Me: Don Hertzfeldt’s entropic musical short is out of this world
Don Hertzfeldt turns an unrealised musical collaboration into a wordless animated dystopia that blends inter-dimensional compositions with the broken-puzzle poetry of Mulholland Dr. (2001).
After the interior voyages, the pathos and speculative power of his narrative triptychs It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2012) and World of Tomorrow (2015-20), Don Hertzfeldt’s non-verbal musical short ME rebounds into the cacophonous socio-cosmic satire of his similar-length fantasia The Meaning of Life (2005). Its wordlessness is pointed: this is a film about communication breakdown and its upshots – solipsism, abandonment, blight, fascism – set in a contemporary landscape of high tech and low morality. Hertzfeldt’s signature line figures (bean-shaped here) speak in emoji if at all and the film too is his most coded, gnomic and perhaps intuitive; both on the nose and deeply cryptic.
Six music selections give the piece its movements. In the first, set to one of two Brent Lewis percussion tracks, a father shuns his family to invent a self-reflecting telecoms system that accelerates self-absorption as well as the obliteration of public space and time. Hastening to death, he’s heedless of the rot about him – tableaux of beggary, disease and state violence recall British animator Phil Mulloy’s similarly barbed skits. Hertzfeldt also blitzes the frame with spots and scratches – echoes of the entropic scarring of Bill Morrison’s Decasia (2002) perhaps more than the dancing abstract animation of Norman McLaren, though you could think of the movie as McLaren’s Post Office promo Love on the Wing (1939) given a dystopian update by Philip K. Dick.
Meanwhile, to a Chopin berceuse, the man’s spurned partner births a giant eye which, unwatched, floats up to space – shades of Miyazaki’s buoyant warawara babies in The Boy and the Heron (2023), but also the uncanny horror of Eraserhead (1977). Hertzfeldt reconceived ME from an abortive musical collaboration, and the film also has the broken-puzzle poetry of David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. (2001). Most indelible are the final movements of regeneration and transfiguration with a free-floating nervous system, wandering some of Hertzfeldt’s densest inter-dimensional compositions accompanied by Joan Sutherland singing Balfe’s ‘I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls’. I’m out of words.
► Me is now available to stream on Vimeo.