In the aftermath of 9/11, many of the blockbusters which filled the silver screen were toned down. The heady dramas and nihilistic realism which marked many of the independent and mid-budget films of America in the 90s disappeared for a brief time; instead of Pulp Fiction we got Kill Bill, Intolerable Cruelty instead of The Man Who Wasn’t There. Audiences were overwhelmed by the largest attack on homeground by a foreign body since Pearl Harbor. Their egos were bruised, and so they turned to the cinema not to understand the trauma they experienced, rather, to escape from it for a few hours. Likewise, in Jordan Wong’s phenomenal Mountain Lodge, we escape from the claustrophobia of the pandemic into what may just be the first adaptation of a Tumblr post.
“While we were still in school, we were prodded to keep making work, being encouraged to make work explicitly about Covid, which I felt adverse to,” Wong said in the Q&A with the programmer for the short experimental films selection of this year’s Slamdance Film Festival. “I was trying to explore how to make work during that time, but in a way that would spark joy for me and not a constant reminder of what was happening.” And Wong manages to spark joy. The film consists of this Tumblr post and one of the following reblogs, voiced by the speech-to-text function of the computer. It is an ode to the infamous Mountain Lodge candle from Bath & Body Works which briefly lit up Tumblr in the summer of 2015. As the text is read, the audience has their senses pummeled by a flurry of memes, videos, maps — they can accentuate the meaning of individual words, manipulate the audience’s understanding of each moment like music does in most narrative films, reference other media in a winking or ironic way and much more.
The advent of Desktop Cinema, as the curator of this program called it, is arguably the biggest innovation in film in the past decade. Slashers like The Den have managed to do the unthinkable — combine the art-house aesthetic of multiple screens (for instance Jean-luc Godard’s Numero Deux or any number of installation films) with a mainstream coherency many have found poignant, especially in the time of COVID-19. Timur Bekmambetov has made more contributions to the genre (which he refers to as Screen Life) than anyone else, including the Unfriended movies, Searching and the upcoming Romeo and Juliet adaptation R#J. They have not only found love at the box office and with critics, but have included formal inventions as to how to translate many filmic functions like the Hollywood invisible cut, the montage, diegetic music, jump scares and more into this new and exciting genre. There are limitations to the Hollywood model Bekmambetov’s films seek to imitate, which show traditional techniques applied to an untraditional frame.
Mountain Lodge is possibly the first formalist piece of Desktop Cinema. As opposed to everything else in the genre, the cuts aren’t invisible — videos pop up many times a second and disappear suddenly, sometimes with the mouse clicking, sometimes without. We aren’t seeing the subjective world through the eyes of the mouse like in the Unfriended movies, rather an artist accentuating portions of the story by directing our attention elsewhere. Though the clips are overwhelming on a second by second basis, it’s never hard to follow. Wong understands that technological natives are so used to seeing data flash by, following the beats and jokes is second nature. (Though like Jacques Tati’s Playtime, there are so many memes/gags in frame at any one time, rewatching it is as fresh as it is the first time.)
An example of how the style functions. The line is read by the computer: “So I got in my car, made the drive, and located the Yankee Candle Company.” On screen we see a Google Maps route from one location to the store, a clip of a man forcing open the door of a car, getting in and starting the ignition, a dog hopping into frame, and a plastic trash can sliding down a street during a rainstorm. The audience’s eyes are controlled, first over the primary frame of the map, then to the left half of the frame when the man getting into the car pops up. The dog jumps in over the right side of the desktop when the computer says “located,” the video disappearing immediately afterwards. Right after, the car is turned on and drives away as the trashcan replaces the dog. The trash can shot is a transition from this sentence to the next, directing the audience’s eyes to the right side of the screen, as many of the next images start cycling around the frame in counterclockwise fashion. Never once does the audience lose track of what is happening with the candle nor the narrative of the post.
The main point of the original post is to find the candle which recreates the experience of the ideal man, someone in Chris Evans’ weight class who can rip a log apart with his own two hands. This grizzled superhero isn’t what the author actually wants, rather the experience of this person, which the candle manages to provide. Tumblr’s queer culture is probably the only place this type of libidinous post could have found the audience it did in 2015. The videos Jordan Wong chooses are filled with a humor which reflect this homoerotic energy. The first images we see is a YouTube clip of a bit from The Eric Andre Show where Eric is chased down by a cop into a restaurant, handcuffed, then the two begin making out. Onlookers are filled with shock and disgust, outside one woman, looking on with a smile, which is when Wong chooses to pause it and to start with the Tumblr lore.
Mountain Lodge proves that Desktop Cinema is one of the freshest genres today. The composition created by multiple windows of the computer is either interesting for its content, how it’s juxtaposed and how it is utilized for whatever formal function is deemed cinematic. Desktop Cinema is cinema and some of the boldest filmmakers today are the ones proving that the norms of conventional movies, whether it be a genre film or prestige picture, can exist in this digital frame and push film as a form forward.
