In the Flesh: Mad God

Shit pours down a funnel and into the mouth of a great ulcerous titan buried in the earth. It guzzles excrement without cease, processing ton after ton of filth through a bizarre system of organs naked to the outside world and then excreting it in turn through a biomechanical apparatus which reconstitutes waste into stick-figure golems of hair and refuse. The golems wander out into an industrial hellscape to rake more shit, fall into burning furnaces, get mowed down by floating slabs of metal, and listen to the pronouncements of a vast god-like machine which babbles in the overlapping voices of human infants. Our protagonist, a nameless figure clad in coat and gas mask and carrying a briefcase, passes through this vast, inscrutable world largely without comment. Once, briefly, he is moved by the plight of the laborers, but not enough to deviate from his own strange and ultimately futile mission.

Everywhere director Phil Tippet’s film takes us we see society, or what passes for it, from the bottom up. Everywhere we see waste, futility, stupidity, and bottomless cruelty. A butcher hacking a helpless person apart seemingly because he’s in her way. Alchemists tossing a baby into a juicer. No mercy. No love. Only endless work to the betterment of nothing and the benefit of no one. That perhaps the most labor-intensive stop motion film in history is so preoccupied with labor itself should come as no surprise, but it isn’t empty technical skill on display here. There is empathy, too, in the simple depiction of the lives of the meanest and least powerful of the world’s creatures, and awe for the vast edifices of social pressure and belief which arise from the simple repetition of brute tasks.

No, what interests Tippet appears to be not just work itself but the emotional and physical terroir of work, the conditions from which it arises and which it in turn perpetuates. Mad God sees the absurdity of life and handles that fragile fact with respect rather than mockery, plunging headfirst into the excess with which we seek to distract ourselves, the causes and systems of belief through which we struggle to convince ourselves of our own importance or, if not our importance per se, then the importance of our unimportance. There must be something, something out there to make all this worth it every scene seems to beg, and of course there is: there’s the work itself, the act of taking a thousand little nothings, setting them end to end, and declaring “this is something.” It’s absurd, it’s futile, it’s trivial, and it contains within it the seeds of all human endeavor and misery.