Week 4 (July 12 – 18) – Roots of the Underground: Film-makers’ Coop
The Film-Makers’ Cooperative is a non-profit dedicated to experimental and avant-garde cinema; almost all of the most well-known American experimental filmmakers have had works in their catalogue at some point.
“After thirty-three failed assassination attempts, entailing two thousand people, and fifty million dollars, they are horrified to realize that you can’t kill something that isn’t alive.“
The first time I watched Tribulation 99, either rented from Incredibly Strange on West Liberty or Heads Together, it was too much for me. Too many facts, all at once, in the time before the internet, before everyone knew what conspiracy theories were and how they worked. The end, as the world just falls to magma and shit, just felt like it could happen. Still does.
An alien race known as the Quetzals has left behind their exploded planetoid and taken up residence in cavernous cities beneath the surface of Earth, hiding within its hollow heart. When 1950s atomic testing disrupts their lair, they begin a calculated infiltration of human society.
According to the film’s breathless, conspiratorial narration by Sean Kilkoyne, the Quetzals are the true architects of our modern crises. They utilize telepathic powers to sow discord, place their human replicants in power and manipulate world events. The CIA, established by Harry S. Truman, is revealed to be the only force waging a secret war against these invaders, with the film positing that U.S.-backed coups against figures like Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala, Fidel Castro and Salvador Allende were actually desperate tactical maneuvers to root out alien-controlled puppets.
Baldwin made this by salvaging material from film archives being discarded in favor of VHS, taking all sorts of footage and also finding moments from The Mysterians, Journey to the Seventh Planet, The Brain from Planet Arous and more. By stripping these sci-fi monster movies of their original context and slamming them against real-world newsreels and war footage, Baldwin suggests that the reality of CIA covert actions is so horrific and evil that it almost requires a fantasy narrative to make sense of it.
The film operates on an exhausting, hypnotic sensory overload. It is a masterpiece of associative editing where the Mission: Impossible theme might underscore a clip of an elaborate (and real) assassination plot, or where the term ESP is revealed to mean El Salvador’s Poltergeists.
I get why this upset me, more than twenty years after I first saw it. It offers no hope in the face of this terror. It cynically says that these are the end times and we can’t look away. I can only imagine how Baldwin would see the world today. Now, people hear about pizza parlors with child abuse inside them and just run in with guns or believe that a President’s wife is a man and say it out loud. At the time of Tribulation 99, we were content to deal with zines like Paranoia and weird pamphlets left out for anyone to find. The truth wasn’t out there. It was hidden, it was occult, it was forbidden.
This movie still scares the shit out of me.
