This week, Le Cinéma Club continues with their New American Cinema series with Philip Thompson’s short Living Reality. The title is a tricky wordplay: living reality does not equal living in reality, but existing within the grainy reality of TV sitcoms becomes the reality of your own. The percolating discomfort allows the film to occupy a space akin to that of Jane Schoenbrun and Kyle Edward Bell, who have incorporated the Lynchian structural puzzle of obfuscated reality to mine human connections with technological screens. Similar to those works, there’s a factor of nostalgia ingrained in the texture of Living Reality that is specific to those who grew up watching sitcoms such as Friends, or even just seen those clips on YouTube Shorts. Thompson is simultaneously diving into that nostalgia by recreating the aesthetic while introducing a contradiction through odd personal circumstances.
The film has a good sense of switching between different camera set-ups, as one would see in a sitcom. Although several of the performances are more anachronistic, instead of emulating the line delivery styles of actors from the 80s or 90s. Thompson stars as Theo, the central character, going against the grain of the laugh tracks and cozy yet artificial atmosphere of this arbitrary space that the sitcom is set in. One can equate him with Truman in The Truman Show. We see him exit the studio and enter his own room, where the short film showcases the most memorable mark left by Lynch – the mise-en-scène. Theo’s room, divided by horizontal lines of shadow dashed across it, with clothes and garbage scattered all over the floor, evokes a rush of discomfort that had only been percolating when Theo was retching in the studio.
Thompson then transitions the film into a series of video footage playing on the CRT TV next to Theo’s bed. What’s scary here is these videos’ lack of a perspective – who’s shooting these videos and why they’re shooting during certain extremely private moments – our identification with the occurrence onscreen becomes as lost as the characters in those videos themselves.
The short concludes on a very typical false happy ending, one of fake acceptance, which can be attributed to an irony derived from the helplessness of the situation. The short’s overall progression, in fact, feels very linear, with its formal elements segregated, with little friction in between. By the end, it seems almost perfectly clear what the sitcom setting is meant to represent and how the other scenes serve to counteract it; the horror stemming from the unreliability of narrative realism thus fades away. Yet, the mixture of the uncanny (the malaise in Thompson’s performance) and the familiar (the sitcom pastiche) does sustain its interests.
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