Only Interstellar Pinball Lives Forever (2010)
Running time: 70 minutes. Produced by Tristan Newcomb, Simon Quiroz and Roberto Rosales. Written and directed by Tristan Newcomb. Music by Tsuyoshi Oyama.
Where to get it: Download-To-Own HD / Amazon DVD / Amazon Video-On-Demand
Even as laypeople, out on a distant periphery far from involvement in actual science, most of us have heard rumblings about the distant technological breakthrough heading our way: that we will be able to upload our consciousness and memories into a digital construct, thereby preserving our identities from the oblivion of organic death. Now, if that doesn’t sound like a damn good topic for a puppet movie, damnit, what does?! Moreover, whereas nearly all films tend to give the viewer a vicarious physical (or emotional) experience – i.e. what it would be like to rob a bank, or flee from a dinosaur, or negotiate your way into a sudden romance in a seaside resort – Only Interstellar Pinball Lives Forever is an attempt to give the viewer a vicarious cerebral experience, and to be fully subjected to the restless, serpentine cognitive flashes of its characters, both human and puppet.
(plot description – contains mild spoilers) It begins with our young, eight year-old puppet lad having to try and find philosophically-soothing reasons for the frequent deaths of his pets, since he is extremely unlucky in this regard. Deciding that there really isn’t a suitable preventative for such loss, he instead vows that, at the very least, he himself should never die. He resolves to someday find a way to become a kind of molecule, since one of the few scientific facts he’s (overly) confident about is that while dead people may become molecules, the molecules themselves never vanish, they just keep going forever. So if he could change into a molecule someday, he’d be fine. He vows to invent the process for individual molecule transformation when, in the future, he’ll no doubt become an adult scientist…
We leap forward twenty-two years and see what has become of this lad. He’s not a scientist at all – he’s an unhappy focus group tester for a huge, nameless video game company. He has apparently forgotten about his childhood molecular vow until, one morning, while killing some time before getting dressed for work, he’s playing a bit of video pinball on his laptop…and the sight of one spherical pinball striking another suddenly unearths his long-buried ambition regarding becoming a molecule – and, more importantly, the vow about never letting himself die…
Not being a scientist, and therefore not being able to contribute to the technological development of a permanent digital consciousness, he gets the idea that maybe he could join that scientific process as an outsider by designing a pinball machine which somehow demonstrates the appeal and dignity of uploading one’s consciousness into a durable, technological form such as a small, spherical, metallic pinball. If he can become “popular” among scientists by building such a pinball machine to amaze & amuse them, perhaps they’d let him become a member of their privileged class, the inner circle of folks who will be first in line for getting to live forever via uploaded digital consciousness?
But designing such a kooky thing as a pinball machine…he hasn’t attempted creativity of that sort since he was that young lad, long ago. His only hope: use various mood-changing liquids, like brandy and cough-syrup, to “become” that young lad once again, and let him design the pinball machine. Alas, like all ingested-chemical-based euphoria, it goes very well and very badly, a joust between confidence and paranoia, utter certainty and wide-eyed dismay, both sides winning and losing that joust in turns…all the while thinking, designing, fixating, pondering, rearranging, staring…and eventually sharing wandering, childlike conversations with a small pig…whom he is bound to disappoint.
There you have it. A puppet movie about death and pinball, suitable for mortality-obsessed intellectuals, existentially-minded children, fans of obscure pinball machine prototypes, advocates of an extropian future, or just lovers of cough syrup. Half existential narcotic, half 80′s Euromantic music video, half wistful message-in-a-bottle to future technology-enchanced humans, and half love letter to pinball machines. A movie so unaccountably odd, you’ll either end up fearing death a lot less or possibly a great deal more.
Slightly more severe spoiler territory: there’s a nifty review of the movie by writer Zack Schuster, which delves into even more detail.
If you’ve seen it…one question which comes up quite often is, “what is the meaning of the purple puppet near the end?” Folks usually sense that the purple puppet is the man’s even wider-eyed state of epiphany, but they aren’t certain why or in what way. Since the man drinks himself to the point of passing out (temporarily erasing identity), he’s able, for a few moments upon waking, to view the items in his apartment with a kind of utter alarmed detachment at how insanely peculiar everything already is…that the one life we have on this one planet, the one life we’ll ever know, is populated with objects such as pinball machines, do-it-yourself magic sets, colored pellets of Trix cereal, etc. In such a world as that, the ultimate absurdity – to possess such a vast consciousness, only to have it be completely erased with organic death – now seems to fit perfectly within the absurdity of ordinary reality…because in a reality with something like a Trix rabbit trying to sell you colored pellets of cereal, of course existence can end up being for absolutely nothing. There is no magical metaphysical barrier that can keep silliness and arbitrariness contained to things like cereal boxes. It would naturally spill over into life’s meaning (or non-meaning).
