I am not pretending that Skew is a great film, or even a good film. I certainly don't like the characters. The idea behind the film is trite, at first blush. It's yet another found footage film about a story that normally wouldn't have found its way onto a camera. The characters are the usual unlikeable jerks we find in the spotted history of found footage films. The camera work's intentionally spotty with the crucial information "accidentally" finding its way into the frame. The artificiality of the genre is such that I found myself falling into the old rut. I was in "the trance".
And then ice-cold water was dumped on my head.
And then the movie ended.
What just happened??? This didn't go the way I thought it was going to go.
So, I started over. And found this, right at the front, waiting for me.
"All physical bodies are made entirely of an infinite number of ghostlike skins, one on top of another. Photography has the power to peel away the topmost of these layers. Exposure to the camera actually diminishes the self."
And then, halfway through the film, the following monologue:
" If my parents are going to rob me of my memories then I'm going to make up my own, and I can shoot what I want, and then I can pick and choose, and I can take it home, AND I CAN PLAY WITH THE FOOTAGE. The trick that I've learned is that you just gotta keep shooting. Just let it roll. CAUSE YOU NEVER KNOW WHEN YOU'RE GONNA GET THAT RIGHT SHOT..." (emphasis MINE)
So, a few things were just established.
This tape isn't "raw". It has been manipulated.
There is an editor, who doesn't intend anyone else to see this film.
The footage is out of sequence, deliberately.
Something is deeply wrong with Simon.
On point the first, the footage has been manipulated. We're shown that Simon never stopped filming, with Richard going through the tapes and making fun of Simon for constantly filming. Given that the movie is 80 minutes long and that dozens of tapes were recorded. This gets all the more disconcerting one realizes that the footage from the police station was probably stolen. This means it's likely that someone added the "dead" people, the ghosts, in post. Did the dead people actually show up? You can't see them on rewind, according to the editor, and large portions of the movie have been rewound over. The movie is consistent with its own "rules", so the question now becomes how the "ghosts" wound back up on the footage. Or it could just be that the editor is making something to assuage their own guilt. Normally I wouldn't go in for such a thing, but the text of the movie openly says the filmer will go back and change the footage later.
The editor doesn't intend doesn't anyone to see this film. Richard and Eva are clearly being shown in the worst possible light they can be, with the fun/vulnerable scenes showing nasty/petty sides to both of them, while trying to show Simon in the best possible light. Simon is always the nice guy, always the goofy one, always the victim. It almost starts to resemble the natural process of memory... except this has VFX and music edited in. It's artificially made to look natural, like the genre!
The footage is most definitely out of sequence. There are interspersed cuts of the world's largest chairs, bowls, knives, and don't forget the forks! Certain scenes don't make linear sense. They'll jump back and forth between different lights, soundscapes, at the drop of a dime. The footage is pieced together to make something linear, make something that resembles a normal existence... by chopping apart a few key scenes and peppering them throughout the movie.
Now, at this point it should be obvious that, if Simon is the editor, there's something psychologically off about him. But when I say wrong, I don't mean like that, I mean there's something existentially wrong with him. His parents wouldn't take pictures of him. The movie ends with the only picture of Simon known. He has manufactured his version of terrible events and put his name and face to it. Whatever actually happened, whatever it was, Simon wanted the first picture of him to be associated with this series of horrifying events.
What kind of person would want to do that?
And that's why I can't stop thinking about this movie.
The movie asked me a question, which I find compelling.
I couldn't do merry-go-rounds as a kid. Under any speed. I'd get green so fast that I never got any joy from the experience. I could practically fly up to the top of playgrounds and the deep ends of pools from the tender age of two, so I was by no means a tender child. If anything, I blazed circles of flame around other kids. They were standing still. From the high dive to the bottom of the pool, I remember the world as motion. As wind. As rush. The world was meant to be experienced as motion, as something to be joined in with.
But you put me on a merry go round? Oh man, get me off. Now.
Same with cars. If I'm not driving, I start feeling a bit green, sometimes very quickly.
The world felt still when I moved. So, as a child, I moved all the time. It also helped me process all the nonsense going on: rapes, beatings, fallings-out, and the list could just go on and on. Whatever it was, I kept moving. Whatever happened, I just kept jumping and vaulting and running and sparring and whatever it took.
Until one day.
When I just couldn't do it anymore.
I couldn't move fast enough. No matter how fast I moved, no matter what I did, the spinning kept going, both inside and outside of me. At the age of thirteen I felt something break. And then I realized: I had to find a way to weather it.
So, I first had to figure out what exactly what I was running into. It didn't take long to realize that this nauseating experience was simply time. And time was apparently thought of as linear: one event went to another went to another to another. Each moment was unique. Something to treasure. Time was progression.
Out of all the lies I have been told, this is one of the most destructive. It has taken me well over twenty years to learn just how wrong it is. The experience of time isn't linear, it is cyclical. You are cyclical. You do not change. Your understanding of you may change, but you do not change.
Well, sorta, we'll get back to that in a minute. Just put a pin in "We don't change".
Every time, over the last twenty-three years, that I have thought "Ah, that's over and done with", I have been wrong. For, you see, the world (and therefore time) revolves, bringing us back to the same experiences of ourselves and of the world. History repeats. It takes longer to come back to the same world events under a different glamor, but they're the same events, whether you want to admit or not. Now, the usual brainwashing rot is to tell people to ignore this feeling of revolution, this sickening realization that yes, indeed, you have been here before, yes indeed, you didn't get away from it. "It's a new day! Don't worry! You're different this time." You're taught to look at the ephemeral qualities, not the archetypical substance of what it is you're encountering.
The gullible and/or brave manage. The gullible just find any of the ephemeral and inconsequential details they can to trick themselves. The brave throw themselves onto the merry-go-round, blocking out everything else until they finally collapse in on themselves, and if they're very lucky they'll get wise to the grift. If they're not, they'll become cowards/honest people. Sorry, brave and gullible, the cowards are right this time around.
The honest and/or cowardly start abusing substances, to dull the internal nausea, all the while everyone is telling them that they're progressing, not spinning! This level of dissonance between what you're told and what you experience usually creates bitter addicts who, if you get them into a corner and put a gun to their head, will tell you what's really going on. And don't worry, they'll usually get very poetic and specific about what they're going through. But you have to listen, without judgment. They all say the same thing. It's 100%. Sorry, brave and gullible, the cowards are right this time around.
"But wait, people change!" the brave and gullible will say. "I've seen it! With mine own eyes! And that's progress! That's linear! There's a clear change that makes that person different from what they were before!" Is that really true? Are we really counting the incidentals, the surface level stuff that doesn't mean anything at all? The inner experience of change has nothing to do with linearity at all. We've got enough universal wisdom to know that. The interior experience of change isn't that of linearity. At all.
No, things get quiet. Real quiet. And then something happens to you. One minute you're one way, and the next you really are something different. It's like this odd wink in time and presto! Well, if you're Christian you know it's not a "something", it's a SomeOne. God changes you. He acts based upon what you have sincerely tried (and failed!) to do. He sees the failures and your insistence on not backing down. And then He changes you, as much as you can stand. He'd do the whole thing at once, but there aren't many who can do a whole hog change like that. So, He watches you go 'round the carousel, with the unscrewed horse, and waits until you have built up enough hope, and then He changes you as much as you can stand. But you have to actively work at hope.
So, the thing that's being called "linear" is a combination of three different factors, one of which is outside of time. If you wanna oversimplify that to linear, that's your decision.
But that's reductive, unhelpfully so.
It doesn't describe the experience that people are actually going to go through.
People are going to come away with the worst possible idea of what the human experience, nevermind of God saving them, actually looks like.
