Welcome to the Rubber Room (2017)

Director: Trent Harris

Screenplay: Trent Harris

Cast: Natalie Keezer as Fatima; Dan Morley as Gary Guy; Davey Morrison as Alexis Thrill

"You gave money to a duck?"

Another Trent Harris production and the most poignant detail about this film is that, whilst an openly silly film, it has as a reoccurring reference Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain" (1917), a urinal that was upturned, signed and presented an exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York. In art, Duchamp was connected to the Dada movement, the urinal in itself creating a hypothesis whether his intention that any object could be art, causing an inherent provocation from an object that was both manufactured, and thus not unique, and usually urinated in being held on a pedestal. Whilst it is played for humour, such as a video artist having the misguided historical theory that the Nazis already existed by World War I and started it to steal the urinal, despite the "fountain" itself only coming to existence when World War I had long already started, it is poignant how much it is referenced. It is viewed in Welcome to the Rubber Room as a world shattering creation in art, with characters here trying to find the newest piece as radical in its influence as Duchamp's readymade was, all whilst having to worry that even the art gallery they might show their work in is about to be replaced with a Bed, Bath and Beyond store.

Rubber Room is structured as if three episodes of a micro budgeted television comedy, which if Trent Harris ever wanted to elaborate upon I would be more than welcome to see as, here, he hits upon a premise where he can show his best traits. That he has allowed himself to write memorable characters and dialogue and, notably, not be structured around a plot based around a mystery narrative as the other work I have seen have been, allowing him to try something different for me. Set initially at the titular Rubber Room, it is a beatnik place outside of time in the various idiosyncratic figures within it and their jive talk; that club however is not immortal as it is having its last night before being replaced with a Pottery Barn. Everyone is a stereotype of artistic minded people but you come to love them, be it Alexis Thrill, the neurotic poet whose broken relationship with a Fatima or informing bubble obsessed aliens he has no love to give is among his deeply personal work, or Small Lily, a cat obsessed artist who hangs around the guy whose literature does not use commas. There is even a bongo player - Beat Bob - who speaks as a fifties groovy cat and is in love with an artist Clover Dover who is obsessed with painting horses. I initially presumed Clover was a male actor playing a female character, or was trans, but in character has a very elaborate sexuality when Beat Bob finally pushes her to be straight forward with him the more he tries to woo her.

None of the jokes in Rubber Room are mean to art itself, but play to absurd touches and that a lot of the art feels out of time already, the "modern" Tracey Emin era of installation art going as far back as the nineteen nineties or earlier, or video art with an artist trying to sell Beat Bob a video loop of buttocks, possibly his own, to have as art in his house. Also, if anyone is going to have the piss taken out of them, Harris does it to himself, a brief tangent for a 1972 avant-garde film by a Trent Harris, involving a man's romance with a female mannequin in black and white, which no one is impressed with.

Episode One does show the absurdity that I have seen in his other work, as it is revealed Earth has been acquired by a very drunk alien (voiced by Harris himself), who intends to turn it into a tourist attraction for other aliens. The film is working on a minimal budget, so that interior is thankfully as home made as possible, with coloured cloths hanging everywhere, the floor wet in bubbling pools and bubbles floating everywhere. A lot more emphasis, even to the other films I have seen, is laid on his dialogue and comedy, and I will say now Trent Harris has a gift for it. By Episode Two, where Beat Bob has managed to gain a lot of money and decides to search for a piece of art to decorate his wall, Harris has this material down perfectly, and barring acquiring a few rooms and having some jazz on the soundtrack, he can instead rely on this dialogue and the cast instead.

Baring the abrupt cuts to the cast dancing, Rubber Room is structured as a sitcom envisioning this group of artists and beatniks, lovable figures who over presume their talent or joke about modern art. Whilst the jokes can be obvious, some are drawing from the reality of art, such as the artist who paints a canvas in just one colour with nothing else, not only evoking Yves Klein who became fixated on the colour blue, but that he did paint a (hugely tactile) canvas of one colour called Untitled Blue Monochrome (1955), going as far with his work to create his own trademarked shade of blue called International Klein Blue. Even the audio video installation of the buttocks I mentioned earlier just evokes the fact Andy Warhol made a film called Taylor Mead's Ass (1964), because he rightly realised a film had to be made of Factory star Taylor Mead's butt.

It helps that, whatever the necessary acting quality, everyone is interesting and memorable, a spark between them to stand out in a large cast of figures, be it artists trying to placate Beat Bob for a competition for prize money or the final Episode being Alexis trying to make a film against the evil corporate "crab people", literal or not, in spite of a lack of focus and the only background prop he requests being a miniature homemade volcano.

There is also a heart here. The references to places of art and culture being bought out and replaced with stores selling consumer goods is both a joke but a comment, clearly, for Trent Harris of the dangers of losing these interesting people and art. He loves them all, the characters ways of expressing themselves earnest whilst their gripes of this encroaching culture is evident and felt; it is a film from 2017 which felt it was worth even joking that there was a danger of losing this world even if, even in my neck of the woods in England going to my nearest city, there is some semblence of culture still but always a sense of this being marginalised by an encroaching store, or when a free gallery was being considered being changed into a building for wedding receptions. There is even a line mocking social workers who think painting butterflies on children's' faces qualify as an art festival which is a darker, scathing joke from Trent Harris, one that we can dilute art and culture from its raw, startling form. Remember, the film is practically worshiping Marcel Duchamp and his "Fountain", so clearly Trent Harris in his own odd way has raised the flag for the real subversives.

The result is a charmingly silly work, a further piece where I have come to really admire Trent Harris. Particularly as a film like Delightful Water Universe, whilst fun, can be seen as indulgent and too freewheeling in tone, this however is from that same position where an older outsider makes digitally shot films with full creative control, but also makes something entirely from this period which is also continually funny. Constantly hilarious and imaginative for the better.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

Delightful Water Universe (2008)

Director: Trent Harris

Cast: Bill Allred as Vicious; Sina Amedson as Sheriff Butler; Kim Armston as Sassy; Dan Morley as Franklin; Stefene Russell as T.T. Swackhumma; Liberty Valentine as Lisa

To be honest*, Delightful Water Universe is an acquired taste. Some filmmakers enter a period when they are older where they make films or work that are low budget, even homemade, taking advantage of the newest technology when they become outsiders to the industry. This is not a bad thing, and is in fact an ultimate form of auteurism, these people happier making films without restrictions in ideas even if they could be restricted by resources. Ken Russell, for example, eventually went from helming expensive Warner Bros. films to making films in his garage, and Jean-Luc Godard arguably has been doing the same for the 2010s. The only potential issue is that of indulgence, which for me is charming if you follow the idea like I have that cinema should be viewed as part of human communication. It can also be idiosyncratic to say the least, in a way that is potentially off-putting.

Delightful Water Universe is charming if anything, even in its moments of titillation being merely actresses in exotic under garments but never explicit beyond this. It probably realises its plot, effectively a remake of Plan 10 from Outer Space (1995), but with a washed up male news reporter in a dystopian world and Bigfoot being a left wing political subversive, is a bit ad hoc at points and stretching its low budget. It probably finds joy in that too, and bless the production for thinking like this.

Made in 2008, when Barack Obama would become President of the United States soon after, the film feels of the George Dubya Bush days, now so remote in comparison it is amazing we once held that in some quarters as the end of civilisation. Films from that era, like this or a big box office failure like Southland Tales (2006), were probably right to deal with it with a cartoonish nature, suiting the tone of the era nowadays as we look back and see how absurd it was in real life. Harris to his credit hits ideas that are not that removed from the criticisms of the real first world even decades on, that there is a continuous barrage of advertisements and that the news is a puff piece for corporations, to which the protagonist is a washed up journalist who cannot pay his bar tabs and misses important events, like an American football star going insane and kidnapping a busload of Mormon schoolgirls.

The acquired nature of the film, structured like Plan 10, is that it is very determined to follow its plot with few tangents, mostly following our lead meeting someone, gaining new details and wandering on. It never really moves beyond this and the plot itself is very eccentric and loose to say the least. Between the title, a soda drink which is an Aldous Huxley approved soma, and a corrupt politician who fails at public arguments but still gets ahead of the polls^**, this is the low budget take on the likes of Southland Tale which are over the top and absurd.

Barring the explicit detail (curious and dropped) that Bigfoot rogered a male politician, which is technically a rape joke and another in the bizarre obsession in American culture being obsessed with the Cryptozoology  specific being randy for humans¹, there is always a sense of whimsy even when it is being serious. Even Harris' clear attraction to women is quaint, beautiful figures but contrasted by the second lead, a figure with a speech impediment who follows the reporter and is more assertive, a follow up from protagonist Lucinda in Plan 10 as a charming, downright lovable female figure who is not objectified or demeaned.

Harris works with what he has, which means this is a very eccentric sci-fi tale which does not try to look like the future in the slightest. That is to his advantage even if the viewer is not as fond of the indulgences, entirely because every idea I mentioned is something that transpires in real life and there is never any tech that has drastically dated in the slightest. Even the addictive soda drink is like sugar rich foods we warn children not to have and the film nearly turns into a low budget Chinatown (1974) as it involves politicians buying up land and access to water supplies. The difference too is that all of this has a sense of humour. That Bigfoot is real and is savvy enough to put windshield wipers and a giant kitchen sieve together to make a head garment that can pick up signals, used to promote his Dada-like political comments against consumerism. This, for all the padding in the film, is why I am glad to see a film like this, because even the semblance of the idea is wonderfully absurd.

I have not mentioned that this is a story-within-a-story, as Delightful Water Universe is actually a tale being written by another figure in his own story. A man in a mental institution, watching by a single male guard, he continues on the typewriter he is allowed to have whilst society outside is crumbling under a violent revolution. Said writer is shown to be an egotistical figure who thinks he is a literary genius, even the instigator of profound revolution, in spite of the fact he is neither and that the world (shown in stock footage) is burning down already around him.

This is the most interesting part of Delightful Water Universe, where this is Trent Harris showing how interesting he is as a creator, because we have to process that the absurdities of the plot inside the bookends are influenced by his clear incompetence and egotism, and that there is an unexpected sadness too. Namely that this figure is still pining for a female figure, entering the story as a member of those Mormon schoolgirls who comes to the lead, providing him the McGuffin of the windscreen wiper transmitter helmet and leaving the reporter pining for her after a one night stand, a love sick puppy onwards. It is this whole aspect, these complications, which bring up some additional questions, whether we are to question this entire main story in terms of bias or not. It does provide also an emotional connection as, with even his utter ignorance of himself, he is still someone to follow, where even his guard is just there to have someone to talk too, making the final with him stuck in the room and memories coming to haunt him a surprise change of tone to the film. That makes any indulgences with the film acceptable as they pay off eventually.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

====

* And in mind that this particular review was made possible because the director Harris was kind enough upload his films to YouTube temporarily through 2020 for the public to see, which can feel like biting the hand of a benefactor.

** Trent Harris to his credit, again, pointing out something we only come to realise happens in the 2010s and 2020s a lot.

1) From softcore like Sweet Prudence and the Erotic Adventure of Bigfoot (2011) to actual porn in The Geek (1971), this is surprisingly common. That is not including the literary genre of monster porn, which was surprisingly prolific and with a surprising amount of female authors.

Plan 10 From Outer Space (1995)

Director: Trent Harris

Screenplay: Trent Harris

Cast: Stefene Russell as Lucinda; Karen Black as Nehor; Patrick Michael Collins as Larsen; Curtis James as Talmage; Deva Cantrell as Guy; Gyll Huff as Rockwell; Jeff Price as Sanders; Karen Nielsen as Jazell; Burnadette Leroi as Burnadette

Obscurities, Oddities and One-Offs

The title is a reference to Ed Wood Jr's most notorious film, Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959), the film above many which people referred to when they both talked of bad cinema but also so-bad-its-good. There have been possible challenges to it in pop culture memory, The Room (2003) springing to mind as possibly taking its crown in the modern day, but the notoriously shambolic sci-fi tale is synonymous with cult cinema. Plan 10 From Outer Space for me always sounded like a modern pastiche, which did exist especially in an era where Ed Wood managed to get a 1994 biopic from Tim Burton from a major Hollywood studio. The actual film, my first Trent Harris work, is not this but about Mormons. That is the first interesting surprise, and it gets more peculiar from there.

Trent Harris is a filmmaker who has had a few notches in cult circles of immense interest. Rubin and Ed (1991) with Crispin Glover is from this same era where we once had these wonderfully idiosyncratic productions bankrolled. The Beaver Trilogy (2001), spawning three films between 1979 and 1985 based on a figure Harris met called "Groovin' Gary, is his most well known work including the notoriety that it was long unavailable and that the middle one has a young Sean Penn playing Groovin' Gary. Here, the Utah raised filmmaker takes a look at a huge cultural aspect of his local culture, that Utah is famously of historical important for Mormonism, a controversial religion in terms of Christianity and where Harris turns this into a sci-fi tale of their beliefs with more aliens than in their actual writings.

The premise is that a young Mormon woman Lucinda (Stefene Russell) wants to write about Utah's history, only to find a tablet in the wilderness, connected to a controversial work by a Mormon founder which posited an alien influence on Mormonism. Now, Mormonism is a divisive belief system, and Harris' work tackles as much its beliefs as it uses it for artistic inspiration, taking into consideration that this faith grew in the 19th century, a potted history involved, but also bringing in some of its more idiosyncratic beliefs, such as Mormonism's reference to the cosmos and the other planets which is translated in this film as outer space being part of its form of heaven, here the dead gaining their own planet if they are good Mormons. As Lucinda herself will eventually say though, this only applies to her male brethren, whilst Mormons' most known practice of polygamy, in which men can have many wives, becomes a huge plot point which involves Karen Black, the cult and acclaimed actress, as a scorned woman in the midst of this conspiracy.

Plan 10 is also a film from knee deep into the nineties, and whilst it would take a precise discourse on aesthetic and fashion to explain this, the sense of this being a nineties production is felt in its colour and especially its eccentricity. "Eccentric" is the best way to describe the film as well as charming. Plan 10, whilst it is dealing with sexy saucer people who invite women on midnight "motorbike rides", is almost chaste, pleasingly so in a narrative structure which, baring a few tangents, is wholly devoted to its story of Lucinda uncovering this conspiracy and following it to the end. Barring her very crude Freudian slips, finding herself attracted to the next door neighbour who twerks in his undies at night through an open window, Lucinda is a very likeable and affirmative figure, taking in her stride a conspiracy that naturally makes her male seniors uncomfortable. Particular, as much a joke, because they fear it would make them worse off in the public view as a laughing stock, but becoming more suspicious as she digs further, even to the point of getting a cousin to help translate a Mormon created language to decipher old text.   

Baring the fact her brother is likely to be picking up transmissions, unwell as he eventually stands proud in front of a founder's statue in the nude, it is Stefene Russell's film and she is charming. Never demeaned, and the only explicit sexuality depicted through an outer space motorbike ride or two. The story is her growth, not just through her sexuality, but a general sense of growth from a nerdy figure who, be it struggling to get into a secret hideout unless she wears a costume or even getting shoved into a mental health asylum and having to escape, grows stronger in general by the conclusion.

And it does touch upon some problematic content about Mormonism. Not in a superior attitude either, but calmly critiquing points, such as Mormonism's struggle with racism, depicted in the difference between the "Nephites", light skinned population of Israelite origin who came to the Americas, and the "Lamanites", people who are seen as wicked but, as film tells the version, are depicted as dark skinned people, a nod to this problem within the Church. That and the gender politics, as this ultimately revolves around Karen Black wanting to create a gender war against Utah, which does happen in the most subversive aspect of Plan 10. She even gets to sing, which is admittedly awesome as I did not know Karen Black could sing.

The result was a very pleasant surprise, again an introduction to this very idiosyncratic director, and a great beginning at that.