Final Images: The Films of Don Hertzfeldt
Ah, L'Amour!, Genre, Lily and Jim, Billy’s Balloon, Rejected, The Meaning of Life, Everything Will Be OK, I’m So Proud of You, Wisdom Teeth, and It’s Such a Beautiful Day.
Until recently, Don Hertzfeldt’s short animated films could be mistaken as nothing more than insidiously macabre comedy. But with the completion of his recent trilogy It’s Such a Beautiful Day (comprising the shorts Everything Will Be OK, I Am So Proud of You, and It’s Such a Beautiful Day), it has become clear to me that Hertzfeldt’s films concern nothing less than the fundamental act of creation. And by creation, I don’t just mean artistic creation. I mean the wresting of a cosmos out of a primordial state of chaos.
Such ambition began humbly. In Ah, L'Amour and Lily and Jim, Hertzfeldt focused on the creation of heterosexual relationships - dating and its attendant problems. In 1995, he resolved the youthful misogyny of Ah, L'Amour with angry cynicism, and the boy and the girl get together. Only two years later, he brought pathos to both sides of the gender divide, sketching in Lily and Jim a relationship which never quite got off the ground. The deadpan pessimism, leavened with the occasional honest insight or cringe-inducing grotesquerie, reminded me of Todd Solondz’s film Happiness.
In 1996's Genre, Hertzfeldt turned his attention to artistic creation, tossing off a self-effacing reflexive faux-pretentious student film in the process. Faced with the tired repetition of genre conventions, Hertzfeldt ruthlessly hybridizes existing genres, giving birth to all manner of comic disaster in the process. Relative to the rabbit drawings on his animation stand, Hertzfeldt comes across in the film like some kind of bored dispassionate deity, mutilating and destroying at his whim. He builds a universe, but it in his own insecurity it displeases him, and he destroys it. Four years later, in 2000's Rejected, he took up the theme of creative stagnation more explicitly, this time using a fictitious persona to explore what might happen were he forced to create advertisements for his livelihood. This time, as he goes mad, his animated universe takes on a life of its own, and to the existential horror of its inhabitants, begins to fall apart. In the absence of God, the cosmos descends into chaos.
In Billy’s Balloon, a sinister inversion of the benevolence of the French classic The Red Balloon, a balloon becomes sentient and begins to torture a hapless lumpy child. (As in his 2010 film Wisdom Teeth, the absurd violence is worthy of a Beckett play.) This drags on humorously for a short while until the frame widens to reveal a blank field full of children and similarly malevolent balloons. What we’re witnessing here is no longer just comedy, but some sort of interaction of new fundamental particles. Protons and electrons have been superseded by battling children and balloons, and from this chaoskampf, a new universe may soon arise.
We see a similar surging sea of humanity in the opening minutes of 2005's The Meaning of Life. A multitude of stick figures stream by, embroiled in quotidian concerns, a great confederacy of triviality made significant by its sheer mass, living, dying, evolving. By the end, a soundless galaxy swirls past. As in The Unanswered Question by Charles Ives, the universe continues, despite our failures to resolve its fundamental questions.
In this same universe we meet Bill, the piteous protagonist of Hertzfeldt’s magnum opus, the It’s Such a Beautiful Day trilogy. As Bill goes about his daily routines, the world swirls around him, rushing formlessly and incomprehensibly past, torturing him with all manner of strangeness and, at times, banality. Hertzfeldt frequently splits the frame up into many smaller jostling regions, indicating the extent to which Bill is beset on all sides, facing incoherent cruelty from without while crippled within by a mangled mind which cannot make sense of any of it. The story of his life is simultaneously particular and universal. We identify with Bill immediately, and we fear for him even while Hertzfeldt coaxes dark laughter out of us. But in It’s Such a Beautiful Day, the universe does not spin out of control, nor do its secrets remain forever inaccessible. Rather, in act of aching beauty, Hertzfeldt rescues Bill from the tumult, cradling the audience in the poetic fantasy that perhaps, at the end of the universe, we may yet be able to know what it all means. Even as all the stars go out, our hearts fill with light.
August 1 is Don Hertzfeldt’s birthday. Happy birthday, Don. Thank you for your passion and your tireless hand. May the universe never become too small for your vision. And if it does, please take us with you.
Essay by Max Tohline, in collaboration with TheFinalImage.
