If you were to describe it to me, I’d have raised an eyebrow. But with his mystery-turned-existentialist drama, Meme, director Sean Mannion pays grinning homage to basement horror filmmaking while using it to explore the existentialist questions underpinning our relationship with digital media. And, even in those moments when the enjoyment starts to sag, I don’t think I ever stopped admiring the film for its ambition.
Underground horror meets digital-age commentary
We’re set up stably. Jennifer (Sarah Schoofs) is a disenfranchised and self-conscious freelance designer, stuck in a petering relationship and an infuriating job contract. Her boyfriend Tommy (Shivantha Wijesinha) now spends most nights in front of the VCR watching obscure mashup tapes and pinging VHS dealers to contribute to his pristine videotape collection, and she’s being taken for a ride by corporate employers who keep changing their minds about her design for a company logo.
At first, things very much appear to unfold as we’d expect of a standard life drama. While Tommy lays on the couch and becomes increasingly friendly with co-film buff Carrie (Kitty Ostapowicz), the frazzled Jennifer becomes increasingly suspicious, confiding in best friend, Lesley (Lauren A. Kennedy) and deliberating ending the relationship. But as the frustration mounts between the couple, we get the decided impression they’re being watched. The camera will peel back now and again, showing the pair in their mundane (sometimes, more ‘spontaneous’) activities as if mimicking CCTV footage, which against Tommy’s love affair with the underground video scene leans less toward a sci-fi explanation and more toward an anthropological exploration of humanity’s fascination with media: our proclivity to consume, create, consume again.
I always get mildly apprehensive when realising things are about to get meta in films now, simply because there seem to be few ways to make that gimmick feel fresh. Before long, Jennifer encounters an experimental mashup tape titled MEME in one of Tommy’s storage boxes, in which she indulges her curiosity and whacks into the VCR. There, she finds herself, lying in bed, walking around the house, sipping anxiously at wine during suffocating house gatherings. She’s perplexed, and immediately becomes consumed by the desire to find out who made the tape.
What unfolds from there is a bit of a mixtape in itself, paying homage to David Cronenberg on the one hand, the experimental film scene on the other. Jennifer’s attempts to uncover MEME’s creator has her fall down an existential rabbit hole, Jennifer picks out the actors seen in the film, only to find that they had no idea they’d been filmed either. They’re all promptly reminded of a theory they studied during college, though, that argues that humanity is merely a representation of accumulated information, which is perpetually interpreted and re-interpreted as a machine might interpret an algorithm. The mysterious movie mashup thus becomes both a narrative and stylistic hook, allowing Mannion to undertake an exercise in existential pondering via the psychological mystery.
Campy, campusy, yet ever so slightly cluttered
Almost everything about Meme gives the impression of the 80’s and 90’s being looked at through the lens of millennial nostalgia. Tommy and his friends hang out and drink bottled beer in a video store named ‘Bullshit’; a gaudy, grungy throwback to pre-millennial slacker culture. It’s also anti-corporate in a way that evokes old times, with Jen’s two suited employers quite happy to discuss a one-night stand in grotesque detail while Jennifer waits to discuss her pay. It’s good to know that well-paced comedy never really dissipates as the heavy existential ruminations continue.
More than just flexing his familiarity with cult films, though, Mannion clearly has a very special place in his heart for 90’s film-making, which is brought grinningly to the fore whenever we’re privy to one of the many low-budget schlock-fests playing on Tommy’s TV. Stuffed with bizarre imagery, camp pseudo-pornography and intestinal shock shots, I get the impression that these grainy movies-within-movies are there, not just because they serve Meme’s reflexive setup, but because Mannion loves the celebratory kitsch of basement horror. It’s not often that interest comes across so clearly, but with Meme, it’s both striking and entirely welcome.
And given that so much of what there is to admire in Meme (its narrative spirals, its horror winks and rampant 90s angst) is told visually, it’s frustrating that there’s an equal amount of explaining lodged between each realisation. It seems that each actor, lead, and interviewee Jennifer tracks down took an anthropology class at some point, and insist on giving tangential accounts of the digital model of the universe, or the holographic principle.
It’s not that the dialogue isn’t relevant. The philosophising, the speculating, the metaphysical ponderings might even have felt appreciatively Waking Life-like in something less dependent on unsettling the viewer. But in what ultimately uses a mystery setup to interrogate questions of existence and identity, the reams of cluttered campus waffle sometimes prevents its tenser moments becoming as effective as they could have been.
And really, they only verbalise what is already wonderfully hinted at in the constant parallels the film draws between media and (very large air quotes incoming) ‘real life’. I was so much more hooked when the talking simply became background noise to the more disquieting omnipresence of the television set, as it cycled through disjointed excerpts and beer commercials that – in their abstract, almost-coincidental way – align with those blissfully ignorant in the foreground. More unsettlingly, I was sure that Lesley had started to appear as an actor in some of the obscure vampire porn Tommy and his drinking buddies like to watch after hours, and amid the film’s Russian Doll-type premise I could never really tell if it was a coincidence, or if there was a more esoteric, predetermined reason for the apparent match. They say that economy breeds creativity, and Meme’s existential metanarrative is just one of the clever methods Mannion uses to navigate his spendthrift budget.
Conclusion: Meme
Meme can be a brilliant thriller when it wants to be, but there is a heck of a lot of philosophising bridging those tenser moments. Working within another genre (perhaps something more experimental in itself), there’s a sizeable possibility that the musing and theorising could’ve made a fascinating depiction of how we humans – self-centered as we are – try to justify our ‘place’ in larger, grander and probably random cosmological frameworks. But so much of the film seems geared toward suspense, from the mystery behind the mixtape to Mannion’s fascinating exploration to Jennifer’s mounting paranoia, that it’s difficult to read it outside the horror categories.
But hey, coming from a director as fascinated by the subterranean and experimental filmmaking as Mannion, maybe loosening those categories is exactly what Meme is challenging us to do.
Did Meme’s theoretical ponderings work for you? Share your thoughts in the comments!
Meme premiered at the Art of Brooklyn Film Festival, before opening in the U.S. on March 29th. Future tour dates can be found here.
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