FUR, INVASIVE SPECIES, and desire unchained
A thank-you to films that let longing go wild
by Issra Marie Martin
This review is published as part of the Youth Critics Initiative V, a collaborative mentorship incubator between the 27th Reel Asian Film Festival and TACLA.
I’ve been trying to make a list of the first films I remember watching to better understand the stories I grew up with. My recollection is disappointingly spotty. There are the Barbie movies on the VCR — Barbie of Swan Lake, Barbie as the Princess and The Pauper. A special edition of 13 Going on 30, gifted to me by a classmate in a pink DVD case that glittered and smelled faintly of bubblegum. Other forms of media come to me more easily. I remember the dubbed anime available on cable TV — Sailor Moon, Inu Yasha, Naruto, Pokemon, Cardcaptor Sakura — and remember the electric feeling of watching scenes that barely passed my household’s filter for “adult-themed” content, which had a low tolerance for kissing, characters that professed their “like” for each other, and the words “damn” or “heck.” (Violence was alright unless it was excessively bloody.) And because I grew up with more music than I did film and TV combined, I can effortlessly recall the love ballads that played on my parents’ CDs. I soaked up their lyrics for years and then learned to repeat them with the help of our karaoke machine.
If the narratives that surrounded me as a child portrayed any sort of longing, it was in narrow service of upholding relationships between men and women. Within a conservative Catholic upbringing that avoided discussing matters of the flesh, “desire” was precariously balanced on the edge of sin and permissibility. I eventually conflated the language of desire with the language of heteronormative romance and inherited a sanitized understanding of it that demonized its heady, unpredictable influence. I didn’t know that one could ache for friendship, family, belonging, legacy, influence, or justice, and see that they were forms of desire all the same.
Because I didn’t realize that yearning could take other forms, I couldn’t see the connection between desire and other, less “delightful” affects, like desperation, anguish, and impulsiveness. The Disney villains whose yearnings expressed themselves in “unsightly” ways — a tantrum, a deranged smile, maniacal laughter — scared me because they were so different from what I had learned to be “appropriate” shows of wanting. This colouring of desire has only held me back because the things I have learned to want and how to ask for them are connected to the ways I have been taught to be good — a meek, obedient daughter who expresses her desires only as she has been taught. I’ve judged myself for wanting and I’ve judged the way others want, playing into the Western, patriarchal structures that both stymie and fetishize the desire of young Asian women. It’s like I grew up to give the world’s most boring karaoke performance, singing only as the lyrics appear and to the exact tune of flat MIDI tones.
Detangling these views of desire from my own longings is an agonizing process, but with an invaluable reward: realizing that my capacity to yearn has been expansive all along. Sometimes I pine for specific things, goals, or realities; sometimes I put in a vacuous request to the sky. Often, I feel most of it is unattainable: I want stability, certainty, reassurance, opportunity. I want to be even more fortunate than I currently am. I want to be surrounded by love.
I attended my first Reel Asian when the triumph from completing my MA was beginning to fade. My post-graduate preoccupation was to regain my footing in the suburbs of my home city, adjust to a tenuous job market, and nurture my work as a budding art writer, all at the same time. Those goals asked everything of the world, and everything of me. Reel Asian turned out to be a perfect place for me to show up, yearnings in tow. Halfway through the festival, I realized that many of the screenings, panels, and conversations were also driven by desire, ambitions ignited and fulfilled by the promise of film. At a time when I felt both obsessed with my aspirations and powerless in realizing them, I saw two films that freely explored the sheer force of desire and what it could achieve, whether or not their characters secured an ideal outcome: FUR, the 2022 experimental animation by Zhen Li, traces a schoolgirl’s fermenting feelings for her crush as she sits behind him in biology class. INVASIVE SPECIES, written and directed by Annie Ning, follows the complexes and cravings of young sound artist Maggie (Emily May Jampel) while she navigates the social politics of her first artist residency. The overwhelming desire to be seen fuels both the disfigured reverie in FUR and Maggie’s eventual rupture in INVASIVE SPECIES, unsettling visual and sonic boundaries in the pressurized package of a short film.
FUR: butterflies gone bad
A biology teacher holds up a tiny hair from a fly being dissected in class. The eyes and nose of a school crush are peeled from his face. A pair of giant chopsticks inches toward lovers who have abandoned their dinner for each other. Things are picked and plucked for examination in FUR. Li animates her adolescent protagonist’s fervour with smudgy, charcoal illustrations, while disembodied limbs and floating hairs illustrate what it’s like to (quite literally) get under another person’s skin. Her choice of sound design is minimal and detailed when it needs to be, amplifying the intimate details of a classroom daydream. For seven intense minutes, I was swept into the pent-up desires of a schoolgirl. I was horrified, and I was delighted.
The opening fantasies in FUR are sweet and saturated with pure, juvenile yearning. Early in the film, the protagonist joins her crush to hang halfway outside the window and watch a crescent moon rise over the school. But FUR isn’t just a fanciful joyride of its protagonist’s feelings, which are restless and powerful, deforming and digesting the bodies in her imagination. In the next scene, a spread of vegetables, soup, and half-eaten fruit rots on a dinner table. It’s the only part of the film where Li opts for an actual time lapse over illustration, and she punctuates the footage with the sound of wet kisses, pushing realism into excess. The kisses come from another room, where two bodies sit on a sofa and wrap around each other like a cord. As their faces warp into one, a fuzzy, white orb emerges from their melded form, and a pair of chopsticks enters the frame to pull at the thing. It stretches, snapping like rubber, and the fever dream collapses. The couple, the living room, and the dinner cave in on themselves. Entire frames liquefy. When the protagonist eventually reappears, she is tiny. Her classmates loom large and peer at her from floating windows, spectators of her disorientation. She finds her crush, and a few heartbeats pass before she peels the nail of his middle finger to slide underneath it. It’s only a second or two of body horror, but I thought it was the most unsettling part of the film. The scene has stuck with me for months now as if I left the theatre with a version of the protagonist under my skin.
Hiding under a blanket provides a sense of safety, even if it doesn’t actually make the monsters go away. The fingernail of a crush can be like that, too — the protagonist’s cloak from the wildfires of longing, fashioned from the very object of her desires. And yet, even as she hides from her feelings and the judgment of her peers, she continues to fiddle in her crush’s direction. Later in the film, the protagonist tries to lick her crush’s face while their disembodied heads are tossed in the air. I laughed in the theatre because her messy, oscillating behaviour is understandable: she’s stuck in a stuffy classroom and must remain tantalizingly close to the person she likes. In her personal, torturous merry-go-round, her crush is the source of both anxiety and comfort. In reality, he might be a little indifferent to her, but in her imagination, he is the only giant without a window, the only one not examining her. This conjured version of her crush is her refuge from everyone else’s prying eyes.
The feverishness in FUR suggests something unpleasant about the way the protagonist experiences her feelings. The attraction she feels is past the point of stale; it doesn’t put a skip in her step, nor does it embolden her to approach him. Her daydreams escalate from the slow, attentive deconstruction of her crush’s face to the dismemberment of the entire class, as if her unfulfilled longing is eating away at itself. While FUR is a firecracker of a short, its frenzy is a veil for the disenchantment and sadness of unrequited love. When the protagonist looks to the sky at the end of the film, the reflection of the moon in her iris dissolves and escapes from the corner of her eye — a tear shed from the remains of her fantasies.
Surreal elements provide a splash pad for desire to make a fuss against circumstance — in this case, a potentially unrequited crush, a classroom intolerably filled with other people. Desire is depicted in FUR as a reaching, grabby force, which is why forms are stretched past their limits in the film. In the end, unanswered heartache doesn’t look too different from a mould colony: it is all-consuming and decays everything it touches, even its own fancy. Though the protagonist runs from her imagination-gone-awry, I appreciate that the film doesn’t hold back from its subject matter. We get to see the rot and fuzz of her feelings, and they are playful, disturbing, tender, and persistent. FUR remains honest as it explores the expression and anxieties of yearning. It’s an exhilarating trip, and perhaps even a comfort for viewers who have been sitting on their longings for an extended period of time.
INVASIVE SPECIES: a study of the starving artist
At the beginning of INVASIVE SPECIES, Maggie eats small. Physically, she is compacted, sandwiched between two other artists. She keeps her elbows narrowed while she slices her food, and even when she switches to using her hands, her bites remain polite and indiscernible. Her mouth barely opens for a strawberry; her fist covers her mouth as she chews. When the table of artists raises their glasses in a toast, Maggie’s cup is stainless steel, its contents hidden amongst clear goblets.
After a few nights at the farmhouse residency, Maggie devours the communal produce in the kitchen while everyone else is asleep. Her face fills the screen as she bites into raw, dirt-encrusted carrots, a cucumber, and a yellow bell pepper. In the morning, she is disoriented and covered in soil. Director Annie Ning spares no sonic detail while Maggie attempts to cover her tracks: against an increasing staccato of strings, you can hear the dampness of torn vegetables swept off the kitchen tile, the moisture of soil and saliva as she spits into the bathroom sink, and her muffled cough against the toilet bowl.
INVASIVE SPECIES is a portrait of the aspiring artist’s shadow self. Though Maggie has been afforded a seat at the table, inner and outer voices alike unsettle her feeling of belonging. Her hunger for acknowledgement grows during the residency, and it’s only in secret that we see a glimpse of this appetite — she craves a little bit of everything, all for herself. No one else is awake to see, and Maggie herself might even be acting in her sleep, giving her desires free rein in the night.
Maggie is the next subject of gossip shortly after her clandestine meal. In the garden, her recording equipment captures flies, sheep, and whispers:
“She rarely talks to anybody…”
“I can’t imagine… do something like that…drawing attention to herself.”
“She’ll get there.”
“Eventually, maybe.”
“And her work is pretty, it’s nature. It’s not brave, it’s boring.”
There’s a promise of confrontation right then in Maggie’s brisk rise from the grass. But she acts instead at the following dinner, in front of the whole group. While everyone converses as normal, Maggie eats with her bare hands. She reaches into serving dishes and other people’s plates, grabbing the cup of the man who interrupted her a few nights before. The table falls silent as Maggie eats big, eats wide, and leans into everyone’s space. No one stops her from taking a bite out of every dish, including a yet-untouched chicken, which she drops carelessly onto the table before leaving the room. With this spree, Maggie spoils everyone’s meal and endangers her social place among the other artists. It’s a public transgression of the very first rule she is reminded of at the residency — that consumption should not take place unless it is shared.
When I think about Maggie stuffing herself with freshly harvested vegetables in the dark, I’m tempted to describe her actions as grotesque, especially compared to the other artists who dine merrily with each other at prescribed mealtimes. But she isn’t the only character to consume in this way. As tension builds in the film, the usual dinner scene is replaced with a montage of white mouths that chew and pucker and suck seasoning off of fingers. Microphones capture the squelching sounds of mastication, which are combined with angles shot close enough to catch the moisture around the artists’ lips. It’s gross. It’s also not that far off from the way Maggie eats at night and during the final dinner. The difference is that the other artists eat at the table, with a shameless comfort that comes from age, experience, and artistic clout. They eat with self-assurance, in bodies that have inhabited this earth and produced work for a while, in bodies that already feel welcome. Everyone is a consumer in INVASIVE SPECIES — the question is, who is invited to devour as they are?
I could say that Maggie’s arrival results in an upset to the ecosystem of the residency, that she is the invasive species of the film. However, the residency is overwhelmingly populated with older, white artists who speak over land acknowledgements and criticize the work of emerging artists. According to this majority, to be recognized as an artist is to take up space: flood conversations with criticism, land multiple residencies, and then take issue with other people who land multiple residencies. Maggie, on the other hand, is timid and struggles to describe her artistic practice to those around her, even when others attempt to make small talk with her. She might eat from the communal gardens when she’s not supposed to, but she is also surrounded by strange restrictions, hushed conversations, and competitive, exclusionary attitudes. Their dominion over the art world precludes Maggie’s presence and crowds her out from the beginning.
When Maggie’s episode elicits unexpected applause from the rest of the artists, it’s because she has assimilated into their invasive herd, at least through her consumptive habits. After her outburst, they follow her outside, considering her as if she were an artwork. For a split second, their evaluation is uncertain, but then a single clap turns into slow, buzzing applause and nods of approval for the young woman who just stole bites from everyone’s food. It’s cathartic to see Maggie finally express herself when she struggles to do so for most of the film. But how turbulent it is to realize that your presence is encouraged only according to norms that have been set long before you.
I would have felt monstrous in that farmhouse, too. In fact, as an early-career cultural worker in an increasingly precarious arts landscape, monstrosity often feels like the most comfortable suit for my desires. I grow prickly with each rejected pitch or job application. I often wonder if I’ve sprouted horns or if my desperation throws a scent across the room. There have been months I don’t hear anything at all, not even a message starting with a “We regret to inform you,” and during those months I’m especially convinced that I’m only screaming into a void. In the worst of these times, my desire is ugly. It fuels me, and it burns me. I clap for Maggie at the end of INVASIVE SPECIES not because she’s ruined dinner for everyone, but because she’s embraced her appetite. For a moment, watching her eat whatever she wanted at that table soothed my own snarling hunger.
Like Maggie, there’s a part of me that longs to be seen, my existence assured and acknowledged by the outside. It’s a longing that perseveres even if its object is compromising (why crave to be part of an exclusionary art world?) or just plain unattainable (why unravel for someone who seems indifferent to your existence?). I don’t want to judge the desires of a starving artist and a schoolgirl terrified of her reverie because I feel a kinship with these characters. Not because their stories show me some uncomplicated wish fulfillment, but because they bridge the cognitive dissonance I’ve felt towards my desires and their appearances. This dissonance causes me to turn on my own longing and recoil from its painfulness and intensity. I don’t think my experiences with desire are singular, though there is a loneliness to prolonged yearning. I suspect that others have also been forced inside themselves at times; it is belittling to feel like you demand too much from the world. FUR and INVASIVE SPECIES, then, are bold examples and good company. At the center of their disfiguring, ravenous narratives are young women who would upend everything if they could, just to answer, “How much do you want this?” I can’t imagine a friendlier face.
Issra Marie Martin (she/her) is a writer and arts worker from Manila and Toronto. She has taken up a variety of community-oriented roles in Toronto, Montreal, and Hanoi, ranging from museum operations, youth programming, and podcast production. Marie recently completed an MA in Cultural Studies & Critical Theory and currently serves on the Editorial Committee for Peripheral Review. She’s especially curious about affective elements in contemporary art, craft (especially textiles), and the entire world of art & cultural criticism.
IG: issssraaaaa
