Wax, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees

"Wax" is very likely the oddest film I've ever seen. Marvelously, beautifully, lyrically, and profoundly intellectually stimulating in all respects. Breathtaking in its scope and achievement. But very odd.

I have read medical reports containing sodium pentathol interviews and transcripts of schizophrenics' monologues. I have read memoirs and fiction by schizophrenics and hard drug users. I have read Surrealist and Beat Movement literature. I have read James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. I have read the visionary poetry of Charles Williams and H.D.

I have watched films by Kenneth Anger and David Lynch and Maya Daren. I have read Yoruba ethnic literature from West Africa and studied Aleister Crowley's skryings on the Enochian aethyrs. I have read H. P. Lovecraft and also Kenneth Grant's post-Crowleyan magickal writings describing journeys behind the Tree of Life which would have preempted H.P.L.'s usual nightmares had he but known of them.

"Wax" stands tall in that company. A hypnotic, hallucinatory, purely poetic fusion of words, images, political ideas, and mystical transformations, nothing quite resembles it. "Pi" (1998) tried for something as distinctive, but that film gave us a glowering, paranoid, tortured vision shot in deliberately painful close-ups. "Wax" makes a complete contrast in its joyful freedom of eloquence in narration and visuals.

"Wax" enhances life while critiquing it. The film employs early, simple computer graphics. It juggles idiosyncratic desert architecture, prosaic photography, and absurd juxtapositions of common images.

It tells a story of Middle Eastern honey bees along with offering a hard view of the original U.S. military actions against Iraq in 1991 (a time so simple in retrospect as to seem the good old days). It links Los Alamos with transformations in consciousness. "Wax" leaps beyond the merely political in its luminous metaphors for human existence.

You can find stronger films, more beautiful films, more linguistically spry films, but you will probably never find anything quite like this fireworks display of language and image. Think "2001: A Space Odyssey" on a home movie budget. Your grasp of reality (and cinema) may never feel the same.

This movie is so clearly a christmas classic that i can barely contain myself! Please, make this movie a part of your family's traditional holidayic behavior. Watch it while you wrap the presents, and for a truly quixotic effect, watch it backwards when you unwrap them.

I think that this movie has also taught my "dog" how to talk. I have showed him this movie (privately) over fourteen hundred thousand times and now he can speak. Of course, he doesn't vocalize his speech: he transmits it through the air-but i think that this is still somehow remarkable (I think).

He is telling me to write this: -------- I am so hungry please feed me. Please. I am starving. I need to eat. I am so skinny I that can barely move. Don't hit me anymore. It only hurts and makes me sleepy enough to fall into some reverie. --------

Well, better go feed the pup! (10 out of 10 stars.)

just wanted to add that i really like the video, and i think its no more weird than any television talk show or game show or news show or presidential election show: it mixes up a lot (in our heads i mean), but the confusion comes from the matter, not from the artist.

it's full of speculations and confusing plot points, as part of what it is about. in fact it was the only movie i ever saw, that was able to both analyze and illustrate the TV strategies of war reporting since operation desert storm (which it is exactly about) and the beginning new world order. that's maybe what seems technically overwrought?

seems to me, other artists like godard or kitano work the same way, merging so many images, synthezising so many parts of life, in the end you're overwhelmed. because we are not used to watch movies that way. because there is little chance to see stuff like this in cinemas.

thx for your attention. ;)

This is a very strange movie. I'm not even sure that I can accurately describe the plot, because it doesn't make any sense and I don't know if it's really a plot anyway. But I'll give it a shot. I rented this based on the quotes on the box, which described it as being like Total Recall, only with 10 times the weirdness. After seeing the movie, I don't know what they were talking about... The whole movie is narrated by David Blair in a very monotone voice, and has no similarities to Total Recall that I see...

The movie starts out with James Maker, who is a member of something called the Supernormal Film Society whos goal is to film the spirits of the dead walking among the living. There's some background on this which seems largely irrelevant. Then we meet his grandson, Jacob Maker who is the main character of this story. Jacob is a programmer who works on aircraft simulation programs. He's also a beekeeper of Mesopotamian bees he inherited from his grandfather.

So, after a bit the bees drill a hole in his head and put in a television, which the bees use to start showing him things. About this time, a statue of Kane outside his house kills the statue of Able, and Kane is marked with the X symbol. Then at work, Jacob wonders why his co-workers never wonder what happens to the missiles they launch that don't come back (never mind that a programmer probably doesn't deal with missile launches), and he realizes that they turn into flying saucers which fly to the moon where the dead live.

About this time, the bees start showing him things on the television and he makes a big pilgrimage to the Garden of Eden Cave which the bees tell him is the entrance to the world of the dead. Jacob then realizes that the bees are actually the dead of the future, and goes to the cave. Although it is a 40 miles walk through the desert, he makes the journey a bit easier by becoming a bomb part of the way. He then learns that he has to kill someone to fulfill his destiny, which is to be reborn in a wax body that the bees make in the cave.

When arriving at the cave, Jacob learns that the cave is actually the entrance to a planet inside of our planet where the bees live. There, he dies and goes to join the world of the dead. For a while, he becomes the X symbol. Then he becomes a poem in the language of Kane. Then he travels to some other planets, including the Planet of Television. Next he becomes a rival beekeeper of his grandfather. Then he decides it's time to fulfill his destiny, which is to kill someone. So, he becomes a bomb and blows up two Iraqi soldiers in a tank. Then he becomes the X symbol with himself, his grandfather's arch enemy, and the two soldiers he blew up.

And that's pretty much it... Make sense? No, I didn't think so... David Blair calls this Independent Electronic Cinema. I don't know what to call it. I can't figure out if this movie is bad because the weirdness of it all is hard to get over. And the filming is worse... One could today make this movie on a home PC fairly easy. There are 3 distinct types of footage in the movie. First, there is a lot of stock footage of bees, bombs, and other scenes. Second, there is footage that was shot with an amateur camera I'm guessing. Third, there were digital renderings. Nothing fancy, these were things like 3D letters and symbols, and renderings of the cave ceiling and floor just on the screen with a black background.

And it's heavily edited. I hesitate to refer to this as special effects, as I think it's overly abused. There is not a point where more than 1 minute goes by without further senseless video effects. Things like the image warping, folding, unraveling into a string, blurring, etc. Basically all the stuff you could do to a movie with a piece of $100 modern software and a video capture card. And it took six years to make. Personally, I don't see what makes this a great art film, as I've seen some reviews and essays claim it is. I think it falls into the trap of being so different and bizarre that people figure it must be artistic. I don't know what the hell it is, and I don't think I ever will. I keep thinking that there must be some meaning in this movie, but I haven't the slightest idea what...

it's a weird movie but maybe a little bit less so if you think about it as having a kind-of antiwar message -- the guy gets so overwhelmed by guilt over the job he does that he basically loses his mind and imagines himself to be a missile that doesn't want to hit its target.

or, another way of thinking about it is, what would happen if weapons could be haunted by the people that they kill? in order to do that you have to make the weapons into living things, which is a big part of where the movie's weirdness comes from, but at the same time there's a real valid point to it, i think -- which is that it asks us to think about the way we wage war, which is shown on t.v. so that it seems not to have a cost in human lives, when in fact, of course, the toll in human life of wars like desert storm is extraordinary and tragic.

i think the movie DOES get a little overwrought with its technical events from time to time, but i think too that it DOES have a basic message that helps to understand it, and it'd be a shame if that message was missed because i think, whatever its flaws, it conveys and explores that message (about the human toll of "pushbutton" or antiseptic modern wars) brilliantly.

oh, and it made MY dog talk, too. how about that? i'm convinced anyone who sees this movie seven times can be deemed legally insane. having said all i said above, i have to admit that this is probably the absolute STRANGEST movie i've ever seen, and i've seen some strange ones. i liked it anyway, though.