Fantastic Fest 2019: VHYES & The Magical Horror Of Television

I am fortunate to be able to say that I did not have absent parents. Still, life is hard. People need to work late, travel, or see people outside the context of their kids. It was on those nights, when circumstances demanded the attention of my parents, that me and my brother began to comprehend the scope of television. Unrestricted and unobserved, we watched any and everything that seemed remotely interesting, especially if we knew we couldn’t were our parents around.

My parents’ presence, especially in retrospect, meant the world to me, but their absence could also be undeniably liberating. The power to choose something as simple as what to watch can have a profound effect on a child. This is, essentially, the moment you begin to develop taste, when you learn how to decide which content is worth your time. VHYES took me back to that time, when being home alone was scary, yet exhilarating, and television was a vast ocean that, surfed enough, could lead you anywhere.

In a visual marketplace that has become over-saturated with nostalgia, it feels like a miracle when a film–any film, but especially one that is steeped in a retro aesthetic–manages to not slide into a heaping mess of good-ol’-days reminiscing. The bar is exceedingly low, but Jack Henry Robbins soars above it with VHYES; a brilliant comedy that manages to lovingly parody the television of an entire era while sustaining a heartwarming tale that could not have been told otherwise.

Fragments of an Era

For the first thirty minutes or so, it might seem like VHYES barely has a story, and that’s okay. The screen time is about evenly divided between found footage of Ralph, a young boy who just got a video camera for Christmas and spends the subsequent week messing around with it and his best friend, Josh, and seemingly random spoofs of 80s late night television content. Robbins runs the full spectrum here. Some of the programming, like a couple of tack infomercials and a Bob Ross knock-off called Painting with Joan, I found instantly recognizable while others, like several pornographic films that deal with socio-political issues like climate change and immigration, were delightfully confusing.

The late night segments are, to put it mildly, hilarious, and any of them could easily find a home as sketches on shows like Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! or The Eric Andre Show. This is, by no means, to say that they are reductive–far from it–it is an absolute joy to see such content, which as far as I’m concerned is never getting old, being put into a longer narrative. The trajectory of that narrative takes a while to manifest and is much better for it. As we cut back and forth from Ralph’s shenanigans to the endless late night TV he’s consuming, we begin to put together the story of a child trying to process the collapse of his family by at once consuming, and producing, video.

Beyond Nostalgia

If you’ve heard anything about the film, you already know that it prides itself on being shot entirely on VHS. Going in, this excited me as much as it gave me pause. As thrilling as the idea of revisiting the unique visual texture of VHS for a feature-length film was, I was worried that that would ultimately be all the film amounted to; a fun gimmick with no emotional or thematic core. But Robbins refuses to reduce the use of VHS to a mere novelty.

Instead, the film makes ample use of the wide spectrum of visual elements unique to VHS, from its particular graininess and wonky sound quality, to the subdued color palette. This also helps situate us in the film’s period, the late 80s, an era that is often the subject of pining nostalgia without any kind of critical reflection.

Though the dark side of the 80s is by no means front and center in VHYES, it does manifest. Read closely and you can see all kinds of anxieties manifest on Ralph’s favorite late night channels: the fading of rugged masculinity, the Satanic Panic, the true crime boom, and, of course, the ever-present fear of new technology and its impact on our identity.

By the film’s bombastic, and also hilarious end, all the seemingly disparate visual elements of the brisk 72 minute run-time coalesce seamlessly. We understand just how and why Ralph gets to watch all that late night unsupervised. We catch on to Avner Shiloah’s brilliant editing, which mimics both the chaos of an overused tape and the attention span of a child with full control of a television remote. Finally, we understand the visual and emotional significant of the fact that Ralph, without meaning to, tapes over his parents’ wedding tape.

VHYES: Conclusion

At the Q&A post-screening, Robbins repeated a widely held axiom: the key to all comedy is heart. There’s nothing particularly novel about this, but it is beyond refreshing to see that kind of genuine sincerity fused with the off-kilter, dadaesque sense of humor that tends to accompany parodies of late night television, especially from the 80s. Asked about the writing and editing process, he simply responded: “I don’t wanna just make dick jokes.”

Again, a fairly standard position that nonetheless shines through. Though late night parodying often leads to some of the most enjoyable and multi-layered humor in contemporary media, what with its blend of kitsch, Absurdism and low-budget aesthetics, it often avoids emotionality in favor of a detached irony. VHYES actively counteracts this by centering Ralph’s experience, even as we watch program after program that, seemingly, could not be more irrelevant to what he’s going through.

With the unceasing proliferation of retro-aesthetics into virtually every facet of contemporary media, it seemed odd to me at first that it took me this long to come across an American film that markets itself on being shot on VHS. But having seen VHYES, I am glad it’s a rarity. Not everyone has the vision, nor the heart, to use 80s late night television as a comedic backdrop and go beyond hackneyed nostalgia and emotionless irony. It would have been so easy for Robbins to just fall back on dick jokes. What he gives us instead, is a poignant story about the odd agency a child can find in television, and the combination of joy and horror that, almost always, follows.

VHYES premiered at Fantastic Fest on September 21 2019.