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Language:
English
Series:
Part 28 of sil's fanvids
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Festivids 2023
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Published:
2023-12-27
Completed:
2024-04-17
Words:
759
Chapters:
2/2
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42
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53
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6
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391

[fanvid] Goodbye, Honey, You Call That Gone

Summary:

Art, childhood, and the reframing of memory in Jordan Peele's films. How do you survive a spectacle?

Notes:

Contains flashing lights at 1:30-1:33 and quick cuts from 2:00-2:02.

Chapter 1

Chapter Text

Chapter 2: Vidder's Commentary

Summary:

I think this is a vid that relies a lot on viewer interpretation, which is why this is in its own separate chapter, but I wanted to provide some of my own interpretation.

Chapter Text

This is my first entirely instrumental vid. When I’m planning for a vid, I generally filter through a bunch of music to find something that lyrically clicks with me, and that process was not working here (in large part because I didn’t know ahead of time what the vid was saying). Then I heard Jake Blount play this, and I really liked the way the banjo and the dancing interact, so I tried it with that, and really liked the way the repetition offers structure. The title was also something I quite liked, as nothing that happens over the course of the video is really done or gone.

I’ve seen all three of the movies enough times to have a general idea of what images show up consistently. The one theme that is fairly consistent across all three films is that art (very loosely defined) is powerful; it is vital to the survival of the protagonist but can also be a catalyst for destruction (Chris’s photography, Addie’s ballet, and Ricky’s acting). I ended up largely cutting the Haywood siblings from this vid because it was easier to work with three narratives instead of two (and I made a vid on them last year and didn’t want to retread that same ground), though they also fit this theme.

My original outline was “child protagonist - life at beginning of movie - rising tension (unsettling encounters at night) - family comes together - antagonist - survival,” which was not entirely followed but allowed me to get started.

I opened with the years because I really wanted to ground this in early life; how something defining happens and you carry it with you. There’s significantly less footage of Chris’s childhood, so I ended up putting it here at the beginning so the audience would know that these are the three storylines we’re following.

This transitions into symbolic images, which will end up being greatly destructive — Hands Across America, the shoe that Ricky has preserved, and the Armitage grandfather who lost to Jesse Owens.

I deliberated for quite a while over where to put this shot of Red’s* reflection in the TV screen, and considered moving it to the ending just before the shot of Em on the movie set, but decided that it worked better here. Then we meet all our protagonists again, primarily adults but faceless to increase continuity, which transitions into their art. After they have this extension of themselves, we’re able to see their reflections (both literally and metaphorically).

The reflection section is one of my favorites, as there’s a lot of different kinds of reflections happening here (namely “here is what I am deliberately showing you about me,” “here is what I cannot help but show you about me,” and “here is what you are seeing”) and this also doubles as rising tension, as people (and Lucky) see what they aren’t meant to and the audience begins to notice things are going wrong.

This then heads into the “unwillingly thinking about the past” section, which begins with Chris swatting the mosquito. We get the shots of their faces here (as children and adults) because we’re now in their heads. They are caught in the memory and so are we, as we head into another symbolic section, which asks “how do you justify this to the world?” Red becomes a symbol of a way out and Ricky sells a sanitized way in.

This dovetails into a section that is more-or-less “here is the violence and that’s not where this story ends,” as the three animal deaths** occur, the spectators rush in, and the protagonists look back. This is a moment of understanding and (aside from Ricky) escape. The faux-neutral and uncomprehending eye of the camera continues to offer a narrative, but Em talks back to it. This is something Red isn’t able to do as a child with her reflection in the blank television, and it’s something the other protagonists also struggle to do. Although it may not ultimately change the [narrative being produced], being able to explain yourself — and put yourself into a coherent narrative with a past and a future — is a place of catharsis.

(And then we end with the title cards because I thought it was neat and I like rabbits.)

*Functionally Red and Addie are the same person here, for Personal Transgender Reasons that are not actually implied by the film but I can’t not think about.
**I wanted to stay away from overt physical violence against humans because I wanted to focus on the violence of the gaze.

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