Studio 1 - Week 11 - Related Works HH

The Watertower, written by Gary Crew, 1994

SPOILERS!

Working on my creepy Australian coastal town where things are not what they seem, my memory brought me back to this very strange and elegant children’s book I read in primary school. Written simply by Gary Crew and illustrated by Steven Woolman, the book tells a short story about two boys breaking into their town’s watertower for a swim on a hot day.  After one of them, Bubba, loses his clothes, the other boy, Spike, runs back to town to retrieve some spare ones for him, leaving Bubba alone inside the watertower. At this time, Crew doesn’t explain much, but Woolman provides iconic illustrations of the townsfolk looking up at the watertower. When Spike returns, Bubba is almost a different person, but what has happened to him is left completely unexplained. This style of horror story, which leaves so many questions unanswered, is probably rare for a children’s book, and no doubt left a whole lot of kids and parents truly frightened. We have no idea what is going on in that damn watertower, and for some reason, we desperately want to figure it out. The illustrations are so perfectly scary and beautiful, and arguably tell more than the words could. (The video I’m linking is of The Bearded Educator reading the booking aloud, while going through PDF slides of the illustrations. For some reason he has chosen to add music to some of the illustrations which I did not care for.)

Under the Silver Lake, dir. David Robert Mitchell, 2018

I just rewatched this 2018 film because one viewing was not enough to fully understand it. I knew that there was something going on beneath the surface, so to speak, but even on the second viewing I still can’t quite figure out exactly why it is so good and so bizarre. Sam is a fairly aimless guy who totally ignores his landlord’s demands to pay his rent or be evicted, instead busying himself with conspiracy theories and whatever he can see through his binoculars. One day he sees a beautiful young woman through them, a neighbor, who he promptly meets and, over the course of a few hours together, falls for. The next day, she is gone, moved out and left no trace, so Sam, continuing to ignore his landlord and other seemingly urgent life problems, sets out to find her. What follows is a bizarre kaleidoscope of a journey through Los Angeles, learning of secret conspiracies and following leads. We often dip into questioning whether what we’re seeing is real or only going on inside Sam’s head. A rich early-Hollywood score and gorgeous cinematography carry the film, grounding them with an authority which comforts the audience and beckons them to come on this strange trip.

Girls, created by Lena Dunham, 2012-17

I distinctly remember this show being very painful for me to watch when it was first released. I was living in New York, where the show is set, and most of my friends were the same age as the show’s characters. I found everything so cringey- probably it was just too close to the real thing- and I reacted against seeing my life portrayed on screen. Now, time a lot of time has passed and I feel a distance from my New York life and my early 20s, and can appreciate Girls for what it is. The show centres on four young women who have moved to New York after college, a rite of passage for thousands of young Americans. There they begin their adult lives, dealing with insecurity, relationships, loss, love, their parents and paying their rent,. Though the show is sometimes funny in a classic sense, its structure is very distinctive. Things seem to flow as they do in real life; in one episode, the lead character meets a guy and spends the whole episode with him while the other characters are not mentioned. She is easy to dislike, but I am starting to think that Dunham is actually extremely insightful. It seems she was writing about dealing with the insecurities of being in your 20s while she was actually living through it. My only problem with the show is that I sometimes see things in it that actually happened to me, which makes me feel like I’m being watched, or that my life is a total cliché.