Upstream Color is a surreal narrative that focuses on a woman who barely survives a mysterious, briefly physically and emotionally violent, exploitive encounter whose side effects and ramifications extend long after it ends, sows self-doubt, sparks an identity crisis and creates connections that transcend distance and species. The film depicts how trauma permanently alters identity and affects how we even make life decisions. How much of life is determined by free will/who we are and how much is determined biology? While even more elusive and open-ended than Rupture, Upstream Color is less frustrating and more poetically satisfying by not providing clear answers. I would recommend Upstream Color to viewers who don’t mind a creatively confusing narrative structure and no clear answers because it is the nature of life that there are no clear explanations.
I would probably love Upstream Color more if Brit Marling had a hand in its creation. The film has that sci-fi premise used to magnify the drama and emotional power of the human experience that Marling has popularized in such films as Another Earth, Sound of My Voice and The East, but is more surreal, experimental and deliberately paced than any of her productions.
S
P
O
I
L
E
R
S
I’m still not completely clear on the characters and how they relate to the larva or their motivations. The Thief and the Sampler seem to be independent of one another, but they are complimentary. Does this larva compel the Sampler as much as it compels the others who ingest it? The victims project their anger at the Thief, whom they do not consciously know exists, on to the Sampler because they remember him and feel hostility to him because of his treatment of the pigs, which they translate as violence to themselves, but the Sampler seems to be more helpful than the Thief by extracting the worm and trying to eliminate the larva from the world by killing the piglets instead of financially exploiting someone who would have bought the piglets without knowing that they were exposed to a mind-altering substance. Why could you not just let them live their little pig family life? Why was the Sampler randomly at that guy’s home? Was that guy a victim too? How does the Sampler have a psychic connection to the victims? Did her sterility predate the encounter or was it an unintended side effect?
I’m actually fine with all this ambiguity because Upstream Color erases the idea that human beings go into nature, but are part of nature and are just as inexplicably compelled by unknown forces to engage in certain behaviors. I am including the Sampler in this. The film’s nightmarish though initially placid opening scenes are startling. You see children acting in synchronicity after taking some weird organic drug from the local drug dealer, who is the Thief. What the Thief does to the woman is my nightmare? You get kidnapped, drugged, are financially ruined, lose your job, have no idea if anything even happened to you or if you had a mental breakdown that caused this behavior, suffer a weird infection by some ginormous worm, and your reputation is completely ruined. As if that is not bad enough, a drug unwittingly influences all the decisions that you make afterwards to create some kind of life, and all your emotional reactions do not match what is actually happening to you because you are unconsciously experiencing the emotions of another creature (the pig), which further disrupts the scraps of life that they recovered.
I know that people seem to find the connection between the main character and the guy on the bus as a powerful one and a kind of romantic solace in the midst of this traumatic storm, but I felt horrified for both of them. Everyone is still susceptible and vulnerable to manipulation-conscious or otherwise. They are still attracted to weird sounds and comforted by engaging in mindless, repetitive tasks. The connection that they feel is artificial and probably would not exist if it were not for their separate encounters with the Thief. Their identities are being merged and erased to create a communal consciousness that expands when they create a community with other victims. There is almost no trace of the people that they were before this event. For me, what is most horrifying is that they are robbed of ever understanding what happened to them, their life story and experience. More intriguingly, they seem to have some sort of connection to the orchids thus the main character’s connection to water and rocks.
The whole film is a complete rape nightmare complete with roofies and destruction of the victim’s reputation and subsequent emotional stability. While the end is a happy ending because they form a community to protect each other, human beings and pigs, from further trauma, and destroy the proliferation of the larva, they are still suffering from the trauma and can never recover or act fully as him or herself without being influenced by the larva, the trauma.
Upstream Color makes more sense if it is seen as the pig’s narrative, which is more dominant than the human one and is a successful pig revenge fantasy. Pigs are more aware of their predicament than their human counterparts. The pigs’ experiences determine the lives of their human counterparts, who simply follow their lead and are eventually compelled to kill the Sampler because he killed the piglets then devote the rest of their days to creating a piggy paradise. In a sense, the pigs control the minds and supplant the identity of the human victims although they did not victimize them. I, for one, welcome my pig overlords and hope that they are kinder to us than we were to them.