Mock Up on Mu

Mock up on Mu

114 Minutes






Cinema is a creature of deception. Watch any film that isn't The Russian Ark and pay attention to the editing. The shot of the inordinately handsome leading man looking lovingly off at what's most likely a production assistant is juxtaposed with a shot of the quirky-but-bankable leading lady who seems to be returning the gaze. We're meant to believe that this man and this woman are in the same place at the same time, but these images could very well have been captured on different days -- perhaps even months apart. The man would be lusting after a sandwich. The woman could be ogling a Victoria's Secret catalogue. This is the Kuleshov effect -- the juxtaposition of images to create a story that our minds interpret. Scott McCloud, in his study of sequential narrative, termed it "closure."

What, then, happens when someone like Craig Baldwin comes along and constructs an entire film in disparate sequential images? For one thing, if you're into the discourse of semiotics, it reveals the seams of filmmaking that were always meant to be invisible. But Godard did this half a century ago with his incendiary use of the jump cut -- formerly just a sign of bad filmmaking or that Groucho Marx had ruined a take by making an extra giggle. Baldwin takes things a step forward with Mock Up on Mu by assembling a film from stock footage, clips from sci-fi B-movies, and even some original footage, among other myriad sources. For Baldwin, this is nothing new (he is known for his video collages) but the ambition of his newest patchwork creation is: feature-length narrative.

The video collage style alone would make Mock Up on Mu a postmodern piece, but then Baldwin ups the ante by making the narrative itself a pastiche of fact and (science) fiction with its dramatization of the real-life relationship between Jack Parsons, the Crowleyist rocket scientist, and L. Ron Hubbard -- here a megalomaniacal cult leader who lives on the moon. Hubbard sends real-life Beat artist/witch Marjorie Cameron (here a mindwiped femme fatale) to seduce Parsons and a completely fictional defense contractor named Lockheed Martin in a plot that culminates with sex magick, an encounter with Aleister Crowley and the release of an underground society of mutant warlocks.

If it sounds funny, that's because it's all meant to be. Mock Up on Mu is self-aware in the way it uses science fiction to convey its ideas about scientific fact and the occult to the point where characters namedrop movie titles as dialogue. A logical extension of Mystery Science Theatre 3000, Mock Up on Mu appropriates old science fiction to make new science fiction, but without its predecessor's method of lampooning the source material for the sake of a good laugh (and what a good laugh it is). Instead, Baldwin weaves a new tapestry from patches of old fabric with new voiceovers and original footage to hold it together.

It's hard to imagine Mock Up on Mu without the pivotal voiceovers, especially considering that the first third of the film is exposition that inducts the viewer into Baldwin's zany, pseudobiographical world. When the voiceover disappears, the film -- which is a bit too long for something that will, for many, be a novelty -- suddenly becomes hard to follow. For the narrative to work, the film needs the continuity of the voice actors to hold together the discontinuous images.

It would be easy for a viewer too immersed in the mainstream Hollywood narrative to not make the assumptions Baldwin wants you to make -- that is, that what you're watching is a continuous story where the images are representational and allegorical. However, on some level Baldwin wants you to be aware that the images are disparate and unrelated despite the plot at hand -- an anti-Kuleshov effect.

by Danny Djeljosevic