Dogwings
On the most important living artist in America
"There is a moment in each installment of Don Hertzfeldt's masterful trilogy of animated shorts where you feel something in your chest. It's an unmistakably cardiac event, the kind that great art can elicit when something profound and undeniably true is conveyed about the human condition. That's when you say to yourself: are stick figures supposed to make me feel this way? In the hands of a master, yes. And Hertzfeldt is to stick figures what Franz Liszt was to planks of ebony and ivory and what Ted Williams was to a stick of white ash: someone so transcendentally expert that to describe what they do in literal terms is borderline demeaning."
-Steven Pate, reviewing It’s Such a Beautiful Day for The Chicagoist
There aren’t a lot of movies about the COVID pandemic, and some of that is because movies take a long time to write and make, and some of that is because the cultural consensus on the COVID pandemic appears to be “let’s pretend it didn’t happen and also if it did happen maybe it was good?” Eddington got some buzz this year because Ari Aster made it and it played at Cannes, but it wasn’t the first film about COVID. The first major movie to directly address the pandemic actually came out in October 2020 and it was called Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. While that movie may not have treated the subject with a lot of gravitas, it was an extremely accurate and up-to-the-moment look at how American brains were starting to melt in 2020, or had already been melting for a very long time before 2020. And then there are other films that, perhaps, addressed COVID indirectly by exploring themes of grinding isolation (The Holdovers?) or by satirizing life-threatening internet-fueled polarization (Don’t Look Up?) or by just generally kind of nailing everything four years before the pandemic started (10 Cloverfield Lane?) What I’m saying is that there’s one COVID movie, one explicitly about the pandemic, that you shouldn’t sleep on. It’s ME, from 2024.
ME, of course, is a dialogue-free twenty-two minute short film by two-time Academy Award-nominated animator Don Hertzfeldt; as a work of animation, it is stunning, and in my opinion it moves the entire medium of animation forward into a weird new age. The origin of the film is also weird: Hertzfeldt started making ME because a band hired him to promote their new album, and Hertzfeldt’s animation was originally meant to play over tracks from that album. Then, due to what Hertzfeldt describes as “extenuating circumstances,” the band was no longer able to work with him1. All of the animation, which was designed specifically for a certain set of music, now could not be used with any of that music, and Hertzfeldt reworked the whole thing into a new film. After noting the additional year’s worth of rewrites and edits he had to do to make the film work at all, Hertzfeldt writes on his website:
“i'm not telling you this to make you feel sorry for the movie or even suggest that it's compromised. on the contrary, the picture that's somehow still standing is leaner, more raw, and arguably stronger than it would have been had everything gone right. being born from weird chaos forced it through an extra year of reflection, a new structure, and a different kind of clarity. if you're forced to make changes, how can you turn changes into improvements?..."ME" is therefore not a dog that's missing a leg. it's a dog that now has wings. and look, i know dogs aren't supposed to have wings, but this dog does and somehow it works. they're dogwings but they're still wings. that's all to say, this is not what anyone expected it was going to be from day one and sometimes that's for the best. sometimes a movie has to take the really, really, really, long way around.”
Considering that Hertzfeldt started with a completely different vision and the vision blew up and he was forced to make something else, it’s pretty remarkable that ME is still so dazzling and moving, albeit probably more abstract than anything else he’s done. Best I can tell, ME is set in some version of our world; most of the main action takes place against a backdrop of stick figures dropping dead from plague or getting their heads beaten in by the cops. “The main action” is much harder to nail down, but there’s a man who invents some kind of time-traveling bowl-phone and a goddess whose has absorbed the entire digital footprint of humanity and a woman who gives birth to a cute little walking eyeball and doesn’t want to raise it, and it’s all presented with Hertzfeldt’s usual mordant sense of humor and crushing sense of sadness, and the stick figures keep getting sucked further and further into this world of big bright glowing tubes and waves and eventually you watch the entire reality of the film disintegrate to one of Hertzfeldt’s replacement soundtrack selections: Jelly Roll Morton’s “Sweet Jazz Music”2. In his review of the film, rogerebert.com’s Collin Souter wrote “While [Morton] may sound disconnected from what is happening on-screen, it also feels like a lost radio wave traveling through space, bringing us back to a simpler, more playful time before we destroyed ourselves.” David Erlich’s review for IndieWire notes that “The eyeball watches on as everything before it sprouts daisies and crumbles into stardust; the nervous system is the last thing to go. For a brief and beautiful moment, feeling is all that remains of what we were. Then again, Hertzfelt suggests with the latest in his ongoing series of small miracles, feeling is all that we could ever have hoped to be. What a shame it is that we keep wasting it on ourselves.”
So what am I supposed to take away from this cartoon with no words, this musical where all the music had to be replaced? Hertzfeldt tried to describe it in an interview with Collin Souter:
““ME” is about human beings and the selfish things that always hold us back. It’s about the pain we cause. I’ve always thought pain to be kind of like a game of tag. If someone drives like an angry maniac and tries to run me off the road, I’ll be hurt and angry about it. I’ll carry that gross energy around with me. And I’ll be more likely, whether I intend to or not, to go hurt somebody else. And that person might feel gross and go yell at their waitress and then ruin her day. Pain is contagious. In many parts of the world you see a white hot ball of pain being passed back and forth between populations for generations. Pain only makes more pain. And it takes a strong person, a mindful individual, to receive pain from somebody and totally defuse it. To absorb it and kill it in its tracks…if nothing else, “ME” is trying to make you feel something that you might not have otherwise been able to put into words.”
I'm going to try (and probably fail) to put it into words. At the end of ME, I watched reality disintegrate while sweet jazz music played in the background. Reality is going to permanently disintegrate for me someday, just like it is for each of you; Hertzfeldt is the single best artist at making me understand that I am going to die someday. And films like ME make me think about what I’m going to want to hold on to as reality starts to disintegrate around me, what I hope is left in my brain as my organs fail and the lights start to go out, and I sure as shit don’t want my dying brain to be stuck focusing on the pain that is so easy to find in the world. I want to hold on to the beautiful things that I hear and see. I want to hold on to the people, each of them an unwavering beam of light just like me, that I love and that love me, and I want that to have been such a big part of my life that my dying brain can’t help but run that all back for me in my final moments. I want my dying brain to remember mercy and relief and beauty. That is how I want to live. That is how I want the other unwavering beams of light around me to live.
Like almost all of Hertzfeldt’s projects, ME made me want to hug my kids and tell them that being alive right here and now was still a beautiful thing, despite all evidence to the contrary, and that we have not only the opportunity but the obligation to make life a beautiful thing for ourselves and for the people around us. We have the opportunity and obligation to defuse pain, and to offer mercy and relief and beauty in its place. Hertzfeldt is maybe the only artist that consistently makes me feel this way. He is certainly the only artist that can do this with an unparalleled level of narrative economy, considering that his life’s work so far has been animated short films about stick figures. He is the most important living artist in America.
Don Hertzfeldt was nominated for the Palme d’Or at age 22. Don Hertzfeldt was nominated for his first Oscar at age 23. Don Hertzfeldt has had more films compete at Sundance than any other filmmaker. Don Hertzfeldt has won Sundance’s Grand Jury Prize for Short Film twice, and nobody else ever has. Don Hertzfeldt owns all of his work outright and makes his money by selling digital rentals and blu-rays directly to consumers through his company Bitter Films3; he has never done commercials or studio gigs apart from animating a very strange two-minute couch gag from a 2014 episode of The Simpsons. Whenever a new Hertzfeldt short comes out, critics greet it with rapture, and they are correct to do so. Hertzfeldt also, for what it’s worth, basically invented all of Millennial internet humor with his Oscar-nominated 2000 short Rejected, which he has since made free on YouTube:
Set up as a series of (fake) pitches Hertzfeldt made for potential commercials on the “Family Learning Channel”, Rejected starts with absurd non-sequiturs (“my spooooon is too biiiig!”) and gets increasingly unhinged (“Now with more sodium! Sweet Jesus!”) until the fictional animator starts to lose his grip on what he’s making and reality starts to once again disintegrate. Hertzfeldt did the whole thing by hand, which is staggering, and it predates all of the Adult Swim interstitial bumpers and Reddit threads and someecards and single-panel webcomics and slurry of shitposts that obviously crib the film's absurdist sense of humor. New York magazine called it “the cartoon that invented Internet culture”. He did it, he’s patient zero, and while he also is the best artist at making me realize I’m going to die someday and while his work has brought me to tears multiple times, it’s also worth mentioning that he influenced a generation’s worth of comedy. If he had done one or the other I’d consider him maybe the single most important American artist in my lifetime, but he did both.
For the past few weeks, I’ve been casually working on a project for the Catholic Worker’s unofficial website (the Catholic Worker movement does not have an official website or really an official anything). Basically, the volunteers like me are looking through old PDFs of Dorothy Day’s articles across decades of the Catholic Worker newspaper and editing and proofreading everything so the Worker’s unofficial website can maintain a searchable and accurate archive of every article Day ever published. It’s not hard work at all, just a little time-consuming, and you have to put a PDF and Wordpress editor side-by-side and make sure everything matches up. I figured it would be a better use of my free time than staring at my phone (it is), and it would give me a chance to read some of the deep cuts from Day, an author about whom I have written often and whose writing I feel is extremely relevant to our time.
Day came up in a world that felt like it was ending - two world wars, a depression, a global pandemic, civil unrest, the spread of fascism around the world, the failure of the left to bring about lasting change, the constant threat of nuclear weapons making humanity extinct. All of these, of course, are foreign concepts to us, but just know that it was very easy for Day to feel bad about the direction in which the world was heading. Her response was to do what she could with what she had; she and Maurin got a house and they let people live there, and they fed the people who came through, and they tried to explain, as simply as they could, that any change that we wanted to see in the world would have to be downstream of our daily practice of the works of mercy. As Day famously wrote at the end of The Long Loneliness:
“We were just sitting there talking when Peter Maurin came in. We were just sitting there talking when lines of people began to form, saying, “We need bread.” We could not say, “Go, be thou filled.” If there were six small loaves and a few fishes, we had to divide them. There was always bread. We were just sitting there talking and people moved in on us…it all happened while we sat there talking, and it is still going on.”
So, as someone who sometimes also feels bad about the direction in which the world is heading, I thought that getting to read the occasional deep cut from Day would be nourishing. I did not expect that reading my first dozen articles would just result in my complete spiritual annihilation, which is what has happened as I have seen firsthand how prophetic her writing was - not even her books! Like the stuff she rushed out so she could hit the deadline and fill space for her own paper! - how moving that writing is for a scared little guy who has no idea what he’s doing, and how harsh a light it casts on my own cowardice and moral failings. And when horrifying things are happening every day and I feel powerless to stop them and wonder what it even is that I’m supposed to do and what being a Catholic means and what being a person with empathy means and what sort of future my children can have and what I’m supposed to model for them, I come across a paragraph like this from July 1953:
“We are told to put on Christ and we think of him in his private life, his life of work, his public life, his teaching, and his suffering life. But we do not think enough of his life as a little child, as a baby. His helplessness, his powerlessness. We have to be content to be in that state too. Not to be able to do anything, to accomplish anything. One thing children certainly accomplish and that is they love and wonder at the people and the universe around them. They live in the midst of squalor and confusion and see it not. They see people at the moment and love them and admire them. They forgive and they go on loving. They may look on the most vicious person, and if he is at that moment good and kind and doing something which they can be interested in or admire, there they are, pouring out their hearts to him.”
God damn it, GOD DAMN IT, that’s a good paragraph. There is never a time when you cannot accomplish something, even if it is to just see the person in front of you at the moment and love them and admire them, and become like a child, as Jesus said we had to do to enter the kingdom of Heaven. Obviously this is also World of Tomorrow.
World of Tomorrow was and is my pandemic film. I mean, it’s not really about the pandemic, it came out in 2015 - it got Hertzfeldt his second Oscar nomination - and I did watch it when it came out long before the plague started, but then when the plague started I watched it again and I wrote about it on March 30 2020, nineteen days after the NBA cancelled their season and I was told to stop coming in to my office[These were separate events. I am not an NBA player.]. And you can read that piece if you really want, although I’ll just tell you about the film right now, or even better, you can just watch the film yourself because Hertzfeldt has also made it available for free on YouTube:
This dog also has wings; World of Tomorrow came about when Hertzfeldt started recording his conversations with his then-four-year-old niece, whose exclamations became the dialogue for one of the film’s two characters. As he put it, Emily Prime just happened while they sat there talking:
“i learned very quickly that you cannot direct a four year old. you cannot even expect a four year old to recite lines back at you. you just sort of have to let the four year old happen. so i recorded her as we drew pictures and talked about the world. we live very far apart, i only see her about once a year, so we only had time for a few sessions. and with these recordings — her candid thoughts, reactions, and questions — i was able to create the character you are about to meet..”
And that’s how we get the story of Emily Prime, a happy-go-lucky four-year-old stick figure girl who speaks in hilarious and sweet non-sequiturs and is visited by an adult clone of herself time-traveling back from the distant future. And while the first chunk of the film is a dizzying and hilarious account of all of the unsuccessful ways that future-Earth has tried to crack the problem of mortality (time travel, energy harvesting, memory storage, transhumanist android experiments, cloning), we eventually learn that Old Emily has traveled back to Emily Prime because human life is about to be wiped out by a meteor. Society is collapsing. Reality is starting to disintegrate, as it eventually will for each of us. Old Emily is there because she wants to harvest a memory from Emily Prime, she wants something to hold on to as everything disintegrates and it sure as shit isn’t pain. Emily Prime’s memory, the thing Old Emily needs at the end of reality, is a memory of walking with her mother on a beautiful day. And Old Emily leaves the child with this:
“Do not lose time on daily trivialities. Do not dwell on petty detail. For all of these things melt away and drift apart within the obscure traffic of time. Live well and live broadly. You are alive and living now. Now is the envy of all of the dead.”
On March 30 2020, I was still pretty sure that everyone I knew was going to die, that society was going to collapse and I would be hiding in my bathtub with my family wondering if there was any way we could go on. And what I knew from watching World of Tomorrow was that I could at least get one more day with my daughter and my wife and we could at least appreciate some beautiful day or piece of music or story and we could have something lovely to hold on to later, when everything started to disintegrate, and if the last chance I had to get that something was right now, well then I’d better do it right now. I felt absolutely powerless - in many ways, I still do - but I could love and wonder at the people around me, love and admire the people in front of me, and my young daughter was a model of that for me. I at least had now, and now is the envy of all the dead.
In 2012, Hertzfeldt completed It’s Such a Beautiful Day (three shorts stitched together into a feature-length film), and I’ve also written about that one before, it’s about a stick figure named Bill who’s dying from some sort of degenerative brain disease, his reality is quite literally disintegrating. Bill manages to reunite with his dying father, and they don’t really recognize each other, but as Hertzfeldt puts it in the film’s narration, “Neither of these two people remember why they're there, or who exactly this other person is. But they sit and they watch a game show together. And when it's time for Bill to leave, he stands and says something beautiful to him.” The beautiful thing is “you are forgiven”.
When reality is disintegrating, when I feel powerless to stop it, when every attempt at immortality has failed, when the lights finally start to go out, what will I want to hold on to? And if I want something to hold on to, well then I have to start asking myself right now: can I love and wonder at the people and the universe around me? Can I live in the midst of squalor and confusion and see it not? Can I see people at the moment and love them and admire them? Can I forgive and go on loving? Can I look on the most vicious person, and if he is at that moment good and kind and doing something which I can be interested in or admire, can I pour out my heart to him? Can I tell the people in my life “you are forgiven” and ask them to forgive me? Can I tell them I love them and am grateful for them?
Sorry about being so repetitive. I’ve written about Hertzfeldt at least twice before, and I’m now up to two long essays about World of Tomorrow, a movie that's only sixteen minutes long. I’ve written about Dorothy Day at least four times before. Hell, even “I love you, thank you, I forgive you, please forgive me” was a line from The Pitt that I quoted like two months ago. I used the phrase “unwavering beams of light” a few months ago too, and it's not even mine, I stole it from Kurt Vonnegut, about whom I have also written multiple essays. This year I have felt, very often, that I’m just saying the same thing over and over again, mostly to myself. Do the works of mercy, care about vulnerable people or at the very least care about the person in front of you, that sort of thing. I may not have anything else left to write about, I may just be telling myself that for the rest of my life. I guess I could do that in a notebook or something.
Day’s essays for the Worker were often repetitive as well; the medium kind of demanded it, as she never knew who was going to be grabbing a paper for the first time, and that new reader had to be able to understand what the workers were all about. In another spiritually annihilating paragraph from June 1948, after talking about the recent conversion of a reader named Douglas Hyde, Day writes:
“...it is never too late to begin. It is never too late to turn over a new leaf. In spite of the atom bomb, the jet plane, the conflict with Russia, ten just men may still save the city. Maybe if we keep on writing and talking, there will be other conversions like Mr. Hyde’s. It was reading an article that got Fr. Damien his leper at Molokai. It was reading that converted St. Augustine. So we will keep on writing. Writing is not an overflow of life, a result of living intensely. To live in Newburgh, on the farm, to be arranging retreats, to be making bread and butter, taking care of and feeding some children there, washing and carding wool, gathering herbs and salads and flowers—all these things are so good and beautiful that one does not want to take time to write except that one has to share them, and not just the knowledge of them, but how to start to achieve them…Yes, we must write of these things, of the love of God and the love of His creatures, man and beast, and plant and stone.”
I am not writing to convert people or show them how to achieve what I’ve achieved, because I have not achieved anything and I am not a just man who may still save the city and I do not have beautiful things to share. But Day does, and Hertzfeldt does, and I’m telling you that you should see the beautiful things that they have to share. You might feel powerless right now, like society or reality itself is disintegrating in front of you. You might feel like you have nothing to hold on to. Day helped countless people and she did it with no money, no church backing, and no structure. Hertzfeldt made a musical with no music and wrote a sci-fi story based on the outbursts of a four-year-old girl. They were lame dogs in a crumbling world and they found a way to fly; he made films and she made mercy. They saw the rapidly multiplying pain in our world and tried to take that pain and defuse it. You can do that too. I can do that too, even if it's just with the person right in front of me, and that moment of mercy and relief and beauty, that moment where the pain gets defused, that is something I will be able to hold on to, that is something so big that when my brain finally starts to die, it will have no choice but to hold on to that. May we provide that mercy and relief and beauty for others, and may we find consolation when others provide it for us. May we say to ourselves every day, and may we treat the people around us in such a way that they say every day, “now is the envy of all the dead”.
Hertzfeldt has never disclosed who the band is, and he likely can’t ever do that without violating some NDA, but context clues suggest that he was tapped by Arcade Fire to promote their 2022 album “WE” and then Arcade Fire had to scrap the promotional project after their frontman was accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women and the entire band had to significantly reduce their public presence
Which is obviously an upgrade from 2022-era Arcade Fire. I mean, WE wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t Funeral.
Which, I can attest, has very friendly and responsive customer service.