I saw the world premiere of this in Philadelphia, with live musical performances and vocals playing out concert-style on stage as the film played on a screen behind.
The advertising materials suggested this would be an energizing, mystical blend of David Lynch, William S. Burroughs, and Nine Inch Nails. I will admit that the musical score was interesting and the performers played their instruments very well. Beyond that, this was one of the worst things I've seen all year.
The libretto is absurdly bad. Subtitles allowed me to see that the author was not content simply with nonsensical, cliched noise patterns--no, she also wrote them as homophonic wordplay, so that a word like "synthesis" was rendered as "SIN/thesis." (I'm making up that example, I think, as none of the lyrics were interesting enough to stick with me, but that captures the overall essence of the writing.) In other words: this nonsense is rich with layered meaning! The most pretentious drivel I've ever seen. My husband and I got our money's worth from several days of extemporaneously adding lines to the script: "Disfunction of a NIGH-HILL-ation / Superfluous Adams in a hydrogen explosion / Like cold FUSE/shun with no ending.... / Like cold FUSE/shun with no ending...."
The singing was likewise grating, though I may be biased against opera vocals in general. There is no plot, of course, nor any surrealistic imagery that is evocative of anything beyond trite messages about alcoholism and death. The filmmaking is dreadful--uninspired lighting, cheap set design, far too many close-ups of stupid-looking faces. Some of the imagery, such as a surgeon-shaman coating the main character's corpse in a papier mache cocoon, was mildly stirring, but most of it was insipid. This film gave me a newfound respect for Matthew Barney's CREMASTER CYCLE, which at least had interesting art design and evocative cinematography even if the end result was cold and pretentious.
William S. Burroughs's cut-up style can be tedious and off-putting at times, but at its best, as in JUNKY/QUEER, it can be mesmerizing. David Cronenberg's 1991 masterpiece NAKED LUNCH proves that it's quite possible to put his strange, comical, disorienting, and unsettling word salads about addiction, sexual dysfunction, paranoia, and the death drive on screen in a mesmerizing way. Just because Burroughs is "random" doesn't mean that a work paying homage to him can simply be "random" and capture his tone.
Likewise, the work of David Lynch is frequently oversimplified as mere psychedelic "randomness." Take a wholesome scene of small-town Americana, inject some abysmal violence in it, and throw in some random objects and a few speech patterns evoking the uncanny valley: bam, you've got something "Lynchian"... or, at least, that's what some people think. Such oversimplifiers neglect that Lynch's work is deeply humanist, with a genuine love for our flawed human condition and an earnest conviction for eradicating violence and hate. Lynch is a master of evoking humor, grief, romance, and terror, often in the same scene. The surrealism is only fascinating because it's tied to recognizable moments of human experience.
There's nothing like that in this opera/film. The writer seems to believe that Burroughs/Lynchian surrealism is simply "grotesque weirdness for weirdness' sake," and the end result is something hollow, unintentionally laughable, and (despite a brief running time) tediously overlong. If this had simply been an instrumental symphony, I might have enjoyed it. The addition of a libretto that seems like it was written in two hours and a film that looks like it was made by college students, however, makes it a truly eye-rolling experience.
