It’s hard to describe the abstract narrative of Noel David Taylor’s borderline incomprehensible and aggressively weird satire Man Under Table, but it’s rather easy to define how it feels to watch it. You’re up really late at night, semi-consciously surfing through streaming services while high on your fifth bong rip, when you happen upon what seems to be a lost Adult Swim special that should’ve remained in the drafts. Because nothing else suits your fancy in the moment, you stay for a bit and wonder if what you’re witnessing is an actual movie made by real people or just a very disturbing lucid dream experience that’s being projected through your television. Instead of keeping you captivated, though, it’s 79 minutes of hollow, meandering storytelling are enough to lull you into a deep sleep. By the time you wake up, you’ll have forgotten all about it.
It’s unclear whether or not Man Under Table is intended to have this kind of psychedelic, past-midnight effect, as the film proves to be unsuccessful, and even alienating, in its attempt to construct a dream-like story out of half-baked commentaries on content overload and artistic pretension. The thin and disconnected “plot” is likely a result of that: a curmudgeonly freckle-faced screenwriter named Guy (also played by Taylor) grows increasingly more frustrated by the lightning success of his filmmaking contemporary Jill Custard (Katy Fullan) while struggling to come up with an original script of his own. He bemoans Jill’s vaguely opportunistic stories about “identity politics” and “fracking” — buzzwords that are said ad nauseum throughout the film as comedy fodder — but simultaneously uses those same empty, self-important gestures to pique the interest of the exploitative film executives he encounters.
There’s a perceptible undercurrent of irony here, where Guy’s fruitless pursuit to garner the attention of producers and cultivate a story worth telling seems to mirror Taylor’s own effort in convincing us, the audience, of the same with Man Under Table. That endeavor admittedly does start out promising, with Guy’s petulant observations serving as a compelling representation of a man-child who lets his failures, insecurities, and ego inhibit his path toward a prosperous career. Illustrating that criticism of cynicism through a surrealist aesthetic also adds a unique twist to Guy’s professional predicament. Los Angeles is depicted as a seedy, dystopian landscape made up of cardboard cut-outs, neon-lit interiors, and green-screened locations that showcase Guy’s confusion in navigating the artifice of the entertainment world. Along with the wonky production design, composer Danny Lane incorporates a spooky, industrial score that injects every scene with an unnerving Lynchian vibe.
Unfortunately, that’s about as far as Taylor takes his premise. He locks Guy in a restless, repetitive emotional limbo for the remainder of the runtime, chaining him to vacillate between raw-nerve rage (“get the fuck out of my eyeline,” he shouts at strangers several times) and relentless self-pity. Amusing as it is to watch someone whose pettiness blinds him from his mediocrity, this kind of mocking routine runs out of steam pretty quickly and overstays its welcome. In addition to prolonging Guy’s hostile, smug attitude in spite of his character development, Taylor drops in a few pointed, eye-rolling pop-up advertisements at the bottom of the screen, ostensibly meant to signify our oversaturated, overstimulated culture but really just appearing as a lazy, obvious visual metaphor for it. Lyle (Robert Manion), an Australian YouTube sensation whose videos are broadcast in the dingy bars Guy frequents, also acts as a glaringly overt avatar for the creative vacuity of popular Internet influencers, but Taylor doesn’t even seem to care much about exploring the implications behind that theme or really any of the themes he’s highlighting.
Man Under Table is the kind of project that feels born out of feverish inspiration after watching something like Spike Jonze’s Adaptation, another loopy, self-referential story where a writer agonizes over cracking a script and seethes with jealousy at the foolish yet charismatic creative streak of his peer, in this case his twin brother. But where Adaptation’s eccentric, anxiety-riddled formal style and self-deprecating ruminations on the pains of the writing process feel rich and lived-in, Man Under Table lacks the crackling personality and dramatic momentum to pull off its experimental gimmicks because it relies so heavily on its bizarro, deadpan shtick. Much like Guy, it masks behind the fact that it’s trying to convince us it’s saying something meaningful when it’s really just saying nothing at all.
