A few years ago, I took a big jet to San Francisco, and then a tiny prop plane to fly a second leg up to McKinleyville, California, a little town with a little airport that stands between the Pacific Ocean and the Coast Range. That evening, as we prepared to land, the pilot called our attention to the forest fires—nothing like the fires that are still sweeping the West, but destructive nonetheless. When you looked out the plane’s window into the darkness of the coastal forests, you could make out field-sized orbs of glowing orange that seemed like portals to another world. Late the next night, I drove a few miles down the coast to Eureka, an old California fishing town, and had a similar experience when I dropped in on Laura and Kate Mulleavy. They were in a corner store, all brightly lit up and the only light on the stretch of Eureka’s old main drag. When I poked inside, the sisters were sitting on the floor chatting with Kirsten Dunst, in the midst of filming a movie that released this week, Woodshock. They were surrounded by glass and mirrors and bathed in an incandescent white light. The set wasn’t just cool and interesting—shades of Dan Flavin and Robert Smithson in his mirror-influenced days. It was an experience in itself.
That was about three years ago, and now that I’ve seen the finished film, I can say the same rules apply. It’s an experience, as it’s meant to be, and the title itself points to this idea: Woodshock is the term used for the state of a person who loses their way in the woods. It’s important to keep this in mind because you will feel a little woodshocked if you are headed to the Mulleavy sisters’ new film in hopes of rapid-fire dialogue and the three- or four-part narrative structure you’d see in an episode of Friends. It’s not that words don’t matter in this film. They do. But they are less important than the imagery. In Woodshock, words are like markers, or buoys, set out on the surface of deep waters—indeed, like buoys, oftentimes suggesting where not to go. At one point, the boyfriend of Theresa (Dunst’s character) asks her if she was with another man. “It’s not about that,” she says. And it’s not.
Just to give you a bit of what it’s about: We can say that as the film opens Theresa’s mother has died. Theresa, who works at a medical marijuana dispensary with her friend Keith, has assisted her mother in dying, adding some mysterious something to her last joint, something that appears to have killed her. Theresa mourns her loss, though her grief is, we begin to feel, not just about her mother but about her own place in the world in light of that loss, her place being—in a very deep and psychological way—in the woods and rivers of the Northern California. She is isolated somehow from her human community and from the world. As the film proceeds, Theresa makes another attempt at helping a very ill friend ease his way out of pain, and this goes horribly wrong. Theresa breaks, and paranoia, among other things, ensues. Dunst literally fleshes out Theresa’s grief. “My character’s part of this forest being cut down, and what she’s going through in her own life feels like a psychological rebirth but also painful as well,” she told a reporter.
What this film is about, though, is what can’t be said, and probably shouldn’t be. The Mulleavys have crafted what amounts to an abstract meditation not just on grief but the ways in which we are connected, for better or worse, to our physical world. “The landscape thinks itself in me,” Cézanne once said, and indeed, he referred to landscape painting not as copying but as “realizing one’s sensations.” Woodshock is a film of realized sensations. Words just don’t do it.
Of course, it’s ironic that the Mulleavys, of all people, offer us a work that describes the great phenomenological void while being so devoid of words. They have, after all, with Rodarte, made their reputations as the literary designers for women who would be more likely to show up in a novel than a sitcom, and, in fact, I talked about the word disparity with Kate and Laura the other day, just before the film opened in Manhattan. “The script for this film is a lot of description,” Laura said, “and the way that we felt you could best communicate an internal mind state is to be less explicative, to make it purely emotional, and we really had to ask, What is the task at hand? Is it to explain Theresa’s behavior, or is it for the audience to emotionally connect to her and feel like they are connecting to her subjectivity?”
They were not, they went on to say, looking to write a character whose behavior could be diagramed. “We didn’t want to say Theresa is like this because her boyfriend is abusive,” said Laura, “or Theresa is like this because. . . something. The point of the film is bigger questions. She is aware of something that other people in her world are not. And she’s disconnected from the other people, and there are no words that Theresa could ever say to somebody that could explain that more than the way she would, say, just touch something. I was thinking that Theresa could really say something to me by just touching the wall.” How Theresa feels, in other words, is defined by the way in which she literally feels.
Accordingly, the design is tactilely beautiful, tangibly moody, and in touch with the Northern California landscape—the wide, gray mountain-born wide rivers. This is thanks to production designer K.K. Barrett, as well as wood-saturated Eureka and the gorgeous Humboldt Redwoods State Park. The costumes are minimal, portraying Dunst as exposed and open to the viewer, without barrier, and, sure enough, we see her touching everything—walls, fabrics, plants—as she attempts to reengage with her place. The music, by Peter Raeburn, is centered on something called an aeolian harp, which is a harp that is typically set up outdoors or in a window frame and played by winds and breezes. It makes for a drone-like sound that’s reminiscent of running your finger on a glass. The aeolian harp, it turns out, was a favorite instrument of East Coast phenomenologist Henry David Thoreau, though he liked it more as a metaphor than as an instrument. In fact Thoreau always said people would be better off if they found a way to be like aeolian harps themselves, allowing the winds and breezes, the tides and weathers, and all the phenomena of the earth to fill and move them. That’s the point of Woodshock. It reminds us that it’s not just Theresa who’s disconnected. We all are.
