“They never should have grounded me – now I have nothing” ... sounds like a quote from an emo teen in a self indulgent drama, but Tracey is anything but self indulgent. While she is "emo", she has copious reasons to be - her brother is missing, her parents are abusive dead beats and she constantly finds herself in situations with threatening / hostile men.
Tracey’s character is easy to feel for. The viewer is shown a fragmented view of her life by split screens, scenes behind bars, and broken imagery. Although I spent most of the film cringing, it was a total pleasure to watch. This film exhibits many postmodern techniques, such as visual fragmentation, non linear plot line and blurring between fantasy and reality. There is also a recurring theme of animals, particularly horses and birds, to denote freedom – the freedom that Tracey wishes she had. She’s oppressed by her problematic relationship with her parents, the kids at school, and the disappearance of her brother, for which she is held responsible.
A quote that stuck in my head when I watched this film is said as Tracey is on the bus in the shower curtain she grabs before she flees from Lance’s bleak apartment. “How do you know what’s real and what’s not when the whole world is inside your head?” The story within a story technique employed in The Tracey Fragments naturally triggers the viewer to question the reliability of the narrator.
As she is on the bus, looking at the camera, telling her story, she tells us that her dad has previously expressed qualms with her exaggerating. He can't tell “whats the truth and whats a lie” when it comes from her mouth. The viewer is shown pieces of her fantasies as well as reality, with little distinction between them. Tracey’s questionable relationship with Billy Zero is an example of such exposure of her imagination. We see them both portrayed all goth glam in the super steamy sex montages of her fantasies, which look like something from a music video. Then a minute later, we see her being kicked out of his car onto the road in a more realistic representation of the dreary world in the film. But the portrayal of reality isn’t exactly true to nature at all times, as fragmentation and obscurity of vision is a regular occurrence.
Tracey’s life has been a perpetual state of crisis, and if I were her I’d live in a dream world, too.
Tracey, as she narrates the story, makes many references to the cycles of nature and life and how creatures of the universe are all connected. Horses watch her and Billy Zero in their fantastical escapades, and she is spliced with a horse as she runs away from her house near the beginning of the film. She tells us of the connection we, mankind, have to these creatures even though we might not know it. She tells us -when horses fall, foam comes out of their mouth. Then they are made into glue and kids glue bits of paper to cards and the children eat the glue and the children become the horse.
In another statement exemplary of the cycles in nature and life, Tracey tells us the country creeps her out – because dead bodies live in graves, swamps, ditches, in the country, creeps her out. A man dumped the body of a girl into a ditch, it melts into slime, then flowers grow and a bee sucks the flower and makes honey. And the family of the girl buys the honey from the store and the family eats the girl.
These cyclical correlations adhere to the postmodern theme of absurdity of life – animals, humans, corpses and insects are all connected because we share this earth and live on it together. We aren’t conscious of this fact all the time, it’s easy to forget it. Yet, the viewer is made aware of this simple, all encompassing truth once again as we are guided by the wisdom of our unconventional protagonist.
Sonny, Tracey's brother, is often portrayed as a dog or seal like figure, on all fours, barking. She even calls him a "bad dog" when he follows her to the forest. Sonny is one of the few characters in the film that seem to bring Tracey pleasure. When he presents her with a necklace for her birthday, she is genuinely touched. Unlike Lance, her sketchy “friend” who gets his ass handed to him by an enormously aggressive man who ends up raping Tracey – or at least such is implied. (But she slashes his throat with a can of beans in a fury of instinctual fervour that inspired my room-mate and I to laugh out loud in feminist triumph.)
Anyway, Lance is a total creep who grabs a crow from outside his window even though Tracey protests. She asserts that crows are like people, and will be tarnished by his human hands – much like herself. Lance grabs the crow, casting a “human’s spell on it”, robbing it from the natural world free of oppressive institutions and messing with it with his greasy, substance riddled hands and killing it.
The end of the film has a surprisingly optimistic ending. Tracey gets off the bus at last and walks through a more or less deserted park, but runs into Billy Zero and his entourage of lowlife homies sipping on 40’s in the middle of the afternoon. She tells herself in her head that no one can stop her, no one can make her stand still, (like the horses and birds we see so frequently in the film). Tracey gives Billy Zero the cold shoulder and walks on as it starts lightly snowing, giving us the impression that she continues walking on in this world that is “as crusty as the flowers on this fucked up shower curtain”.
I think what makes this film a masterpiece is the fact that it takes bold risks that might confuse the (less attentive) viewer. Watching this film as a "class reading", I prepared myself to be more critical, ask more questions of it as I was watching it, than I would have if I were just kicking back watching it with a group of pals. The viewer who is looking for a good kick back film will be disappointed, I think. But I was not. On the contrary, I found this to be one of the best films I have seen in many moons.
No comments:
Post a Comment