It’s hard to talk about The Color Wheel – almost impossible to talk about without spoiling. While undoubtedly a movie that inspires strong reactions, it would be fair to say that it doesn’t occupy too great a space in our collective consciousness. The internet has both emboldened and imploded shock culture; nothing phases us anymore.
I wanted to do a piece marking ten years from the release of this transgressive classic, a movie which Ignatiy Vishnevetsky hoped to be ‘the cinema of the future’, but I’m not sure it ever had a theatrical release in my country. And so this piece lies between its somewhat rapturous festival run and its U.S. release in 2012. If not trailblazing, Alex Ross Perry’s sophomore feature remains an abrasive and startling work, towing the line – almost cruelly – between traits that people dislike about indie movies and those that will estrange the alternative filmgoers it seeks to ensnare.
Of course, speaking in such broad terms about films with comparable budgets is ridiculous. The world of independents is perhaps not as daring as it should be, but who has seen enough to tell? The Color Wheel clearly bears huge similarities to the so-called ‘mumblecore’ movement, whose offspring usually focus on neurotic twenty-somethings and their troubles forming relationships. Common features include digital camerawork, improvised performances, and endless streams of conversation.
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Perry’s movies, though laden with the ramblings of middle-class loners, concern form rather than dialogue – fragmentation rather than comfort. This one is symptomatic of this, though arguably more radical in its sustained, disjunctive adoption of these tropes.
Starting in relatively innocuous fashion, we open on a close-up of the female lead, J.R. (Carlen Altman) lying in bed, wearing a sleeping mask. Captured in black-and-white, the general style is grainy and richly textured, contrasting the darkness of the obscured body behind her with the hazy morning light bursting through. These details, as well as the sitcom cliché of waking up to someone and sighing, conjure a tone of intimacy and relatability, propelled by a shaky camera with frequent focus pulls. Authenticity is key, yet the faintly Bergmanesque nature of the cramped, ambiguous two-shot suggests something darker that the director is hiding from us. The harsh white glow is one of sobriety rather than revelation.
The man, Colin, played with exquisite, clumsy misanthropy by Perry himself, joins her outside for a coffee. They are brother and sister – though we learn this later. A smart consequence of cutting from this disarming cold open to the lighter, more regular storyline is that we end up forgetting these elements before the final scene hurls them back up again. Despite the messy, improvisational tone of the movie, everything revolves around these subversive, catastrophic bookends. The rest is a road trip: J.R. and Colin embark on a car journey to retrieve J.R.’s belongings from a professor she was in a relationship with. Each encounter on the way (and back again) exposes the considerable insecurities lurking beneath their vicious veneers of wit and cynicism.
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While the film already performs a somewhat miraculous lie in its construction, its two leads hide beneath shields of self-deception that are constantly attacked by the other. J.R. is a mostly talentless graduate who hopes, with admirable resolve, to become a news anchor. Colin is her opposite, a once aspiring writer who now works a dull day job which – at least, he thinks – sounds respectable. He too is falling out of love.
Co-written by these uneasy yet naturalistic performers, each sequence was extensively rehearsed, and techniques such as stuttering and misinterpretation emphasise the characters’ discordance with the outside world. J.R. for example, often breaks into strange voices in order to ironize events around her (‘ooh la la’). For her, humour is a defence mechanism, a way to avoid being taken too seriously by others.
The audience is constantly aware that, even though they seem to hate each other, Colin and J.R. are irrevocably tied. After an incredibly awkward, deeply artificial scene in a motel – in which the clerk says that they must be married to stay, revealing a sign that says ‘I need to see all married couples kiss’ – they finally reach the professor’s house. Unlike Colin’s, his insults are incisive and cruel. Standing outside the car, ready to leave, J.R. is clearly hurt.
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Adorning a pair of sunglasses, she strolls through a park, her shrouded eyes detached from the mosaic of inky trees beyond. A stunning, sun-drenched shallow focus inhabits her perspective entirely, reinforcing this isolation from normal life. Moments of intimacy are sparse, splintered between increasingly surreal, comedic interactions – yet they are more jarring and effective because of this. It helps that the movie is shot by Sean Price Williams, who masterfully renders even the most mundane settings as fractured and haunting.
An ironic distance is maintained not just by the characters but the film itself. Unlike many indie dramedies of the new millennium, it is shot on 16mm film stock, which constitutes a soft, impressionistic visual style vulnerable to high and low light conditions. Retro musical choices and a distinctly 70’s font put the leads somehow out of time, dipping in and out of iconic, incongruous American spaces like diners and motels. Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha (2012) appeared at a similar time, memorably using Bowie’s ‘Modern Love’ to evoke Frances’ timeless, irreverent charm – her anachronistic glee. Colin and J.R. are stifled by a milieu of neoliberal monotony, an environment which cannot articulate their feelings. Music here is alienating and diverse, reflecting, like the film’s structure, an emotional vagrancy that can’t be expressed by mumblecore’s casual existentialism.
Before considering The Color Wheel’s audacious final scenes, it is worth exploring a little further the themes of romance and sex as they pertain to the siblings. For much of the runtime, they react to each other’s bodies and desires with what we might call an appropriate, slightly immature sense of disgust. Colin vomits after he is forced to kiss J.R., and is visibly uncomfortable bringing her different clothes after she spills food on her shirt. At one point he says possibly the nicest thing he has ever said to her: ‘you’ve always been a hot commodity in the world of perverts.’
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The tightrope that Perry walks, which the film’s reputation stems from, is between this expected revulsion and his unexpected use of romantic comedy conventions. After J.R. has been invited to a party when bumping into an old schoolmate, her and Colin’s preparation (buying clothes, mainly) is ostensibly a date scene. In it, uplifting power-pop backs a montage of the two laughing and playing around, insulting each other in a more benign way. Recognisable images – having food fights, breaking antiques – are unsettled by their status as relatives as well as Colin’s casual racism. Over the course of the movie, the sparring of the two protagonists becomes gentler yet increasingly disturbing.
Spurring towards its justifiably divisive conclusion, laughter turns to genuine sympathy, dismissal becomes acceptance, and hatred of other people becomes a distressing love for each other. The agonizing party scene is really the nail in the coffin for their social lives – the moment where their insecurities spill out into the world, never to be hidden again. Cleverly, a jump cut to mid-conversation contrasts the siblings’ genuine intimacy with the superficial camaraderie of this new environment. Though somewhat unique in its uncanny falseness, cues are taken from Lynch and Sirk to mutate these suburban hipsters into a genuinely terrifying social force.
One man slowly pours a glass of wine down Colin’s shirt. Others trip him up like school bullies. Someone in a wheelchair is caught standing in a bathroom, faking polio. The full shots are framed with an eerie distance. J.R.’s predicament is more believable, but still deeply humiliating. A group of modern yuppies interrogate her about current achievements and career goals. They refer to her ‘little auditions’ and laugh mockingly at the idea that she would be unemployed. Their jobs are portrayed as vapid – parodically “creative”. Also represented are different versions of womanhood, obvious in these careerist types but also in the cynical young mother J.R. speaks to.
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Far from naturalism now, a kind of cyclical editing strategy scrolls through all the partygoers, emphasising their bland uniformity. Like Colin and J.R., the audience is placed in a privileged position that sees through these deceptions, the great divide between real feeling and social presentation. Yet this only makes us more disconnected. They head back, stopping for the night at a family home. Driving becomes less coherent here, a brief montage of flickering car lights in an abyss of darkness. While a nice transition on its own, there is also a sense of descending from genre – away from the road movie towards something without purpose, irreconcilable.
As with any romcom worth its salt, The Color Wheel traffics in the tension between rejection and consummation. Indeed, many screen loves would not function at all without a certain level of dismissal; this is where the drama is born, where the audience’s hopes are stoked for the final payoff. The logic in this case is precise, calculated for an emotional engagement that must finally be shattered and destroyed. Perhaps there is a slight complicity here, in that we cannot see the ending happening in any other way. When Colin and J.R. finally have sex, it is shocking enough to be horrible, but plausible enough to act as the sole crusade for their deliverance from society.
Fittingly, the moment that paves the way for Perry’s incestuous climax is the party, an inherently social event that explodes the siblings’ shame and insecurity. The excruciatingly long take begins with Colin’s anxiety that he might be like those people – so the act is positioned as directly oppositional to the partygoers, who we also despise. This subtle, unbroken two shot of them lying on a sofa is always about sex, yet its hand-held, intimate framing lulls us into a sense of security. Duration underlines this comfort while also forcing the viewer to question it. After all, no other shot in the movie has even slightly resembled this one.
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Part of this moment’s mastery, in spite of its provocative material, is its delicate allowance for our own denial. As I mentioned, we do see it coming, but always within the shelter of doubt cultivated by our expectations. Namely, J.R.’s part of the conversation concerns not her but a detailed hypothetical encounter between Colin and a female student (he has just expressed a wish to get into teaching). J.R.’s precarious act of self-insertion into this story is emphasised by a quick pan to her writhing fingers. The parallel drawn between the man she has been screwing and her own brother is obvious, though still fantastical. We don’t have to believe it.
Then the movie severs this possibility. About six minutes into the shot, Williams’ camera suddenly picks up, trailing us closer and closer to the oblivion of knowledge. The propulsive style can only highlight our entrapment – this is destiny, it seems to say. The close-up pairs their lips in a way that is flattened though still detached, a stunning visual metaphor for the central theme of dejected, inescapable romance. They kiss and we wince. We can either reject the film entirely or embrace this startlingly original portrayal of society’s rejects, of people raised on resentment eventually finding a place for each other.
Unfortunately, alongside the grimness of incest itself, this path is equally corrupted and hopeless. As it cuts closer to them kissing and then having sex, the shrill buzzing of grasshoppers outside swells and increases to an exaggerative, pointed level. They are now hopelessly divided from the world outside. They have traded one rejection for another. The close-up is completely insular – it permits nothing else.
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