Hidden Flick: Shoreline of Our Dreams

But a funny thing happened once I passed twenty Hidden Flicks, and I somehow found myself moving from seasons two and three and into the odd design that became season four. Yes, I got hooked on LOST. It wasn’t just that I picked up on it near the end of its run. I began watching the series from the beginning of season 1 in mid-February, with the goal of watching the season 6 series finale in late May. Well…I accomplished that goal, and the metaphysical show sucked me into its concepts of time and space, loss and redemption, meaning in life, relationships, and the need for one to leave behind what is unnecessary and continue forward with the rest of what is true and right and natural. After all, no man is an island.

And so I have continued forward, moved on to the next vibe. Each edition in this season, after a haphazard and improvised three seasons, became linked to each other in a weird form of connected imagination. I still don’t know what I was getting at this season, but it is fun to look back at this little intellectual quest to see how mysteries were discovered without any prior knowledge of their location—what was lost was now found, and the rest just sort of followed in a very random way. One film would lead to another, and often, the next film in Season 4 would be wildly different from the one before, but, yet, there would be that strange and surreal connection. And the links built themselves as segues became easier and easier, flowing as one long edition. In the end, none of it means a damn thing to the reader. It was just a device for the writer, the Trickster Clod, and one that was like a tiny musical box to play around with until I had my next Big Idea.

Which brings us to our discussion of the film featured in Hidden Flick number 60.

Woody Allen was entering the third phase of his filmmaking career after his “early funnier films” led to the twin peak artistic summits of Annie Hall and Manhattan, before the Woodman toyed with a serious Bergman bent, genre-role playing, and ideas about fame and celebrity and weird annoying fans that had been better served by Fellini (and I LIKED Stardust Memories, too). By phase three, Allen was smart enough to know that he had the best artists working with him, his writing and directing skills were about to kick back into high gear, and the idea of a documentary mocked into oblivion, like Rob Reiner’s take on hard rock escapades in Spinal Tap, was ripe for exploitation on a small scale via the capable mind of a seriously neurotic and talented auteur.

In Zelig, Allen was able to cover a phenomenon in 1983 that had not quite taken hold. The 1980s would become a vast wasteland of dumbed-down conservatism and most people, especially young people, were no longer seeking anything new or revolutionary. People wanted to fit in. They didn’t want to take chances anymore. It was the dawn of AIDS, Ronald Reagan, and the New Rise of the Evil Empire, and people were scared.

[SEEMINGLY IRRELEVANT INTERLUDE>Ironically, it is during that very time that my favorite band was born, and they were most definitely a quartet that believed in the human spirit, believed in the meaning in life, believed in both individual free will and the power of the collective mind, and didn’t give a damn whether or not they fit in. Being out WAS in, and that was setup in the 1980s by a little band of four weirdos who started out by playing music in a state called Vermont.]

Allen has been an outsider all his life—an iconoclast, a rebel, a troublemaker, and, yes, a huge rule breaker in numerous ways that are both well-documented and not really needed for this discussion of Zelig. Indeed, Allen bypasses those issues of the 1980s, and places his lead character, Leonard Zelig, human chameleon, smack in the middle of the 1920s, the era of the Depression, the post-World War I environment which slowly led to World War II, and the evils of fascism in and outside nations that practiced democracy.

However, a closer look reveals that Woody Allen was talking about the ’80s while also making a cleverly timeless and funny film which discussed the tragic foibles of so much of what large segments of the population truly believes in: we build others up, tear them down, and, if they are lucky, we build them right back up again IF they do something interesting just one more time—monkeys on a street corner, bread and circuses, oblivion.

Allen saw all of that as a trap, and sidestepped it by continuing to make films, continuing to push his issues about relationships onto his cinematic canvases, trying to find answers to questions only he was asking. The artist known as Woody Allen had a pretty fucked-up personal life after Zelig, but that’s the real hook, isn’t it? After all, there are no such things as miracles. There is only the next step, and then the next, leading one ever onwards, as the battle between the forces of light and dark, time and space, and the whole notion that a film has to progress in a linear fashion with comfortable images that tell you exactly what is going on is debunked.

This isn’t always the case, but what happens is that often one is shocked by amazing brain-searing scenes of insane activity which only appear to transpire if one is willing to go along for the outrageously wild ride (or you’ve cracked the seventh level of the seventh chapter on your seventh attempt of that really cool and heady 4-D video game). Sound familiar? I call it the Page McConnell Factor—that “what crazy image can we come up with if we keep pushing ourselves?” idea. Seemingly irrelevant? Maybe so. Maybe not. See ya in another life, brother.

Season 4*:
Trapped in Time–Part II > Being Jeremy Davies > Carouselambra > Your Time Is Gonna Come > Hidden Flick Turns 50# > Trapped in Space–Part I > The Wilson Kingdom^ > The Werckmeister Kingdom > The Wunderkind Kingdom@ > Trapped in Space–Part II+ > The Window > Wanda > The Wind Will Carry Us%X and Why > The Shoreline of Our Dreams

* – fully-segued; teases of future editions dropped into prior editions, past editions teased and cobbled together with new interpretations in future editions, and the easter eggs ricochet back to the Mothership in the opening paragraph of each edition…

# – Hidden Flick mashup which contains excerpts from all four seasons

^ – unfinished
@ – by request from a sign held by a tall guy in the front row
+ – concludes ‘time and space’ discussion, and sets up the ‘window to the soul’ theme
% – wraps up a trilogy on wandering spirits; all a silly setup to talk about Unheard Music

Randy Ray

[Ed. note – I can’t thank Randy enough for four wonderful seasons of Hidden Flick. Randy has long been one of my favorite writers in the scene and it was with a tremendous sense of pride that we published Hidden Flick every two weeks. I’m not sure what the future holds for this column, but I wanted to take this opportunity to thank Randy on behalf of the whole staff from the bottom of our hearts for all his efforts. – Scott Bernstein]

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