to me so I can’t just hate him outright, despite hating what he did.
As someone who nearly died and has had a variety of traumas, what he created definitely speaks to me in a way that few movies ever have. I had to write about it eventually and there’s a strong chance I will write about a Woody Allen movie too in the future. (What does it mean to forgive and not forget, anyway). There’s more to the conversation than separating the art from the artist and I tried to work through it the best to my ability in the here and now.
I also can’t deny that I’m mad we won’t ever see a follow-up to this while also accepting the fact that maybe two movies is all we needed. Ending on a positive note, I’m grateful for the fact that those two movies made by a complicated individual exist on their own. Upstream Color is forever a film that floats in my mind, but now for different reasons. Some of them are bad but most of them are life-affirming. The conclusion seems to say that chaos, openness might be preferable to control. It’s time to let go and let the colors flow where they may.