Friday, October 11, 2013

Memory and Dream in "Some Static Started"



This is a brilliant mind-bending thriller of a short film.  I have a working idea of what is going on in this story, but I'm still mulling it over.  

But here goes:  The wounded man sitting on the make-shift couch talking (Bleeding Man), and the man with the bushy beard who looks at him but doesn't say a thing (Shaving Man) are in the present.  They are the same two men in that motel room, from many years ago, with Shaving Man sitting on the bed and Bleeding Man sitting by the window.  This is Bleeding Man's memory of the past.

The lady walking up the corridor, into the room, then to the bathroom is the same lady in that old motel with the two men.  The Bleeding Man referenced this sequence as a dream.  What I suspect is that Shaving Man, who was sitting on the bed, actually killed her way back then.  Notice that at the start of the film, there were two blood stains on the edge of the bed.  I think the blood is the lady's, as she was killed by Shaving Man, who then sat down on the bed afterwards and placed his blood-stained hands on the sheets.  

The reason she looks the same in the corridor sequence is that she died, and therefore never grew old, in Bleeding Man's mind's eye.  She must've screamed, as Shaving Man was killing her, and this scream was forever embedded in Bleeding Man's psyche.       

Back to the present, Shaving Man stabs Bleeding Man to death, in order to settle an old score having to do with that fateful day in the motel room.  Maybe they were a criminal trio, and the lady and Shaving Man were a romantic pair.  Maybe the lady and Bleeding Man had sex on the side, which Shaving Man found out about somehow while talking to someone on the phone.  So he was not happy, in the least, and must've killed her straightaway.  Which must've pained him terribly, at the same time, and thus tried to reassure her that everything was going to be okay.

As Bleeding Man sat dying, that nightmarish day replayed itself one last time, as a dream, which in some mind-twisted way was now about the lady discovering him, that is, his dead body.  From the look of the two men in the present, the lady may have also "witnessed" the present-day murder.

Memory and dream, one murder and a second murder, all collide and become fluid in a surreal nightmare for the wounded man.

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