The Final Girl
We sat down with the artists to find out just exactly what Dripfeed.tv is all about.
Do you want to explain what Dripfeed.tv is?
Tarren—We wanted to make a body of work that would span several years and come out in slow increments. So, drip feed, like you would drip feed oil into an engine. Dripfeed is messy and falling apart, it's incapable of transcending the environment in which it is taking place, so you see the failure of its fiction. We are interested in the failure of a given narrative to stay cohesive in a performance. Sometimes the characters will achieve a seamless transformation, but we show you the process of this and what its limits are.
We were looking at American entertainment and the kinds of formats that have maintained from vaudevillian, to the variety show, daytime television, reality TV, through to social media.
It's about spatializing the way that narratives exist fragmented in your mind. The characters are not three dimensional or fully fleshed out, rather, we give material to the performers and through the process of repetition and rehearsal see what can happen in the moment. You can watch them embody the material then get thrown back into their own subjectivity.
That reminds me a bit of Out 1 by Jacques Rivette where a group is inside a film rehearsing a play. I wanted to ask if you would connect it to existing praxes where people are trying to collapse the 4th wall like Brecht or French New Wave etc?
T—I was reading about pornography and curiosa and what happened with the rise of user generated content, where its not about production value, but rather the singularity of the moment, and intimacy, where this thing is only happening once and it's happening for you.
Pornography is really interesting because ultimately you are staging reality and playing around with that script and seeing when it collapses or has an “authentic” moment.
T—That's something we were thinking about.
...and is also very Californian!
Joel—We're filming it in a slightly creepy way with the handycams. It looks like it's filmed for someone's personal collection.
T—It's invasive. Can you watch explicit content innocently or are you implicated by the fact you are watching? We often now see warnings of “contains graphic violence” on social media for example. I think there has always been a connection between trauma and entertainment.
I definitely agree with that in the form of popular music.
T—Could you elaborate on that?
Blues, rap, disco; It's usually centered around violence, sadness or loss.
T—Yes absolutely, and the new episode of Dripfeed centres around a troupe of Final Girls, the female archetype from slasher films who confronts and survives the killer. In Dripfeed, this group of final girls come together to process their trauma through performance. Throughout the story they discuss how competitive the conditions are, and how they are being pitted against one another. What is the ideal final girl? There’s a line, “You have to hold whatever hope you have next to the terrors which cannot be unseen." Who will be the one to deliver these messages of female trauma and suffering? I think of Me Too and partly of Greta Thunberg. Why is she the correct messenger for the horrific messages we have to hear? What makes her the best public face?
It's interesting the connection with the Final girl as this survivor of trauma and then if someone goes viral they have to have the most suffering in order to be heard. You can't be successful having a relatively safe or stable life, which maybe says a lot about how society is structured.
T—The Final Girl as an archetype feels very appropriate for the times. Society is collectively having to confront the monstrous aspects of itself and we are living through significant perspective shifts. It's typical in slasher films for the viewer to adopt the perspective of the killer, and then at some point flip and start siding with the Final Girl.
So it feels like a nation of Final Girls?
T—(Laughs) Yes, the Final Girl is a complex figure and in this story she's not a virgin and she's not innocent, nor is she the ultimate victim. We' re still figuring her out but she's definitely an archetype that's worth looking at again.
She’s a figure who breaks through this weird binary of good or evil...
T—Absolutely, we're living in a time where we are getting further away from the complexity of human experience. With feminine desire in particular, there's less territory, we're shrinking. We're not allowed to talk about things that would truly complicate these woke narratives about what is appropriate to be writing, speaking or making art about.
That reminds of that film “Secretary” from 2002, and not to be too topical but it is like the discourse around Philip Guston where some people are deciding for other people how they should or would think about a certain work, but if we look at this film or painting, allowing people to decide for themselves what something is or isn’t depicting, then having a permissive ban on how someone is allowed to react on their own terms with context.
T—Yes and Dripfeed.tv is this autonomous space that we have carved out over years for us to turn back to, there are no barriers for us. We get commissioned from different theaters or different platforms but we ultimately own that space and it's us that decides what happens there. It's unapologetically messy, it tries to materialize psychological spaces.
J—It's dreamlike.
T—The singularity of the event comes from the fact that it's not a polished product that has been rehearsed for 6 months, it's not seeking to be a professional film, it's seeking to capture something that you could have only seen one time and we are going to capture it on video.
