The other day I had a couple of hours to kill, so I looked through the television options to choose something to watch.
For no concrete reason I ended up watching a film called Something in the Dirt.
It was good, maybe really good – but more than that it was unique.
Does a work of art have to make sense? Is it fair for a work to be purposefully ambiguous? Can perplexing be a positive attribute?
Or is life too short for all this?
Something in the Dirt is definitely purposefully ambiguous. It implies that it is a documentary – there are interviews with multiple cameramen, special effects experts, and a string of directors – they talk about making the film that we are watching which may or may not duplicate events that may or may not have actually happened.
It’s fun if you can relax and let it wash over you, if you can embrace the chaos – and I imagine it would be maddening and frustrating if you can’t.
The key is, I think, in the dedication at the end. It is dedicated to friends making movies together. The writers/directors/producers/stars have a long string of odd movies in their history – most with much larger budgets and production budgets than Something in the Dirt. Now I’m going to work through the other films, there is some real creativity going on here.
This one looks like the two of them decided to get some friends together and make a little film while they were in Covid lockdown and see what resulted.
And I guess that’s as much fun as anything else.