Issue 7: Summer 2011
Daniel Cockburn's You Are Here
Rosemary Heather
A bemused and slightly anxious film, Daniel Cockburn's first feature You Are Here (2010) is a perfectly concocted expression of everything we don’t understand about our new century.
Fitting for a movie that features the viewer in its starring role - the "you" of the title - a central character in Daniel Cockburn's You Are Here (2010) is the aggregate entity ‘Alan'. The film creates Alan by layering in quick succession, shots of different men and women performing - or failing to perform - a series of small actions. Cockburn uses this device to displace the viewer identification that typically drives a film's narrative. Meanwhile, a voice muses about the fragile nature of identity. "Are you the same person before and after putting something down and picking it up again?" Fumbling with your keys or momentarily forgetting your computer password, these are situations everyone can identify with. In You Are Here these moments take on existential significance, the director inviting audiences to commune around everyday experiences that provoke unease. For Cockburn, our hold on identity is tenuous; even the smallest upset can threaten to upend it forever.
Like a Russian nesting doll, You Are Here presents a series of stories organized around a centre of nothingness. Different scenarios play out. Details from one tale show up in another. Stories intersect, but to what end? An archivist, played by the late Canadian actor Tracy Wright (R.I.P.), devises her own system to organize and catalogue items she finds on the street. The system has its own logic, one that Wright's character rigorously adheres to, but in the end she is forced to concede it is never going to reveal any greater meaning. Speaking into a tape recorder, she confides: "I thought if I organized these materials properly I would understand..."
Dogged by the sense that your life is controlled by forces you can't comprehend? Join the club, Cockburn suggests. It's hard to think of another film that so nakedly toys with its character's fates only to assign them to that proverbial fate worse than death, oblivion. Joan Didion is famous for lamenting "the centre is not holding". The reference is to Yeat's 1920 poem, The Second Coming, the figure of the centre suggesting a society as it was once typically organized. Forty odd years later, Cockburn expresses doubts about this so-called center, and puts forward the idea that there never was one in the first place. His special talent is to define the contours of this suspicion. In the process, he arrives at a fine-hewed expression of our own era's particular unhappiness. Existentialism is hardly high on the list of today's cultural concerns. Cockburn locates the terms of its contemporary relevance. It's the 21st century and our existentialism has the soul of a computer programme.
Stories interlock in Cockburn's film. When the Archivist finds a Super 8 film and views it we glimpse in it scenes from a narrative that plays out elsewhere in You Are Here. Leading nowhere within the Archivist's own story, the detail foreshadows the narrative resolution she is eventually granted in the film. Taking up a new role, Wright joins characters who are less concerned to solve the puzzle about what their lives mean. Instead, they find self-fulfilment performing their job, an apparently all consuming activity requiring constant reporting by phone about their whereabouts. On the other end of the line are people in an office directing callers to their next location and marking their progress with push pins on a map. Happiness comes with a belonging troubled by no larger significance.
On one level - and this is a movie that is all about levels - You Are Here is a film that balances the wish for meaning in our lives with the caution that we might never find it. On another, as its title suggests, the answer to this question is the movie itself: comprehensible as an experience, but not so easy to explain. To ask if this is even a problem tells us why You Are Here so encapsulates the transitional moment we are currently living through as a culture. Never resolving in a conventional fashion, viewers are left to make sense of the film as best they can. Connect the movie's narrative levels, or choose only those that are meaningful to you. Figuratively placed in the driver's seat in this way, the viewer is given a participatory role, not unlike the experience of being a player in a video game. Here we arrive at the importance of the ‘hole' in the middle of the film's series of narratives, and the significance of its title. Cockburn has devised a cinematic experience that accommodates the expectations of today's participatory culture. Not literally a video game, You Are Here, nonetheless has something in common with computer culture in that, like a computer program, it consists of a series of inputs that are dependent on the user for their combination and outcome.
In his book, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter (2010), Tom Bissell speaks of the "intensely private pleasures offered by video game playing." One effect of this is the broader usurpation of mainstream culture by the universe of self-elected entertainment options. Smaller in scope than the diversions of a previous era, leisure defined by Facebook and Grand Theft Auto makes for an equally satisfying way to pass the time. Social media also has the advantage of dispensing with concerns about user passivity, the number one knock against television. But whereas TV had the ability to turn viewers into square-eyed zombies, social media has its own problems. A mass culture now more narrowly defined by various forms of play and ‘content creation' creates not zombies but slaves. We are now all the unpaid labourers of our own edification. Arguably, the varied activities digital culture makes possible are just the 21st century versions of Wist and stamp collecting, albeit mediated for the amusement of our friends, relatives, and their friends. The problem with hobbyism elevated to the wider significance of its mass cultural platform is that its wider significance remains currently undefined. The video game industry, for instance, is a multibillion dollar concern, outperforming any other form of popular entertainment. Yet, for all its success dominating the spare time of millions, the cultural profile of video gaming is negligible. Cockburn's You Are Here is like a game in the sense that it is governed by a participatory rather than narrative drive. It is arguably about the essentially private experience that gaming - and all social media - provide. Game-like and yet transcending game culture, Cockburn creates a filmic entity that convincingly frames and reflects on the significance of these new cultural forms. Our situation is not unlike that of the film's Archivist. "Whether these documents are clues, or are themselves puzzles to be solved, what's important is that I have a system to keep track of it all...Once I've done that, I'll understand why I'm doing this."
Rosemary Heather is a freelance writer and curator. She can be contacted on Twitter: rosemheather
E-mail: rosemheather@yahoo.ca