by
Kathryn A. Kopple
With latex-covered fingers tugging hard at my tired mouth, the dentist informed me I had chipped a front tooth. Strange. I hadn’t noticed. So much had happened. COVID happened. We went into lockdown. My mother passed away. My marriage was frayed—and there were my children. My eldest child was a teacher and risked infection every day on the job. I watched my youngest struggle through year one and two of college masking, blood testing and isolating in her cellblock dorm room. A slightly chipped tooth was a blip in comparison, though it did provoke my dentist to say, “I can fix that for you.” I declined. I forgot.
Until, after many years, I went to see It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2012) by Don Hertzfeldt. I left a sold-out screening at the Bourse in Philadelphia in a semi-hallucinatory state to wake the next morning with an overwhelming urge to write Don about my tooth. Only Don, one of our pre-eminent independent animators, could do my tooth justice. He had the vision, the uncanny ability to take a chipped incisor and mine it for all it was aesthetically worth: health, age, appearance, neglect, pain, loss, money… the list ballooning, my tooth floating off into space where Don would turn it into a star, a planet, a flash of radiance. Perhaps the rest of my body would follow. Or as often happens in Hertzfeldt’s films, I remain earthbound, where I grow less round, more ragged—a boiling outline of myself. The line boil is one of Hertzfeldt’s signatures. Creatives across the internet go off in search of tutorials to give their animations that “Hertzfeldt look.” A line boil, to get technical, appears when animation frames are imperfectly aligned causing the image to quiver, wobble, stray. Hertzfeldt uses the line boil to give his hand-drawn stick figures a certain aura, an impression of existing in an energy field that could decimate or dissolve at any moment. Mortality is the uncomfortable truth where Hertzfeldt dwells, though never resigned to fate. Operatic comes to mind. His other mode consists of absurd shorts such as Wisdom Teeth, a film best described as male bonding of a tortuous, oral nature.
Where mortality looms large, say adios to innocence. Hertzfeldt’s characters stumble from frame-to-frame straining to keep their wide-eyed childhood selves from being crushed underfoot like a bug. The small-child-vast-universe trope has earned him comparisons to Franz Kafka, most notably by Marc Savlov of The Austin Chronicle in the article “Beautiful Bitter.” “Hertzfeldt's films have always been weirdly affecting creations, Kafka-esque odes to our fragile human condition… Watch enough of Hertzfeldt's animated existential angst grenades, and you're likely to need a good, stiff drink and a hug from your mom.” True enough. As we drove home after seeing It’s Such a Beautiful Day, the mood in the car was solemn. I distracted my daughter by talking about the audience. Hipsters across the spectrum. Three friends in the row behind us passed the time before the movie discussing cereal. Favorite flavor? Dried strawberries and yogurt clusters. What about chocolate? Yeah, absolutely. Granola? Only when in the mood. Their taste struck me as fussy, sugary, refined. One of the friends remembered being rushed to the hospital because he had choked on Cheerios while watching either Fantasia or Moulin Rouge at age four. The banter was silly, but oh so serious. Ironic. My youngest shrugged. “They are cerealists. Nothing wrong with that.” A generous appraisal given she finds cereal disgusting.
Hertzfeldt’s humor leans hard into anti-comedy. His student film Billy’s Balloon (1998) is a send up of Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 Le ballon rouge. Lamorisse’s film centers on a boy named Pascal and a magical red balloon; together they transcend the terrors of the Parisian playground. Boiled down to its basic components, the film is a love story. In Billy’s Balloon… well, let us just say the balloon takes no prisoners: it is a punching bag bent on revenge. Of course, that is just my take. Viewers have seen in the film a story about everything from child abuse to an “anti-pollution campaign.” Other audiences have found serious humor in the film’s resistance to grand interpretations. Dreadful things happen “just because.” It is the “just because,” a version of Kurt Vonnegut’s catchphrase “so it goes,” that kicks the film into the chasms of the absurd.
For all his merrily, dark pranksterism, Hertzfeldt isn’t solely after laughs. Trauma begets trauma begets trauma. Or, in Hertzfeldt, black and white footage of waves crashing against the rocks. The relentless trauma cycle can make Hertzfeldt tough going even for someone such as myself—a viewer steeped in the dark, twisted arts of surrealists, absurdists, futurists (you name it). I keep a copy of The Theatre of Cruelty by Antonin Artaud on my bedside just in case I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t go back to sleep. I have written long, tedious essays on Isidore Ducasse, the infamous Lautremont, whose Maldoror belongs on the shelf marked “depraved” if ever a book did. Still, it becomes too easy to push Hertzfeldt in Lautreamont’s direction. He is cast as the epitome of “outsider” art, which is a euphemism for mad as a Hatter on multiple anti-psychotics. Hertzfeldt’s storytelling, though, is equal to his vision—and the same world in which we suffer and die is also the world in which we live, love, and love more. As one of his most quoted lines from the acclaimed World of Tomorrow (2015) goes: “Now is the envy of all the dead.” If you have ever felt helpless during a pandemic with a chipped incisor and brain fog from dowsing everything in chlorine, being the envy of the dead is as good as it gets.
