Stan Vanderbeek's A la Mode is a work of pure genius. As always, he makes use of many known things on many other levels and ways of saying other things using mutation, reformation and reviewing, thus creating something totally different. A la Mode can be seen as his piece de resistance. It uses a lot of faces we don't know and normal objects we use everyday. by building many layers with/of these things we know, he gives us the feeling we know what he's meaning with a certain scene, yet he manages to double cross us and force us to view things his way, an abnormal way perhaps, but the message is clear nevertheless: I believe Stan tried to make us acknowledge the hypocrisy in which we live, work and eat. nothing is what it seems. we trust the things we create, giving our fate to something like clothing (mode). but fashions are made and deleted everyday, so we must be careful to trust ourselves instead of something artificial as clothing. but by saying that, Stan actually tells us not to trust anything, even his movies can be falsely interpreted. if what he tells can be seen as false, how can we be sure that what he's telling is the truth? maybe the things we know are right and he's wrong... something to think about.
