A Dinner Party, VR, and True/False
Watching Dinner Party in VR was a truly remarkable experience. I can honestly say I have never experienced anything like it. I believe VR will be the future of entertainment due to the immersive nature of the medium. This is, of course, assuming that people still want immersive entertainment and not just something to play in the background while they scroll through Twitter on their phone. For those of you who aren’t familiar with VR, it is a way of experiencing a movie or video game in a fully immersive three-dimensional computer generated environment using a headset with built-in motion controls. Read more about the platform here if you’d like more information.
Dinner Party was playing at the True/False Film Festival in Columbia, Missouri this past weekend. The film officially debuted at Sundance 2018, according to Skybound’s official website. Before heading to sunny Columbia, the film made a pit stop at the Tribeca Film Festival in April of last year where audiences were amazed by the immersion of the experience along with some other great films that were shown. However, watching this film in Columbia, Missouri made the experience like no other.
True/False Film Festival has been going strong in Columbia, Missouri for 15 years. Its focus is documentaries, and it does a pretty good job of staying on theme. From the harrowing Midnight Traveler to the controversial The Commons (read about it here), the True/False lineup was strong this year. While the weather may have caused some to stay away (especially with freezing temperatures all weekend and snow on Sunday), the turnout wasn’t all that different from previous years. The vibe of the festival changed slightly due to the weather with people usually enjoying CoMo culture and local businesses. Regardless, the show must go on, and lots of people agreed as they lined up to watch various documentaries.
Dinner Party is about the first nationally known case of alien abduction in the United States. The couple abducted is Barney and Betty Hill who “were on their way home from a trip Niagara Falls when they noticed an unusual light in the sky.” The couple replays their hypnotism to experience at a dinner party that they are hosting, only to mentally relive their experiences which causes the dinner guests to show themselves out. It is a very psychedelic experience going through what each of the married couple went through on the fateful night that they were abducted and returned to their home. The story is less of a horror story, but instead it gives “us a glimpse into how two people ended up with vastly different memories of a mysterious event.”
Going through Betty’s experience, it was like an acid trip where everything was butterflies and rainbows. She felt weightless, nothing mattered, everything was good. It’s for this reason she decides to replay it in the first place, wanting to talk about and relive the experience. The abduction, which she insists actually took place, was overall good. The same cannot be said for Barney.
In Barney’s portion, we are met with screams from the recording during the hypnosis session. It was unsettling as a viewer to hear that torment in your ear while watching him trying to escape from what looked like hell in the Matrix. Giant pillars of rock block his path anyway he tries to run. There is no escape for Barney. There is no hope for Barney. Barney is in hell. (Some suggest this as an allegory for race in 1961 America. I’m inclined to agree with them.)
When we pull out of Barney’s vision and lock on his distraught face with tears rolling down both cheeks, this was a powerful moment. In fact, it was THE moment of the entire experience. I felt for Barney deep in my soul when I looked into his pain-stricken eyes. A marvelous performance from the actor. Bravo. Bra-vo.
While it was immersive (I’m a particularly big fan of the effects on the audio playing right in my ear), I hope for more in the future of VR. I felt like besides the action I was supposed to be watching, there wasn’t a whole lot of action going on. Nothing hidden, nothing more that I should look for the next go around. It felt very much like a linear film that I wouldn’t gain anything from watching again unlike Black Mirror’s Bandersnatch on Netflix. The interactive nature of that program made it enjoyable. While each entity is going for something different, both are pushing the envelope, and I hope that one day the two can be reconciled to give us a unique reimagining of what it is like to watch television/movies.
