Pitfall.

July 30 2007. From IMDb. Original text left unaltered. No comment.

Titled: I say yes.

There's something in the rhythm of Pitfall that I find absolutely compelling. I like movies that don't take the cowardly way out, that don't sacrifice the feeling for the plot. And when you deal with these subjects (death, man's place in the modern world, morality, liberty) it's easy to picture them as plot elements, thousands of years of storytelling has simplified and distorted these ideas and you begin to see what doesn't exist except as a concept in archetypal forms. You form an image of what actually isn't concrete. You begin to think you can identify loss because you know Miss Havisham, and you can place loss into that, and regret becomes Terry Malloy, and rage becomes Inspector Javert. This is what a great story does: it animates concepts. That's art, don't get me wrong, and it can be brilliant, I think it simplifies the world but I don't think it's in any way simple. A great story has the unbelievable capacity of infecting your own life narrative, of weaving its own themes into your everyday. But I think it exists separately and as its own abstraction.

For the ineffable, the unidentifiable, and the unobservable (what I experience the most in my life, usually experiencing epiphany as hindsight), a greater abstraction is necessary. I think that the modern world cannot be defined by the ways of the old, I agree with everyone who has said this (Kandinsky and Pollock spring to my mind). And with Pitfall, perhaps the rhythm was a confluence of emotion, I felt like the film worked as a whole, like it operated for the purpose of abstractly expressing the abstract, and so I felt it, I experienced Pitfall.

The multiple plot developments are suggestions. Any Lynch fan could identify this tactic immediately. You give the audience some of what they want, and then you continue on with what you want (plenty of other examples of this, but I feel Lynch's mechanics are most in the style of Pitfall). They keep you moving forward, they're interesting, and they enable great visual stimulation, but the truth of the film is outside these moments. You really get a sense of Pitfall when you watch it the second time, because then you ride the other current running through the film, the one occurring in the texture of the film. Reading the Criterion essays, it was the repeated mentioning of the collaborative process that formed Pitfall that appealed to me. And when I rewatched the film I saw better how fully realized Pitfall was, how every component worked to enhance the other. I noticed that if I didn't follow the 'plots' but followed the progression of feeling it became a different story. Fractured, incomplete, insincere, alien, yes, but progressive, and deliberate. By the end it hit me, the whole goddamn thing stirred me up and affected me.

That's my favorite kind of movie. I recommend.