Mommy Mommy Where's My Brain

Jon Moritsugu's "Mommy Mommy Where's My Brain" is a weird, fun and bizarre short film coming from the Cinema of Transgression movement, an underground form of cinema from the late 1970's up until recent years. Acid criticism on art, society, black humor and many incoherent and random aspects are thrown into the mix, specially in this film that can present so many different scenarios that it's actually hard to form a whole concept or find some connection between them. Yet I liked this one. It left me curious and I wasn't bored by it.

There are some four or five segments which evokes a certain speech which goes from different art forms, going from AC/DC to Jacques Derrida. A few weird examples: one segment presents an unpopular TV host named Johnny Public wearing a monstrous mask while the titles describe him as an idiot, fool, prick among other things as he keeps dancing and moving around to the sound of a strange music; then there's some confusing images with AC/DC's "Black in Black" as background; and a most special one revolving a young woman asking about a young man's first sexual experience to which he's too shy to describe while she keeps curious with everything he says but also claims that he's lying. Now, back to Johnny Public: he's everything one is supposed to hate or ignore yet this is your host, presenting himself with plenty of self-loathing yet wanting to have an audience to put up with his bizarre material.

Could it be a hint to a future generation that later present itself on social media with a quality topic to bring yet they're not comfortable with themselves?

What do we get from those moments and others put together? Hard to know. Maybe it reveals the way we perceived media back in the 1980's as being more outspoken, more challenging, where the junction of image and sound could signify plenty of things due to the explosive and visual language of music videos where you can have an image going to one direction and the sound going to another and maybe there's some common link in between. It's all youth rebellion, youth expression and in the way they could do it back in that decade which grew to far more interesting, mindblowing experiences in that decades that followed, from the final years of the VHS, then DVD and the chaotic insanity of the internet which showed that anything could happen.

Images, sounds, literature, music, cinema, theatre, politics, society, life, communities all gathered up into one unique idea, one concept and those with eyes and creative minds to see could develop and create their own view of the world and what's going on. I think this kind of cinema reflect such ideas though in a strange and unusual fashion that hardly ever manages to get some appeal and either some comprehension from audiences...but there's always someone out there who can make the right connection between the ideas and concepts presents and say "I understand it!". Those are the lucky ones and if they have the time, they can share their ideas on a space like this. I'm not that enlightened. I missed something despite having seen it twice.

It was a different cinematic experience. If judging by the title and what's presented, maybe Moritsugu's idea relates to those final teenage years where there's so many information available to us and so little time to process them and make it useful in order to reach out and meet the world, see what's it all about, that we are so confused, insecure and angry that we have to wonder: Where's our brain? Where do I go from here? Knowing what parents taughts us, then what schools taughts us, and that the experience shared from friends, acquaintances, strangers, and art, what can we do to define a vision of ourselves and clearly state with certainty that these are the values I want, the values I'll persue and I'll be satisfied with it?

This is it, a teen angst film that goes inside a young person's brain where there are so many polar opposites that to actually find some certainty is a really hard thing to do. Truth is we are the sum of our experiences, collective or not, and then it's all up to us to find a path or follow some ideal.

If you're into underground movements and underground cinema, this is a must-see. For curious hearts and minds when it comes to watching movies, I'll invite you to take a look at it, see it for yourself and find your own interpretation of it or to get anything from what it's shown. You won't feel emptied out afterwards, something will grow on you. 6/10.