Movie Reviews for Writers: Allegoria

 

Allegoria is a pretentious little arthouse horror flick about pretentiousness. It’s also directed by Rob Zombie’s little brother, Spider One from the rock group Powerman 5000. Where older brother Zombie went into carnival madness and gore, Spider seems to have something more to say about the creation process, even if wrapped in some over-the-top oddness where various songwriters, scriptwriters, actors, and painters discover the hard way that releasing their inner demons can become far too literal. 

All in all, it’s a lot more entertaining than one might think at first glance. It clearly doesn’t have the budget of Zombie’s slashers, but honestly, it doesn’t need it, not for these stories about people first and monsters and killers second. The segments work together in the same way a mosaic novel (like the first few Wildcards collections) with a shared cast who interacts in minor ways with each other as each new segment begins. 

The first story is about an actor teaching a class how to dig deep and channel the true horror inside them. But the second is where we finally hit some gold about the creative process. Marcus is a painter who is up against a deadline. Benny is his manager and is far more concerned about dollars than art. 

Benny: Marcus? Marcus, can you hear me?

Marcus: I can hear you.

Benny: Okay. Yeah, well, it's Friday, and you said that you would have it done by Friday.

Marcus: I'm sorry, I didn't realize my soul was punching a time clock.

Benny: Hey, hey, come on. Don't act like you don't know how this works.

Let’s unpack that exchange. It’s the two sides of the same coin for folks who create art as a way to make a living. Step one: Pour out your soul onto canvas or paper or a piano. Step two: Do that in such a way that commodifies the very thing your soul creates. 

If we want to even begin to make a living in art, it’s a line we have to walk. And we can’t ignore either side. To be true to ourselves we have to create something we find fulfilling. That’s true enough. But to continue paying rent and buying groceries we have to honor deadlines and often argumentative (and even clueless) customers who want to reduce your art to something less. (Just ask any comic artist about the crazy sketch requests they get from fetishistic fans.)

Moving on to the next sequence, which is perhaps the best of the bunch, which features a scriptwriter named Andy Park knocking out the final scene of his newest screenplay. It includes two potential victims and a killer with a knife called “The Whistler,” who whistles the same notes over and over before he kills. 

When he plugs in the words “The End” Andy is convinced he’s done it again. He’s created gold with his laptop. 

Eddy: Eddy Park, you are a fucking genius... Well, my friend, you did it again.

But his excitement is short-lived as someone responds. Surprise, it’s The Whistler somehow come to life from the script, and he’s not happy with the way things turned out. 

It’s not uncommon for us writers to talk about how our characters speak to us, how they tell us what should happen next, and what shape our stories should ultimately take. This just happens to be the way to make that happen in a horror story. 

Whistler: Worthless. Fucking. Trash.

Eddy: What?

Whistler: I said, "Worthless fucking trash."

Eddy: I... I don't understand.

Whistler: Clearly, there's a lot you don't understand, like how to write a decent, fuckin' violent bloodbath.

Eddy: What?

Whistler: First of all, we need to discuss this whistling bullshit. Is that really the best you can do? Whistling?

Eddy: It's... It's just like a-a-a gimmick, you know? Like... Like... Like whistle while you work. This is whistle while you kill. Th-That's gonna be the tag line on the poster. "Whistle while you kill."

Whistler: I hate it.

I love this exchange. I really, really do. Just like all of us have felt at some time, Eddy wants to hold onto something that is actually hurting his work. His character is trying to tell him how stupid it is, but Eddy doesn’t want to listen. First, the story is done, and why in the hell would he want to go back and rewrite now? Second, movies are built on gimmicks, right? And as the writer, Eddy knows better than the character. Well, that doesn’t sit well with The Whistler, who proceeds to beat the shit out of Eddy to demonstrate just how to create an effective (and rather visceral) “decent, fucking bloodbath.” 

Let’s just be glad that our interactions with our characters happen in our heads, and I’ll leave it at that to avoid any important spoilers. 

Next, we come to another stand-out segment, this one featuring Scout Taylor-Compton from Halloween. She stars as Ivy, a sculptor on a blind date. She is clearly way out of her date’s league even if he’s cute in a nerdy way. John’s a neat freak more concerned with keeping things in perfect condition, and she likes to deconstruct things to find the art beneath the surface. As such, he doesn’t remotely understand Ivy when she talks about art. 

Ivy: I believe that art is in everything and everyone. It's just that not everything and everyone is being used properly to transmit its power.

John: I... I have no idea what you're talking about.

Ivy: Okay. For instance, this table.

John: Mm-hmm.

Ivy: Give me your hand. You see it as a table because you treat it that way. And you are afraid of this wine stain, but maybe this wine stain is exactly... what this table needs to express a feeling and in turn transform this meaningless object into art.

John: So I should... I should just spill wine all over the table, because that's the thing? I mean, I just... It's expensive, so I didn't want to ruin it.

Ivy: It's not about the table. It's about how you feel.

Whether or not Ivy is a role model for us as creatives, she definitely knows where art hides and how to get to it. I love her definition that is espoused here. “Maybe this wine stain is exactly what this table needs to transform this meaningless object into art.” As she says, “It’s not about the table.” It’s about the feelings the art produces. 

Art has never been about concrete meanings and lock-it-in-a-box definitions. It has always been about the sensations, thoughts, and feelings it creates in those who see and/or hear it. 

All this brings us to the final segment of this pretentious anthology flick. With an expert framing device, we visit Brody, an aspiring actress from the first segment on the night before her acting class. She lives with a rock and roll singer for a punk band. She’s also dating Marcus, the painter from the second segment. We see a repeat of the conversation with him from that segment, only from her perspective this time. 

Brody: Whatever, Marcus. I just want to act.

Marcus: You want to be famous.

Okay. Marcus may be a pompous Artiste (capital A intentional) and a total dick, but he’s right in this case. Brody is less concerned about creating. She wants to get famous. She sees art as a means to that end. 

But, let’s be honest, a lot of folks do, and when they find out what a fat load of garbage that way of thinking is, they either reframe their expectations because they’ve fallen in love with creating or they relegate such endeavors to an “every now and then” sort of hobby or get out of that creative world entirely. 

This writing life isn’t likely to make any of us famous or rich. Sure, some people find that dream, but the odds are stacked against us from the beginning. When we stick with it, we usually do that for the addiction to seeing our art children venture out into the world, regardless of how they are received by the public.