Video Vision
‘I’ve accepted that I’m male, maybe you should accept the fact that you’re turning into an obsolete entertainment device, all I know is that you’re making my dysmorphia feel normal.’
For the most part, Michael Turney’s film is a sweet, engaging indie drama about a woman perhaps entering into a relationship with a transman and the mental adjustments she has to make to go along with her partner’s physical changes – it’s well-played by Andrea Figliomeni as Kibby, who works in a small business where obsolete formats are transferred to digital, and Chrystal Peterson as Gator, who has talent as an artist and needs to get some of her Dad’s 1990s anti-tech punk songs rescued from tape, and Turney’s chatty dialogue feels real even as the characters awkwardly navigate difficult territory while trying to be kind.
However, also dropped off at Video Vision – which is run by old-school tapehead Rodney (Shelley Valfer) – is an obsolete top-loading video recorder that has somehow become a conduit for a black goo which channels Nietzsche’s theories about time and quite a bit of material leftover from Videodrome. Kibby gets the goo on her hand and has nightmares which sometimes have a video blur look. She also sicks up a length of tape which features Dr Analog (Hunter Kohl), a combination of Cronenberg’s Brian O’Blivion and Max Headroom with Pinhead and Freddie Krueger (or maybe the digital demon of Brainscan). Bubbling along somewhere is a plot about Dr Analog’s schemes, which included hooking his daughter (Liz Livingston) up to the machine for dubious purposes. It roughly parallels the body horror trope transformation Kibby suffers with the more positive, if not unproblematic experience Gator has as a boy born in a female body.
It’s very small-scale, but nicely written and played – Figliomeni, in particular, makes an impression as a woman trying to readjust to new realities … in a zeitgeisty fashion, Kibby and Gator feel that everything has been off-kilter since the pandemic began. Though the hook is the weirdzone stuff, which evokes TerrorVision or Ring as often as Cronenberg, the film works because it’s kind of nice to hang out with Kibby, Gator and Rodney for a while. In a telling bit, Gator admits she’s only pretended not to recognise the famous Nietzsche quote on Kibby’s shirt (yes, the one from The Abyss and about a dozen other movies) because she doesn’t want to seem too clever for Kibby to like – but it’s refreshing to see a movie where characters chat in an unembarrassed way about technology, old movies (including a debate about the 1986 Pamela Segal vehicle Willy/Milly), culture and philosophy without constantly distancing themselves from the material for fear of being tagged pretentious.
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