Uncertain transcendence
Shane Carruth’s “Upstream Color”
Upstream Color, the second feature film from writer-director Shane Carruth, realizes an uncompromising vision. It so successfully coheres an immeasurably wide array of shots, phrases, and sounds that it feels elegantly simple. Without a doubt, it defines Carruth as a contemporary auteur, but it does so without postmodern reflexivity: it is surpassingly sincere, a tour de force of unusual tenderness.
The primary story is an interrogation of the obstacles before intimacy created by the singular series of events which shapes each of us: the sequence which establishes our fixed beliefs and identity. It asks: if you were conditioned in exactly the same way as someone else, would intimacy between you become transcendent? The film’s beautiful shots and expressive score move wonderfully towards this ideal, but at once with this movement, it is cautious: afraid that transcendence is illusory, the future uncertain.
This shadow cast on the perfection of intimacy subtly frames a careful intellectual tension. Literary transcendentalism, at the center of the plot, is venerated, but it is also doubted at the edges. Upstream is as much an homage to Walden as a question to it, a tentative implication that true escape is impossible; that even reconditioned, we cannot escape our selves.
It seems within our nature to blame our own faltering on interference outside of our control, and in Upstream, the characters assign blame to the trespassing Sampler, but he is merely an observer: dispassionate, but not responsible. This discernment of the wrong evidence, the inability to attain the truth, is their key failure. They break a cycle, but, by failing to reach the truth, they do not transcend their humanity.
What makes their transcendence impossible is, unsurprisingly, loss. The Thief takes from them everything: their seemingly romantic conditioning is inflicted, forced, not the consequence of choice but of chance. We have no control over what forms us, and we only misdirect the blame. The origins of our identity are as tightly wrapped, intricately influenced, and impossible to locate as a stolen chain of origami.
Despite its demonstration of this inescapability, Upstream Color is not without hope. It contends that even blindly conditioned existence does not preclude the possibility of beauty, innocence, and communion with nature. In this way, it is decidedly ambiguous: a sensitive, graceful, but intentionally incomplete exploration.
