All the way through the film, the Dreamer’s journey with Nara is intercut with snatches of the dream he realised for the Monolith. We understand now that the Monolith is the city’s despot, and that the Dreamer is his propagandist – his job to create an image of the city of Tu Cáscara that will inspire its people to arrange themselves behind their ruler’s singular desires and ambitions.
The city in these snatches of dream is a cavalcade carnival of modernity and bombast – the towers are rigorously constructed to make a mockery of scale, and curves are only apparent as afterthought adornments to classically-phallic columns. The city bay is sheer glass, a mirror of the right-angled horizon above and undisturbed by any ripples cast by ferries or any waves wrought by the ocean. However, the blank canvass sky is hacked at by rocket ships and airliners the size of towers blocks, a cloud of furious hornets criss-crossing the atmosphere and leaving a mosaic comprised of razorblade scarclouds – heaven reduced to a spreadsheet grid.
It is supposed to represent an engineered triumph, the world terraformed by monomaniacal act of will, bereft of illusion. A tyranny of scale that dwarfs everyone but its monolithic creator. We are as impressed by the Dreamer’s skill at realising this vision as we are appalled by the paucity of the Monolith’s imagination. Everything at right angles, in every direction, forever and for me.
What is the counter argument?
Nara leads the Dreamer through the strange circuitous streets of Tu Cáscara, far below the Monolith’s apartment. If the journey began as an escape from the prying eyes of their Razor Master, it has now become a tour of a new city entirely – a city that sprawls under the same moon, but somehow seems subterranean.
Nara dashes along an alley, her shadow grandiose on the almost organic mineral of the wall, pulling the Dreamer along with her. Suddenly she stops, and falls back against that wall, her leviathan shadow somehow shrinking back behind her and disappearing, just as her jacket meets the stone. How does her shadow hide so well? Her head is back and she is laughing, delighted to be a fugitive, but the Dreamer seems shocked and afraid.
He looks at her, looking for her intent, but all she shows him is her joy. For reasons that might trouble him, if he took the time to consider it, he does not trust joy, especially when it is not tethered to reason.
The film, beautifully, cuts in to give us a two-shot of their faces, in profile, looking at each other. His is studying hers, but hers seems to take him in whole, without analysis.
Without judgement, we can almost hear him hoping; we can almost read, liminal, across the screen.
She turns away from him, but the film cuts back on the action, revealing that she is still holding his hand. Somehow it is impossibly intimate. She points towards a window in the smooth, curved wall – it is almost square, but as if a child has drawn it through the stone, the edges aren’t parallel and the corners aren’t sharp, and the wall is thick. On the other side of the window is a small grey cell. A monastic cell, though, not a prisoner’s cell. Within the room are a couple, dancing to music we can only imagine – the scene is incredibly romantic, until we notice that between the two lovers there are three pairs of legs.
Nara leads him further along the wall to another window. Through this one we can see a woman sitting alone at a workbench, stitching. She is completely absorbed in her work, her workbench picked out of the cell in a bright spotlight. She is stitching something vast, not an item of clothing, but similar… the Dreamer peers closer; the item has legs, we can see, but also arms… the tailor turns the item as she stitches, and we can see that it also has a face in a collapsed head – she is sewing together what seems to be a human suit. She has a look on her face of transfixed fascination – she is preparing her own skin, her own hide, so she need no longer hide.
And as the Dreamer leaps back from these intrusions we see Nara’s delight as his horror, and she gestures beyond, further along the alley, to a low wall that looks out further across the city as if from a cliff edge. We follow where she is indicating, down over a lumpen stone building of the proportions of a huge, beached whale. Across the body of this whale are dozens and dozens and dozens more windows, each blazing with light, each a perspective in on a fresh new cell, where the inhabitants of the city are at work and at play and at transformation.
The scale is enormous – the sumptuousness of the city is elevated still further by the inferred but inevitable teeming life within each window. We are staring into a termite’s nest of unfathomable invention, of unfettered possibility. Again, without the benefit of any dioptic camera trickery, Isaacs somehow shows us both the building, just one among hundreds, and Nara’s face, together and in focus. The effect is that the woman appears gargantuan, leviathan herself. She carries the bearing, in this moment, of a million individual lives.
And then we see this reflected, in awe and in dread, in the face of the Dreamer.
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