Wax, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees

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.

Amazing title for a movie, no? It's what made me get it in the first place, that and the promise of weird. They weren't lying. What the hell was that? Something about Mesopotamian bees, souls living inside weapons, the land of the dead in the Moon, Cain, the Trinity site, the tower of Babel, and a planet TV transmitting the dead of the future inside the Garden of Eden Cave which (the dead) are giant bees. There's also stuff about a Supranormal Film Society trying to capture the dead on film in the 1920's, the letter X, missiles turning into flying saucers, a beekeeper who is murdered by his own bees, and the cities of the dead.

It sounds like a big ball of spiritual-cum-metaphysical hogwash at first and well... it still sounds like a big ball of hogwash in the end, but somewhere along the way, if you resign yourself to the distinct possibility that there's no profound meaning to be gleaned and that if there is meaning it's flying way over your head, that racking your brain to connect pieces that don't really seem to fit together in any meaningful way and sound more like a science fiction mythological journey, if you can accept it as such and go with it, the movie can still be enjoyed both for the hallucinogenic trance it's prone to inflict if given enough room and the lyrical prose. Every now and then something beautiful comes along ("the graveyards where the new words are born") that doesn't make much sense but it's still beautiful.

It's all narrated by someone who sounds a lot like Nobody from DEAD MAN (and a lot of what he says sound like something a spaced-out Nobody of the future would say).

IMDb says it's a documentary but it's not. It reads more like the transcripts of some philosophizing drug fiend who dropped acid and walked around in the New Mexico desert and came back to write about it.

Here are some excerpts:

"our world was puny and finite in comparison with the world of the bees"

"one of the dead of the future arrived... it was grotesque with four brains on a single body."

"I lived in a mad tower above Trinity site, the day of my death the other dead came to visit me, and they said the bees would come to live there and the flying saucers so you will know that through the grace of God, the maker of people, his Son the saviour of the Christians and those bees who swarmed through the air that though you were dead you were born Zoltan Abbashid on July 11 1882. This was true."

"the first place you stop after you die is the pulsating place which is designed to be familiar for people who used to have bodies. I became a short poem in the language of Cain. I would get my new body after I killed."

"I followed my enemies through the bee television and arrived over Bashra, Southern Iraq, in the year 1991. Now I was going to kill. That was my job."

This played over a combination of grainy stock footage, footage of a guy walking around New Mexico in a beekeeper's suit, and dated video SFX.

We showed this at our local Art film movie-house. It is where it belongs.

Watch it if you think that David Cronenberg's adaptation of Burrough's book, "Naked Lunch," is too linear. If you don't know who William Burroughs is definitely avoid this. This has more to do with surrealist dream films than documentaries.

Delightfully mad IMHO.

Bees, Bouroughs, Book of the Dead. Egyptian myth.

Anti-War Sci-Fi Cyberpunk "My dead wife was in the hive. She fragmented." "They were the dead and vengeance was their life." "I was Cain." "The Planet of Television, transmitting the dead."

It's all pretty schizophrenic. Jacob Maker, beekeeper, in the land of the dead and the garden of eden, Iraq.

Not unlike an acid trip, I don't think this film is meant to be clearly "understood" in its entirety. You have to pay attention and give it some thought, like modern symphonic music or abstract painting, but doing so might just reward you with a strong appreciation. It is (a bit dated) psychedelic eye candy and food for thought. It can be rather depressing, or if taken lightly, can be quite comical. I found myself dumbfounded, asking the screen "WHAT?!" several times, but it was a good kind of "what?" because it's so off the wall. If you discount anything mind-bending or mentally challenging as boring or stupid, if your idea of great film-making is "Signs" or "True Lies," don't bother with "Wax."

"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.