March 5, 2008
Part 5 - Isn't it Me
Matt said:
From the beginning, this song worried me. I wanted to resist making this a sappy moment in the movie but the song almost demanded something bittersweet and melancholy. So, I wrote this stoic reunion to go along with the song.
In the original draft, not much happens; The Musician sits next to Jenny. They ignore each other. The Musician gets the clarinet and brings it back to her. She puts it together and plays. THE END. Not much content for entire song and both Craig and I were worried that there wouldn’t be enough footage to fill an entire song and it would be boring. One night, Craig and I got finely tuned at Club Foot (the location of this very scene) and began rattling off ideas for this scene. I don’t remember them all. I think we discussed more flashback material but Craig eventually came up with what we’ve since dubbed “MultiCraig.” Why not have a bunch of different Craig’s in the bar? One could be dressed as the cowboy, another as broken nose trainee. All of the Musician’s costume changes would be represented. I knew we could pull it off because Craig had done “MultiCraig” in his videoblog, Wheezy Waiter (http://www.wheezywaiter.com). Craig was an expert at “MultiCraig.”
Thus, a barely coherent conversation turned into movie history.
I admit it’s gimmicky and we did it mainly to fill up time but I think it livens up a particularly dead scene. People have asked what the scene means and I have to say that I don’t really know. I have a few theories:
A.) The sight of his long lost love not only breaks the Musician’s heart, it also shatters his psyche into three distinct personalities: The Cowboy, The Musician, and The Broken Nose which is sort of a transitional personality between The Cowboy and The Musician.
B.) They are The Musician’s past and future. His past represented by the The Musician playing the guitar and his future by The Cowboy and The Broken Nose.
C.) They are ghosts. BOO!
D.) (This is a theory put forward by tentilone in a youtube comment) A confusing chapter, but I'll take a shot. Beginning with the theft of the musician's balls, it seems the girl still holds some hypnotic power over him. At which point his past, present, and future all hover around her. She is his focal point. Only when he returns her clarinet, does he enable his future to move forward while he enojys the present in her company.
E.) If you think of the entire movie as The Musician’s deathbed flashback, then this is just some weird hallucination—a misremembering of events or a jumbling of memories.
Maybe it doesn’t make any sense but you know what David Byrne always says: Burning down the house!
Matt Weber Writer/Director
Craig said:
Hey, Matt! I have another theory. This is the way I always thought of this scene, and I’m the editor, so my thoughts are right. Think of this scene in terms of Jenny’s (the girl’s) point of view. If we step into her psyche (which I recommend doing barefoot) and we slosh around in there for a while, we’ll discover it makes perfect sense, and then we’ll need to take a bath.
From this scene we can derive that Jenny knows, or at least thinks she knows, what’s going to happen. She can see the Musician for his past, present, and future. She knows the road she’s going down is a dangerous one and bringing the Musician back into her world could have dire consequences. She knows the Musician too well, and can predict that he won’t back down from a fight. Equally, she can picture him out on the road playing on a lonely stage, as he did before his arrival. This is all a good, albeit confusing, way to get into the mind of Jenny.
Also, in the original idea, I believe we were going to have the cowboy bleeding. I don’t know why we dropped that. Probably for logistical reasons. And using blood is intensely frustrating.
Look for the tracking-in shot revealing the clarinet. One of my favorites. The shot, not the clarinet.
Also, I hate this song cuz I had nuthin’ to do with the recording of it.
Craig Benzine Actor/Editor/Guitarist
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