Upstream Color and Walden

A Thematic comparison between Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden

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“The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears that hear it.”

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Walden isn’t one of those books glimpsed once in the background of a scene; it is a key to the invisible thematic web of Upstream Color. The above quote is featured in the film, in one of the pages that Kris tediously transcribes into a paper chain. It is perfect voice for the film— it relates to the poetic ripples of the world, and that need for a specific mode of listening to properly hear all the things around us. The film, also, is a poem of creation— it is like listening to a wind of images, or watching for the rhythm of a bird-call. Upstream Color fills the senses, and stirs an appetite for sensual joy, for hazy enigma. It caters to that which is not understood: its images are food for the senses, for the spirit. Something to be digested, given enough time. Not only does the mouth require food, but so does the ear, the eye, the nose, the mind. In this way, the film itself develops in a life-cycle within the viewer’s mind. As the worm does with Kris and Jeff, the film becomes invisibly entangled within the viewer.

Most of Walden is applicable to the voice of this film, and is crucial to fill in the gaps of all that dreamy, enigmatic editing. Thoreau writes of the two years he spent next to Walden pond, the cabin he built with his own hands, and the crops he planted with his own labour. The book is a celebration of simple life, a study of the artistry in nature, and an exploration of the difference between loneliness and solitude. While Thoreau is widely read in old philosophy and Greek legends, he brings a stark appreciation for the simple, the current, the presence of each moment. He aims to tune himself to both the humanistic need for story-telling, and the baser instincts of our animal nature. “My instinct,” he writes, ‘tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills” (134). This metaphorical connection between the mind and burrowing is literalized in Upstream Color, when Kris wakes up one morning to find a worm crawling beneath her skin. Later, a man known only as the Sampler conducts a surgical procedure which transfers the worm to a pig, and establishes a sort of psychic connection between Kris and this farm animal. While initially the sequence is strange, even absurd, it comes into thematic focus as a tool for understanding our complicated relationship with nature. As Thoreau says, I shall now use my own head to burrow further into all the hills and crevices of this elusive film.

Reading (Watching)

Thoreau titles the third section of his book ‘Reading,’ but for our purposes, dealing with film, we can just as easily call it ‘Watching’— for observation is at the heart of both. Such is alluded to in the first sentence of this chapter, where Thoreau writes: “With a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all men would perhaps become essentially students and observers, for certainly their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike” (135). The most overt role of observer in the film is the Sampler, who can place a hand on one of the pigs and call forth an image of the man or woman they are connected to, where-ever they may be in their day. In the space of a dreamy edit, the Sampler moves from the farm to a busy city-scene. He passively watches, picking out one story from the many across the anonymous streets. Between two frames, he can put himself into the life of a random passerby. What can he tell from those lives that he peers into? What godly power is this ability to watch unseen, to conjure a story with the briefest of touches? Perhaps it is not so different from our own ability to conjure a stream of images, with a tap on a remote, or a keyboard.

The Sampler’s actions are voyeuristic, yes— as is cinema itself— so perhaps his role comments on the unassuming power of the watcher, the reader. People generally assume that it is the author or the director that possesses the most power of creation. But does not the reader or watcher have just as much a slice of that creative power? In the audience rests the capability for interpretation, and, the unspoken agreement to make sense of what they have digested. Thoreau writes that “books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written,” (138). It is the same with film. Especially with films such as Upstream Color, which gently suggests that it be watched with as much attention as possible, including few easy bridges between scenes or ideas. Images flow with a smooth cadence, but omissions and metaphors abound, ensuring that the film remains unfinished without its viewer, who smooths over those gaps and gives meaning to the poetic comparisons.

Sounds

The fourth section of Walden is ‘Sounds.’ Sound has always been tied to image in the history of cinema, but has largely been the subordinate of the two. In today’s time, “we are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is copious and standard” (Thoreau 151). Sound itself is present in Upstream Color with more force than it is in most other films. Even more abstract than music, the sonic element of the film is better described as an ambience. Sounds came before language; they are not discrete and packaged bits of meanings like words, but are flowing, seamless, like so many invisible acoustic waves. Leaves rattling in the wind, bricks stacking, pushed over, a file against metal, rocks in the corrugation of a tunnel. Natural sounds are contrasted against mechanical ones: the whir of the photocopier, or the running of a tap. These sounds are amplified, given special consideration, taken from their nameless habitats and enlarged, emphasized. This reveals the inner-workings of so many little events that have become normalized and therefore invisible to the ear. Training the ear is to be more observant. Thoreau notes how the calls of the birds in the woods “gave [him] a new sense of the variety and capacity of that nature which is our common dwelling” (170). And for the protagonists in the film, Kris and Jeff, it is the force of a sound which leads them back into nature, and to the source of the mysterious organism that they have become entangled with.

Solitude

The beating heart of Thoreau’s work is learning to be content in the space around you. One of the great lessons of Walden lies in this simple sentence: “I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude” (184). The repetition of the word ‘companion’ gives a feel of rhyme to the snappy sentence, an invitation to the reader to re-read, re-think. What is solitude but enjoying the company of oneself? It is opposed distinctly to loneliness, which is itself a word that sounds alone, hesitantly piping up then fading away into an ‘s’ that lingers softly in the air. ‘Solitude,’ on the other hand, is firm and resolute, ending with a coupling of confident consonants. Solitude is being content and it is natural. Thoreau finds the quality present all around him— he writes that, “I am no more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughs so loud, or than Walden Pond itself. What company has that lonely lake, I pray?” (187). Yet whereas Walden seems to be an assertion for the positive simplicity of seclusion, Upstream Color leans towards a different approach.

In the film, solitude is, strangely, only complete with the presence of another. The world decants not to one individual, but into a cycle. For nothing truly exists in isolation, but always in the context of someone, or in relation to something else. The solitary thing is also stationary— but a couple of things will slowly begin to move, to revolve around one other. Ours is a world composed like this: in movement, change, cycles. When Kris and Jeff are both impacted by the psychological trauma inflicted by the Thief, they are drawn together. The gravity of that confusing, black hole of an event draws their orbits into alignment. Or— two sound waves from the same source that find each other, and match up. The depth of their relationship forms the emotional resonance of the film. They are two leafs floating downstream, brought together by the ripples of the past. It is an unresolved past that can not be resolved by either of them alone; it is only in their shared experience that they can eventually move forward. At one point, Kris finds herself drawn to the rhythm of fetching rocks from the bottom of the pool, and reciting half-remembered phrases from Walden. When Jeff finds her there, he tests her memory by reading random lines, which Kris then completes from memory. This incident is narratively important, as it spurs their search for the Sampler, but it is also thematically important, in that both of them are needed to complete the phrases. Together, they complete the sentences of Walden; together, they construct the safety of solitude.

Higher Laws

Thoreau calls attention to two forms of life: the spiritual, and the primitive. We have instincts of the mind that drive us towards the ideal, the infinite, and we also have instincts of the body that drive us towards the immediate of the physical. When Thoreau compares this body-mind coupling to the life-cycles in nature, the passages draw stark parallels to the ideas of Upstream Color. Almost all insects eat less than they had in their larvae state, he writes, and this then becomes a metaphor to describe gluttony of the mind and the soul: “The gross feeder is a man in the larva state; and there are whole nations in that condition, nations without fancy or imagination, whose vast abdomens betray them” (293). There are films like this too, without imagination, indulgent in excesses to feed an ever-increasing appetite, weighty and slumped in a turgid posture. Upstream Color resists this: it feeds something spiritual, attempts to shape something that engages the mind, heart, and body in similar doses.

In the film, a strange worm bridges the gap of between the physical and the psychological. In its larval condition it elicits a similarly embryonic condition in the mind of the host, leaving them susceptible to every suggestion or command they hear. A man known as the Thief shapes Kris’s appetite with the mere acoustic power of his words. He imposes upon her a sparse craving for pure water: “The water before you is somehow special,” the Thief says, “when you drink it, you feel revived and full of energy. It is better than anything you’ve ever tasted” (Upstream Color). His control is absolute and instantaneous, for Kris finds her desires and tastes immediately changed. For a moment, under the hypnotic coercion of this worm, both her spiritual and primitive life are seamlessly intertwined.

Thoreau links both physical and spiritual well-being to one’s appetite (literal and figurative), and suggests that an indulgent appetite corrupts the soul. An appetite is dangerous “when that which is eaten is not a viand to sustain our animal, or inspire spiritual life, but food for the worms that possess us” (297, emphasis mine). This quote seems to be literalized in Upstream Color, where certain worms do possess people, and warp their appetites. Yet it also functions just as well on the thematic level, that is, as a metaphor for trauma: trauma as a worm, which ruthlessly demands its own food, care and attention. Whereas Thoreau uses the mention of worms to relate to the squiggling sense of animal nature within us all, the film goes ahead in another direction, relating it also to the lingering effects of suffering. Although Kris awakes with no memory of the events with the Thief, she is effected greatly for the remainder of the film.

Even after the worm is removed, Kris remains psychically connected to it, and all its strange effects. This shows how often it is the invisible which has the most profound influence over us. And it leads us to one of the most crucial passages from Walden:

“We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers. It is reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot be wholly expelled; like the worms which, even in life and health, occupy our bodies. Possibly we may withdraw from it, but never change its nature” (298, emphasis mine).

Every event leaves its worm within us, and to trace the event back to its source is to find the life-cycle that the worm is a part of. Once we become a part of something, it also becomes a part of us. Even after Kris finds the Sampler and kills him, she may think she has broken the cycle, but she still has not expelled its effects. Trauma is immortal, whether it functions as a gaping hole in memory, or as a tiny, powerfully coercive worm.

Conclusion

The events that strike us are sometimes beyond human understanding. Sometimes we can not rely on the logic of the intellect, on the rigid forms of logic and science. In the face of terrifying nebulous mystery, where can we turn except to the arms of another, to the irrational cloud of emotion? In the end, Upstream Color leaves with more questions than answers. Yet it is the kind of film where the questions do not call for answers, only emotions. Sometimes that is the only way you can answer an unanswerable question— with emotion. Where Walden champions the power of simplicity, solitude, and nature, Upstream Color simultaneously reinforces and challenges those themes by proclaiming the power of empathy, the depth of emotional scars, and the wide interconnectivity of feelings. Walden asks for a greater appreciation of the nature around us; Upstream Color asks for a greater appreciation of the people around us.

Works Cited

Carruth, Shane. Upstream Color. 2013.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. E-book, 1861.