Miguel Gutierrez & The Powerful People Last Meadow
Posted by: Seth Nehil
The script is a controlling device. The storyboard commands. The director is an egomaniac. The movie camera captures bodies within its lens, contains them – flattens them onto celluloid. Method acting infects actors like a germ, changing gestures, changing voices. Sometimes the role carries actors into a dark hole – they lose their edges, become the character, drive a car into a tree. There is a compulsion behind the machine of Hollywood, driving its makers into standard narratives, driving audiences into admiration and emulation. A nightmare of falseness. We forget that we are immersed in artificiality. Miguel Gutierrez wants to use the cinematic nightmare as an alarm clock.
Old age is frightened by youth. James Dean represented the uncontrolled force of the “juvenile delinquent” – the scary eroticism of Elvis’ hip shake, which reminded the 1950’s of an even more frightening “Other” – the suppressed energy of the American experience. The monster which we ourselves have created, fed with blood, and tried to ignore.
Miguel Gutierrez & Powerful People throw off sparks. They are driven by a demoniacal repetition, swallowed by illusion. Free-floating scripts attach themselves, forcing the dancers to vomit lines over and over. Shouting directions, moving in perfect unison, these bodies are controlled. “Take 47! Again!”
Actors can forget where the machine ends, find themselves absorbed into the tabloids which have scripted romance, scandal, marriage and divorce. This is the “moral” of Lynch’s Inland Empire, with which I could compare Last Meadow. Dancers use their bodies as machines of expression. Who owns these bodies? Do we, as observers, bear responsibility for the actions and habits of dancers offstage, who must carefully prepare themselves for moments of white-hot activity? We shouldn’t forget that we are all human beings here.
Last Meadow carries each scene beyond the limits of “enough”. It displays a prickly exterior. It exists in the moment on stage, but also in the memory of a film (or films). This doubly and triply-layered moment creates complex refractions. Something is wrong here. I want to laugh but it hurts. “You’re tearing me apaart!” Actors live a multiplied existence. Where is their “authentic” identity? What parts of previous roles do they continue to play? What parts of previous films do we knowingly or unknowingly absorb and enact?
DVD extras now allow us to penetrate the machine, to examine the construction with all its visible scaffolding. And yet, the movies never lose their power to convince, to carry us out of our bodies and into other bodies. James Dean is resurrected each time we watch his image, a zombified body compelled to repeat itself. The steps, the swagger, the smirk. And somewhere offscreen, his car rams into that tree over and over and over.
