My initial disappointment of missing The Charles’ run of Here, the latest digital experiment by Hollywood tinkerer par excellence Robert Zemeckis, was made up for by seeing it in what my friend (who hated the movie) described as a decidedly Zemeckis-ian environment: the kitschy capitalist strip mall Americana of White Marsh’s “Avenue.” The matinee was cheap, and we were 50 years junior to the next youngest person in the theater—one attendee’s surprisingly wet cough made it seem like it might be their last journey into Zemeckis’ strange mind. The lights go down, and after 20-some minutes of trailers for everything from WWII dramas set to Disturbed’s “The Sound of Silence” cover to Moana 2, the screen transforms into a plastic stage of a perfect American living room. Picture-in-picture compositions overlay each other in time—Here is an atemporal collage moored by space and composition.
What’s so striking about Here’s Norman Rockwellian evocations of 20th-century America is how miserable everyone is: an early aviator ripping his family apart through his dangerous passion, a Greatest Generation Army veteran returning unheroically and broken, an aspiring graphic artists foregoing his artistic dreams when his girlfriend suddenly becomes pregnant, and she in turn has to give up her aspirations of becoming a lawyer. Even Benjamin Franklin’s illegitimate son—who once lived in the historic home just across the street—hates his father and everything that he stands for. The only people that ever seem regularly happy in that living room are a mid-century couple inventing the La-Z-Boy. That house in whatever idealized New England-y town is always full of dreamers, although so few of them ever get to go much farther than that.
The fascistic images presented by Zemeckis’ penchant for an idealized nostalgia are subverted in the practice of their time passing. A Rockwell of a family gathering for Thanksgiving might be initially appealing in its Protestant coziness, but when Zemeckis puts such things in motion all the tensions of wanting a perfect American life vs. the hand you’re dealt and have to live with come boiling over. Families in Here seem unhappy precisely because their American expectations don’t live up to the—often cruel, boring, and bureaucratic—necessities of life in the States. This is something Zemeckis tries to iterate as a recurrence throughout time, as if saying that if there’s some sort of fundamentally American experience, it’s disappointment; the moment Revolutionary soldiers get word that the war is over and they have won, one of the troops yells out “Now what!”
Conceptually it works pretty well, albeit the film is incredibly corny in the experience of its form and content. It’s hard not to guffaw at sequences referencing Covid or the Spanish flu, at cheesy portrayals of alcoholism or The Beatles’ Ed Sullivan performance as a historic moment given as much importance as Gulf of Tonkin (that one, at least, might just be a bout of self-referential auteurism on Zemeckis’ part), and it's hard not to cringe at Zemeckis’ sympathetic white man’s approach of portraying Native-Americans pre-Columbus or a black father teaching his son how to survive a traffic stop. Sincerity is hard to come by today, it’s something of nails-on-a-chalkboard to actually watch Zemeckis in motion rather than just thinking about this conceptual filmmaker, well, conceptually. I see what he’s doing, and whether or not I’m emotionally moved as an audience member in the way which Zemeckis wants me to is kind of beside the point, because what he’s doing is interesting, honest, and he’s unafraid of being himself. It’s one of the greatest crises in art today that people are afraid to do just that, and often hide behind irony or anger to avoid ridicule.
Here comes in the middle of another crisis in American cinema, that of the crisis of mise-en-scene. Perhaps it's fitting that a culture that’s so afraid to put its heart on its sleeve in any way that doesn’t resemble occult patriotism or sycophancy for flashy superheroes would also be afraid to make images that had the potential to linger or lived. Everything’s fast, either the camera whirs through a digital space that looks like a high-budget video game or it cuts cuts cuts so that there’s no dead air when the clips are played back in little contrast-less squares, glowing in one's hand while they lie awake at night, scrolling from one to the next. The cinema, as a space, demands attention, and it’s perhaps a privilege to sit down for 100 minutes with no distractions. Zemeckis’ stage-out-of-time is a plastic form, a cheap-looking, ersatz pile of images, but it does have to confront its space and what it means because of the limitations it gives itself. There’s a beauty to that, one that you slip into after the initial goofiness of the whole experiment wears off.
It’d be hard to knock Here for giving into a Boomer-on-Facebook level when media has become so bereft of actual personality and the points that Zemeckis is getting at still stand: America’s a land of the unfulfilled, built on the lies that images tell us. Every moment in the living room of Here is tinged with the sadness of what it should be rather than what it is. Even the problematically bucolic imagery of pre-Columbia are understood with the knowledge of the genocide just over the horizon. Maybe most interestingly is Zemeckis isn’t immune to the nostalgia that his film so thoroughly rejects: in the final moments, the digital dolls of Tom Hanks and Robin Wright (no longer rubbery smooth, but wrinkled with age) are overwhelmed with the emotion of the memory of this room, of living here. Everything we’ve seen up to that point was these two hating the space, resenting everything about it, blaming it for ruining their lives and their dreams. But in their final moments there, all they can think about is the good times. It’s a sappy ending, one so endemic to Zemeckis’ cinema. I wouldn’t describe these final moments as a Sirkian subversion, one played out of necessity to the form of a Hollywood melodrama, but instead find it an extraordinary contradiction within Zemeckis’ own ideology: in practice he sees the brokenness, the pain, the untenability of the American Dream, but in his memory all he can do is be enamored by the images of its perfection.