Now, Nemo is alone (Nemo spelled backwards is omen!) in a cavernous luxury apartment filled with objets d'art, with a high ceiling and skylights. The interior lighting is dim. On one wall is a neon sign lit up that says, "all the time that will come after this moment." Rorschach it. Dafoe spends the first several minutes trying to turn off the alarm, which is quickly making him frantic and berserk. A Dafoe in anguish is a hideous strength, add alone, and the viewer begins to hate God for not helping this man. When Dafoe goes off in The Lighthouse, you just know a soul is at risk of losing its essence to the dark energy all around him. Dim light, and a refrigerator that, when you open the door, starts playing the song, "Macarena." Dale a tu cuerpo, macarena, sings the well-built fridge. What kind of universe is this? What really sucks, at first, is Nemo finds the water taps off, and must rely on Macarena for the few water bottles left there, and later the ice cubes, and later the freezer compartment itself, which he licks and slurps at, sometime fingering up the slush like a famished peasant fed morsels of near-dust by Jesus. Why have you forsaken him! I raise my fist at the smug face of God hidden all around us and shake it.
Nemo's locked in; he's come to steal art and the repository has imprisoned him; he can't get out; he could die up there, become just another accident statistic, as Dylan would sing. Nemo finally disconnects the alarm. But a further malfunction of the thermostat means the apartment starts heating up and becoming unbearably hot and, Nemo, being mostly composed of water, begins to evaporate (figuratively speaking). And so, when Macarena sings at him, Nemo takes it, and you with him, as if he is being taunted. He searches the apartment frantically for water, trying the fish tank (yech!), and finally, after many hours, discovers a sprinkler in a mini-garden that comes on regularly to water the meager plants. There is little food to eat; he finds himself eating dog food, caviar and other leftovers inside Macarena to survive. And tank fish that looks like it came from the Disney film, Finding Nemo. Deep!
As it heats up, he strips down -- physically and meta. He seems autistic, then artistic, primitive. Then it turns cold and he's freezing. He makes a costume -- a shaman. He is the will to power. He creates shrines. He draws on a large wall -- images, words, graffiti, symbols. The world is merely representation. He goes on an interior journey of the apartment and himself, stopping to note artworks, looking at them as art rather booty, and he eventually comes across a secret room where he finds the Schiele self-portrait -- in the room is a cadaver on table that terrifies him until he discovers it's faux. WTF?
There's an untitled work of art by Maurizio Cattalan that depicts a balding man in either fucked up feathers or in fetters. It also vaguely looks like the trapped pigeon that Nemo has befriended. Nemo considers the work and says, "I'm gonna free you," and takes it off the wall and lets it drop face first to the floor.
He follows a LatinX maid on the closed circuit system, watching her work, eat, and smoke. He names her Jasmine. He sketches her in a notebook he has. He's deeply interested in her complex banality. He dreams of kissing her. Then he realizes, at one point, that she is working right next door, and all he has to do is get her attention and he'll be free. But the barrier between them is a huge carved hardwood door, like you'd find at a cathedral. He bangs on it. He tries to peck and cut his way through with a jackknife. But to no avail. And she's wearing earphones. She's like Macarena the morning after the nightclub idolatry, back to vacuuming Yanqui's carpets and watering his dogs. Neo is in despair. Then he constructs a makeshift tower to the skylight and over time unbolts the framing. He suffers a howling setback when he slips and breaks his leg and needs to make a splint to continue. My fist goes up and shakes again in empathetic rage. You!!
Nemo's deconstruction of the apartment includes art criticism. There's a painting that depicts a man, his daughter, and a dog. All separated, even seeming alienated. He takes a magic marker and writes comments. He makes all kinds of artworks. He was Dibs In Search of Self, but now he's coming out of his cocoon, an Icarus butterfly needing some freedom. Like a latter day Nebuchadnezzar he leaves a message on the wall for the owner to consider, apologizing for the destruction, and quotes from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:
1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that call'd Body is a portion of Soul discern'd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age
2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3. Energy is Eternal Delight
When he climbs up through the skylight and disappears, he has metamorphosed from a mere thief of someone else's works to an "angel" of sorts; perhaps an artist in full bloom finally, and definitely a nut job.
Inside is about art that is inside us. Archetypal. Shared representation. An extension of the body and its energy. Bio emerging from the quicksand of chemistry, tentative, maybe even miraculous. Losing the miracle and regaining it, paradise regained.
I recommend Inside. I hope you find the self-portrait.
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