Conversation #29: Gorillas, Unicorns, and Bats (January 28, 2018)

This week: we took a walk at Rolling Hills Park, and watched a movie about a gorilla named Sylvio. No, he’s not that kind of gorilla. We discuss three articles. First, a piece from Slate by Darby Saxbe about a woman who tried to get help for postpartum depression, and what happened next. Then, a fascinating piece from Ars Technica about archaeobotanist Natalie Mueller at Cornell University and her work studying the plants that indigenous people cultivated in North America thousands of years ago. And finally, we take a look at a long blog post from members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Josh and Lolly Weed. In 2012 Josh and Lolly explained to the world that they had chosen to stay married despite the revelation that Josh is gay. They just told the world that they are divorcing. We do our best to take on this tricky subject and some of the political and cultural context, and why despite the circumstances we feel saddened to hear about the end of a marriage.

How to Listen

You can find the MP3 file here.

The Podcast feed is here.

The Podcast channel on YouTube is here.

More Information

Our walk of the week was at Rolling Hills Park

The web site for Sylvio the movie can be found here.

The article about Jessica Porten’s ordeal when she asked for help with postpartum depression can be found here.

The article about archaeobotanist Natalie Mueller’s work can be found here

Josh and Lolly Weed’s long article on the end of the marriage can be found here

Their original 2012 blog post can be found here

This Week’s Music

This week’s music clips are from Paul’s cover of Jules Shear’s song “Leave Town.” You can find the original here. There’s a video of Paul’s cover here.

Paul’s Blog Notes on Sylvio

We watched Sylvio. I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect — the film is unrated, so it could have had some kid-unfriendly elements. But in fact it is a very sweet, low-key story under the basic surrealist elements, with a side of kitsch. The kids laughed uproariously, and so did I. Two of the kids did not laugh quite so much. Same, I think, thought parts of it were too silly to bear. I could not get a really coherent critique out of him. He may have just been objecting to the premise itself. If you can accept the premise, which proposes that there’s a mild-mannered gorilla living and working alongside humans in Baltimore, then it all sort of flows from there. There is no CGI or motion capture. The film is beautifully low-budget throughout. Sylvio is played by a guy in a gorilla suit, Albert Birney (one of the writer/directors), wearing sunglasses. The credits list Sylvio Bernardi as playing himself. Birney took no pains whatsoever were taken to make Sylvio look like a realistic gorilla. He can’t speak. He gives out occasional grunts and sighs. But mostly he participates in conversations using meaningful nods and head tilts. There is a gag where he can type (very quickly) on a computer keyboard and it will read aloud what he typed, but the film uses this only a couple of times.

Veronica picked up on something that I picked up on, too, which is that the film is “perfect,” in a sense. It follows through on its own internal logic with perfect whimsicality. Oh, some scenes drag just a bit, and I think the filmmakers, paradoxically, could have gotten a more perfect low-budget look with a higher budget. There are scenes that don’t quite work, like a confusing bit where Sylvio walks through an urban woods and meets some horses. Sylvio doesn’t really convince us that he has some kind of a deep spiritual connection to the natural world, given that the Baltimore environs feel entirely like a decaying urban setting and the natural settings don’t look very healthy. The filmmakers were working with what they had. But mostly, the film is very funny and even touching.

What does it mean? Oh, I think you could try to make the case that it is an allegory about race relations, about black folks trying to tolerate the well-meaning but fumbling acts of solidarity by white allies, about social media, about attitudes towards hip-hop culture — all kinds of things. However, I think to do very much of this is really to stretch it beyond the intentions of the filmmakers. I think they really just wanted to make a funny, weird, touching film with the resources they could easily obtain, and they did. So the allegory is paper-thin; it’s about the struggle of an artist to earn a living making the art he loves. In the closing credits, the filmmakers list their Kickstarter contributors. It’s an amazingly long list. Apparently Sylvio began life as a series of six-second videos on Vine — eight hundred of them. That fact seems somehow more absurdist than anything the filmmakers could put into a film.

The Vines survive on YouTube. I don’t know if there is an official source with better video quality, but I found a compilation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SxYNm9GvwE

You might be able to get a sense of the finished film here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVgnWiA7tKM

Sylvio the gorilla loves to make video puppet shows. He has a little hand puppet of a balding white man, called Herbert Herpels, and he loves to make tiny props and create very slow-moving little clips in which there is no dialogue and almost no action; we might wait a minute for a tiny piece of toast to pop up, or a tiny plant to sprout. To me there’s something immensely appealing about the idea that one can make “quiet” art—-stories in which almost nothing happens, slow readings, ambient music, audio recordings in which someone takes a walk in the woods, long conversations about scholarly topics, essays that go into depth about a book. These are the kind of thing I always feel compelled to make. When I try to make things using the conventions of popular media—-aggressive storytelling, fast-moving plots, narrow escapes, vulgarity, loudness—-I always feel slightly fraudulent, unless I’m simultaneously undermining those tropes. I don’t think Sylvio, the gorilla, is at all interested in cultural criticism or undermining tropes, or anything. He just wants to make his art. May we all get to do the same.