Article: Phantasmagoria: The Dreamlike Imagery of Tarsem Singh

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This article originally appeared in the October 2017 issue of MOVIEJAWN,
which may be available to purchase HERE.

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PHANTASMAGORIA: The Dreamlike Imagery of Tarsem Singh

There is something about the visual language of director Tarsem Singh that resonates with me and has since I first witnessed it. Or, I should say, "first knowingly witnessed it". As it turns out, I was more aware of Tarsem's existence than I knew. You probably are, too; you may just not know it yet.

Tarsem started out directing TV commercials and music videos before finally moving on to feature films, a goal he had been pursuing for some years. His commercial credits are almost too numerous to list but include Toyota, MTV, Gatorade, Absolut, Smirnoff, Pepsi, Coke and Nike among others; his best known music videos are for songs by Suzanne Vega, En Vogue & R.E.M. Looking back through them, his weapons of choice, visually speaking, are already present: bold colors, strange textures, purposefully artificial light & shadows; all of these would appear in his first film, 2000's The Cell.

In brief, The Cell follows psychologist Catherine (Jennifer Lopez) as she is enlisted to enter the mind of a comatose serial killer to try to discern the location of his last surviving victim using a sci-fi mind-meld machine. A silly premise, I know, but easily overlooked as being a means to an end allowing us into the mind of the killer, Carl Rudolph Stargher (an excellent Vincent D'Onofrio, btw). I've seen a character's mind and/or dreams depicted on film numerous times before and since, but nothing holds a candle to Tarsem's depiction of Stargher's subconscious.

There's no real linear sense to them, and what there is doesn't really matter, much like a dream. Catherine appears in some catacomb-like stone structure that drips a few blood droplets, but just enough for dread to begin building in the pit of my stomach. In an adjacent room, a jet-black version of Stargher's albino dog shakes the blood from its fur in visually luxurious slow motion, each drop seeming to glow from within like a jewel. It's simultaneously horrifying and absolute eye-candy and it's only on-screen for a few seconds. As Catherine follows a young boy (Jake Thomas; representing Stargher's innocence) deeper into his mind, the textures and yellowed sodium vapor streetlight palette invoke decay and sickness. An operating room with a live horse and audibly ticking clock almost buzzes with tension, even as Catherine tries to soothe the frightened boy. Whatever happens when the countdown stops, I'm sure I don't want to see it; but the too-bright clinical lighting implies I won't be able to miss a single detail. Similarly, a hallway further on is lined with displays of clockwork bodies, a menagerie of Stargher's warped views of women: bleached, restrained and kept behind disgustingly smeared glass.

Throughout the film, we encounter Stargher at various times in his life. The young boy, dressed in regular clothes, hides Catherine in his closet as he is subjected to verbal and physical abuse from his father. As in a nightmare, Catherine's shouting and banging on the door makes no difference. Tarsem's sets here are, for lack of a better term, normal: these are much closer to memories than fantasies, the product of the relatively unsullied mind at Stargher's core. After that we see him reminiscing over his first victim: he sits hunched over the bathtub that contains her body, breathing blue smoke from his cigarette, wearing only jeans. The walls have an artificially overworked brushstroke texture to them, implying a slight distortion to his mindset. Whenever we encounter the fully-formed evil representation of Stargher, he appears as some kind of monstrous king: in elaborate royal regalia, or manifesting animalistic aspects like bull's horns shaped from his hair or crocodilian scales on his flesh.

When I was a kid and would have nightmares, my grandmother told me to flip my pillow over to the cool side to ensure good dreams when I went back to sleep. The cool side of The Cell's pillow is 2006's The Fall, a passion project Tarsem worked on for the better part of a decade, beginning production even before starting The Cell. Originally inspired by the Bulgarian film Yo Ho Ho from 1981, The Fall follows an injured silent film-era stuntman (Lee Pace) recuperating in hospice who spins an epic fantasy adventure tale to a young fellow patient, Alexandria (Catinca Untaru) in an attempt to trick her into stealing him extra morphine. The fantasy story follows a masked bandit who assembles a crew of other heroes who have all been wronged by an evil governor and their travels and adventures as they attempt to locate and get revenge upon the governor, named Odious. These interludes are interpreted in Alexandria's mind's eye as she both knowingly and unknowingly populates it with people and things she is familiar with: the treasure map is a cut-paper note Alexandria had written earlier, Charles Darwin (yes the Charles Darwin is one of the adventurers) resembles the hospice's pharmacist, etc.

Tarsem filmed the adventure segments piecemeal at locations around the world while filming commercials, and he uses these existing environments in place of the constructed settings of The Cell, relying on their scale and natural beauty to make them seem otherworldly. While The Cell's segments felt charged with menace, pulling you along like a bad dream, comparatively the fantasies in The Fall are a thrilling and whimsical dream I wish I could stay in. A shot of the archer Otta Benga (Marcus Wesley) crossing the rooftops of a Blue City, making it look as though he is descending from the clouds like a myth, has stayed with me since I first saw it. The costuming is much more whimsical this time around as well, appropriately fanciful for a fairy tale adventure envisioned by a six year old: the aforementioned Darwin (Leo Bill) wears a bowler hat & fur jacket in the colors of the Union Jack, alluding to his Naturalist background and British origins; Luigi (Robin Smith) the explosives expert wears a bright yellow overcoat with red designs on the back mimicking flames.

Now is the time I should mention Tarsem's long time collaboration with designer, costumer and art-director Eiko Ishioka since she is as much tied to his visual signature as anything else. Her career also began in advertising and briefly ventured into music video direction (for my otherworldly love goddess, Bjork) but she is perhaps most well-known outside of her collaborations with Tarsem for creating the costumes for 1992's Bram Stoker's Dracula, for which she won the Academy Award. In that film, she gave Dracula (Gary Oldman) a blood-red suit of armor that resembled both a bat and the sinewy musculature of the human body (a design she reappropriated for the mind-meld-machine's suits in The Cell, visually referencing how the machine allows you to see inside of a person). When Catherine is transfixed by Stargher in that film, Ishioka costumes her in what I can only describe as a "fashion muzzle"; a shiny metallic piece of wearable art that curves down from her temples to below her eyes, with delicate chains hanging from it. The long curves up to her temples resemble horns, echoing Stargher's animal/demon imagery, while the chains mimic a veil signifying both his possession of her and her new "royal" status (Stargher sees himself as a king and now she belongs to him).

Ishioka collaborated on Tarsem's next two films, Immortals (2011) and Mirror Mirror (2012), but for whatever reasons her costuming flourishes are largely relegated to head wear. In Immortals, a reimagining of several Greek fables, most of the characters wear tunics for the bulk of the movie, but Mickey Rourke’s wicked King Hyperion's battle helmet features two enormous horns sticking up into the air like a stag beetle and the removable face-plate is rimmed with more tusklike protrusions (mimicking a Venus flytrap, perhaps?). When the gods appear in that film, bedecked in shining, spotless golden armor to contrast with the Earth-tones of the rest of the cast, their helmets are somehow even more fantastical. Poseidon, God of the Seas, has a helmet of golden wire invoking conch shells, waves and dorsal fins all at once; Ares, God of War's helmet is a Mohawk comprised of a handful of 27-inch golden sword blades. These designs invoke the familiar aspects of the myths without resorting to cliches. The Minotaur appears in this film as an understandably huge man with a helmet of barbed wire formed to resemble a bull's head.

In Mirror Mirror, with few exceptions, the flair is kept within the margins of the elegant sets and gowns. A retelling of the Bros. Grimm's Snow White fairy tale, we spend a lot of time with royalty, in castles and attending fancy-dress balls. Early in the film Snow White's stepmother, the queen (Julia Roberts) is playing chess with another visiting royal, but all the pieces are members of their respective royal entourages, wearing head pieces representing which game piece they are. At the scene's climax, the queen achieves checkmate and the scale model ship (a galleon, I believe) fires it's tiny yet functional cannons into the opposing person-piece's face. Since this is a kids movie, this tiny violence has little more effect than if it had happened to Daffy Duck, but seeing this in the theater (because Tarsem's name was attached) I laughed much harder than the few kids in attendance. It's just so fun! This whimsy pops up throughout the film,  as well: there is a costumed ball where Snow White (Lily Collins) wears a swan dress that makes Bjork's look casual, while the handsome prince (Armie Hammer) wears a top hat adorned with huge bunny ears. My absolute favorite costuming touch is that the seven dwarves use accordion-style extending stilts to masquerade as giants while they rob unwary travelers.

Sadly, Mirror Mirror would be Ishioka's last collaboration with Tarsem - and her last film credit - as she passed away that year at the age of 73. The visual language that she and Tarsem shared was frequently the only repeat draw for me to these films. Without it, The Cell would be a fine but forgettable psychological thriller late-90's holdover, in the vein of Silence of the Lambs.  Immortals would be another paint-by-numbers example of the basic Hero's Journey story like 300 or 2010's Clash of the Titans remake (part of the new millennium's brief re-fascination with Greek myths). And Mirror Mirror would be another version of Snow White. The Fall feels the most fresh despite having a structure similar to One Thousand and One Nights (and, as I said,  being based on an earlier film), probably owing to Tarsem's personal affinity for the story.

Tarsem, like all filmmakers, has certain visual fetishes that he returns to from time to time: horses, water, slow motion, a canny use of artificiality that echoes stagecraft more than anything commonly seen in films, aesthetics taken from numerous works of art and a bold affinity for chiaroscuro (which is our vocabulary word of the day! It means "a bold contrast between light and shadow traditionally found in oil painting" and is a five dollar word for dramatic lighting, but it's a five dollar word that I love, and now I've shared it with you! Apologies for the digression). If you were to watch one of the films I've mentioned I would without question recommend The Fall, because if for some reason the visuals don't interest you, the story they serve and the message at its heart is the most impactful of Tarsem's films. The Fall is a love letter to stories and storytellers, whether it be one-on-one or through cinema, to an audience around the world. It's a moving message from a talent that honestly believes in it and it shows.

It's difficult to describe how exactly these films make me feel, but there is an unbridled creativity and disregard for the usual forms that take a true outsider to accomplish. There is a love and championing of the impossible image that is, for some reason, lacking in most films. For a medium that would seemingly allow you to do anything you can imagine, there is a noticeable lack of visual imagination in Hollywood films. The fact that Tarsem does it primarily through practical effects makes it all the more impressive to me (practical effects will always have a place in my heart). Guillermo Del Toro and Lucile Hadzihalilovic are the two other directors who come to mind who seem to embrace the same kind of refreshing and idiosyncratic possibilities as Tarsem and only Del Toro is anything resembling well-known.

All I can say is that watching a Tarsem Singh film makes me want more from all other films. They make me want to see the dreams I never knew I had, realized on the big screen.