(Not)As Good As It Gets. (An Unconventional Treatment.)
Introduction
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is not a disorder about tidiness or order, or straightening fucking hangers in a closet. That is a cliché furthered by Hollywood still today. OCD is an anxiety disorder given its own spectrum in the DSMV. It is characterized by performing “compulsive” tasks or rituals in order to alleviate bouts of anxiety and penetration of intrusive thoughts. There is entrapment on a constant level and the compulsions reinforce the continued behavior. Tourette’s, anorexia, and trichotillomania are all encircled within the OCD spectrum.
OCD is about steps and enacting things in an order; when it is not done just right it must be done again with a variation of an action added. The new ritual becomes an iteration of the last. None of this should be given to the audience in an overt fashion, but should evoke the shaking anxiety, the compulsion, and the nature of obsession in form. It should chew on the back of the necks of the audience and itch in a corner of their minds long after they’ve seen the film.
This film will not explore the standard view of flicking light switches or washing hands to get clean that is so often the case understood as OCD. It is not quirky or cute, and it doesn’t give you extra special powers of perception. It is destructive and devastating, and causes hopelessness, despair, shame, and self-disdain. How far can a film spill this experience? The form, the rigor, the razor edge of the film structure is the ritual, the compulsion. Locked within it will be the chaos of the pain, crippling anxiety, and panicked entrapment that all more often than not gets seen as something it is not. This is OCD, and it is a horror to those who suffer it.
Structure
This one minute film is divided into 60 one-second “stories”. Compositionally, the film will be a palindrome; the rituals and compulsions of OCD always start over again as iterations. The first 30 images will be mirrored in the second half by images with similarities or the inverse in composition with movement, focus, quality, shape, etc. This may be more literal or abstract. For example, one iteration of an image may be a skull, following the contour down to the left, and the second iteration would be a different round object, traced the opposite way.
I plan to group images by themes in 10 second intervals. Each “story” will appear on the surface of water, a drift. One by one each second will be transitioned away through a splash or a ripple. The in-camera effect and camera movement will give the appearance of each images floating and sinking in and out of the claustrophobic frame. The first 10 “stories” will be full of white-hot images like fire and the sun, starting to burn discomfort at the onset for the audience. The next 10 will be of dirt, dead things, decay, and things that crawl, ramping up the unease further. The third 10 seconds will be cooler images that give a sense of mild relief like water or clouds, which will hold over into the fourth 10 seconds. The dirt images will follow, ramping up again to end with heat.
OCD’s repetition and iteration of rituals will be represented in the original 4k minute being telecined and downgraded through 2k, 1080p, miniDV, hi8, VHS, super8, 16mm, and 35mm, creating an end result through this repetition that is familiar, but in its own way unrecognizable from where the film started.
Visuals
Filming over and over again in a different format, there will be a lot of degrade. Developing the film will cause a lot of inordinacies of color; nothing will be natural. Just in these few choices, the imagery should be off-putting and jarring from the get-go, since it has been put through so many repetitions in creation. I plan to work with a lot of close-ups, macro shots, lens whacking, and sweeping handheld camera movement so that even every day images like a doorknob are obscured into something mammoth and unrecognizable on the screen. Cracked and dry hands become unnatural craggy mountainsides, distorting and dismorphing the world and what are sometimes seen as OCD triggers into a phantasmagorical experience in disorientation and misrepresentation.
Processing
This film will use alternative processing methods, giving the developed film something more of an organic finish. There is a matter of precision in alternative processing, but also a matter of uncertainty about the process. Chemical balance is important just as it is in mental health. The chemicals become an inadvertent metaphor for the every day challenge and maintenance.
Music
The plan is to compose an original score for this film, using various compositions as inspiration as well as a real world soundscape taken from everything from the sound of a bathtub running, tree limbs rustling in the wind, to rain drops on the ground. These two options will be used in tandem, but the style of the music is as yet undecided. One option in consideration is fast-tempoed, slashing and guttural cello-like music, something that may make the pace of the film feel more frantic and add to the overall discomfort in line with the imagery of the film. The other avenue is to use something slower and more melodic, which may make the one-second images feel more lasting. The purpose of this option would be to evoke how the inner turmoil that goes along with mental illnesses does not always get seen.
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