7. Mad God, dir. Phil Tippett
I saw Mad God at the new Alamo Drafthouse Lower Manhattan, maybe the perfect place for this particular film. This theater is built deep underground below some anonymous tower in the shadow of the World Trace Center. The financial district is always a strange place after hours. Only hours earlier this was the beating heart of modern capitalism, and after dark, it is so empty it feels like a lost civilization. To get to the Drafthouse, you ride escalators downstairs, and keep riding those escalators, for at least two floors longer than seems possible. The whole ride down is straight out of "liminal spaces" memes on Twitter. There's glass walls to let you see into these huge empty retail spaces that have never been used and probably never will be used. One "store" was full of painted pianos. On the other side I could see dozens of people sitting at long folding tables, having entered from some other passage and for a mysterious purpose. It's all very creepy - but the theater is cool. The legendary collection of Kim's Video is down there, somehow buried dozens of meters below the streets after briefly living in Salemi, Sicily. Who knows what other relics of a New York past are hiding down here in the deep?
Mad God itself is a movie that is hard to believe actually exists. It has been a whisper of a legend of a movie for decades. It's a labor of love from Phil Tippett, a special effects legend of Jurassic Park and Star Wars fame, using his old style of stop-motion effects. This is not the smooth movement of Laika or Del Toro's Pinocchio, this is a jittery, gnarly motion, a fascinating form that feels lost to our modern world. The production began after Tippett worked on RoboCop 2 in 1990, and we've seen multiple revolutions take place in special effects since then. Works of art that take thirty years to make are usually Renaissance paintings or epic works of sculpture like Rodin's The Gates of Hell. And speaking of Hell, Mad God is a singularly upsetting and powerful work. This is an effects showcase and marvel that will make you sick, there is more Francisco Goya here than George Lucas.
Now, do I understand Mad God at all? It is largely inscrutable. No dialog, no names, no context. The exact mechanics of the lore and what actually occurs to the characters is opaque and circular. On the other hand, I am not entirely sure there is anything to understand. If you're repelled and horrified, you're getting it.
Mad God opens on a quote from Leviticus and a shot of the Tower of Babel. The movie then is an endless, sometimes non-linear descent downward into a world of chaos and decay and flesh and rot and agony. It is eighty-two minutes downward into new and terrible ways to depict Hell. Nightmares upon nightmares, all running out their vignettes of suffering without any knowledge of what is happening below or below. The animation feels like a patchwork collage of a thousand different ideas, clearly a hallmark of the decades of stop and start work. However, that does fit the utter chaos of this world.
Our central character is an unnamed burly figure wearing a gas mask, jacket, and helmet that is traveling downward with a suitcase and a map. The "plot" - as much as there is one - involves this figure continuing downward to accomplish something. Mostly he/they are as much an observer as we are, watching every episode in each layer of this katabasis. We conclude with them tearing off another part of their map.
The worlds the traveler visits are these broken, horrible systems of consumption and mechanization. Worlds of many beings with terrible faces smashed into gunk to be fed upon as fuel for the engine that drives more it all onward. There's recurring images of huge red eyes and unspeakable things with filthy teeth. Eventually even our central character is captured and operated upon by the few live action figures of Mad God. Which is then an agonizing work of body horror and unsanitary violation. We end on a long sequence of a wailing thing of sticky hair, screaming like a baby, carried to its final fate, as it too must be fuel for this world.
It is hard to say what the “Mad God” of title actually is. This world does not even seem to have a god. I would guess an apocalypse has occurred many times over, and what we are left with is automation whose creator was long gone, and whose purpose was forgotten. Now it is all governed by filthy creatures continuing the cycle with no ability to understand what they are doing. In Mad God the engine must keep spinning, and all is expendable to keep it going.
Luckily our current time is nothing like that. Relax. God is in heaven, all is right with the world.
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