Marcel the Shell with Shoes On & Infinitely Layered Glass Screens
Glass is leeway. It is permission. Glass is distortion. We know this. The overlay that is the glass screen bleeds over everything, you, the world. The screen of the phone is a luring glass. Is a sick taunting. Is convincing and apathetic. It is full of manic contradictions.
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Dean Fleischer Camp’s Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is another reminder that we are trapped inside an age where the walls around far-off people and far-off places—barriers thought to now have been demolished—still exist. The barriers have been replaced by technology.
We forcefully intake the imagery and catharsis and wonder and serendipity of life through the phone, the expensive camera. These tools have the power to transform the commonplace into art, but Camp is not entirely embracing that idea. For the most part, his story is melancholic. Throughout the film, we are reminded multiple times of the weird space we occupy in the digital age, warned about lingering in it for too long. I think that under Marcel’s lighthearted antics and his odyssey towards his long-lost community is a chirp of a tense hesitation about the screens we tumble into. The invisible engineering of the internet that invites chaos. The questions and realizations we face against the inky reflector that drive us to the edge. These make loss and loneliness harder. These exist like soiled carpet under our joy.
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Dean, a documentarian, is suddenly invited to reconsider his role as a filmmaker. Peering under the camera, Marcel wonders aloud, incredulously, why he prefers taking videos of people rather than trying to actually get to know them. Here, the medium that is meant to capture life’s riches confronts its own limitations. The documentary as a barrier to a full embracing. The documentary as a way to connect as much as a way to distance bodies, impose a power dynamic, introduce artificiality into space, subjectively fossilize a subject. The glass isn’t fully see-through. It is a complex object: reflecting your face, etching another person’s face, invisible under a specific condition of lighting.
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Someone comments under one of Dean and Marcel’s viral YouTube videos incorrectly assuming Marcel is female: “I like her pink shoes!” Marcel, tiny on the keyboard, coughs out about the monsoon of over 207,000 comments he scrolls with his foot: “It’s still a group of people, but it’s an audience. It’s not a community.”
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Multiple times, we get a close-up view of Dean’s computer, looking at other people’s videos. We see a news station and the giant screen behind the anchorman. We get so close. We see the grids of the pixels. At one point, we are right up against a prismatic spillage of pixels, their distorted, glitchy rainbow. It’s like the camera would have wanted to get even closer. We’re wading in something that is unfathomably large. We are single contributions to the massive numbers of views and likes in a given piece of viral content. Marcel articulates the existentialism of that succinctly: “We’re all looking at the same thing and we’re all doing the same thing.”
I couldn’t help but wonder what was under Marcel’s shell. That is to say, what was he made of? I don’t know. I don’t think I need to. I can only look at the surface and guess.
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It’s really bizarre to be living in a world of guessing all the time. How was this made? How does this person on Instagram really spend their days? How many tries did it take to make this? Was Photoshop opened? Is this person truly content with their life?
The screen is a barrier as much as it is an opening. We live between permeable thresholds. It’s hard to pinpoint what is real about the information refracted through them. The film, in prancing between fiction and reality, animation and live action, evokes the feeling of taking off sunglasses after a long time. That blast of reality.
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The intense focus on the interior and the domestic is important, too. Marcel and his grandmother Nana Connie’s lives mainly transpire inside. Lunging toward the outside, non-animated world complicates the film in an interesting way. Seeing pedestrian life outside of their Airbnb, we begin to associate the internal world with the fantastical and the surreal and the external world with the rational and the ruthless. Marcel, even, vomits from motion sickness sitting on the dashboard. I couldn’t help but love the faint grime on Dean’s car windshield. How it almost soiled what was behind it. How its edges warped pedestrians. How this was, fittingly, Marcel’s backdrop during their drive.
Again, I am reminded of the feeling that comes with sunglasses. The feeling of turning off your phone only to face the expansive buzzing beyond you. But the line between this fantasy and this reality is thin. It’s a pane of glass. A door.
The fictionality of Marcel is vibrant when he is next to a spider in the garden. It makes the bugs look weirder. It makes Dean look deranged. The human body clay-like, complicated, jerky. The rain thicker. I love that feeling.
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The film, though, isn’t mind-blowing. It didn’t make my favorite films of all time list. But it knows how to sustain you. It doesn’t want to be mind-blowing. It is meant to be silly and mellow and snarky and sneaky and a little existential and then really existential and heartwarming and poetic. It is in touch with its logic and knows what it is working with, and for that it is able to develop itself on the groundwork of tender, relevant themes. But I find these themes are ultimately as successful as they are because of this half-hidden, apprehensive underlay of technological critique. A critique that isn’t entirely critique, but part fascination as well. That nuance that comes through with a meek smile, that spirit shimmering from the screen, did a lot for me.
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The end of the film shows us a final piece of glass: the window in the laundry room Marcel sits by. He basks in the melody of the wind. Being by this opening reminds Marcel that he isn’t “just one separate piece” living in the house, but that he’s part of a whole. A multitude of living things. The intense sunlight of the final scene passes through the glass in a flush of pastel circles. The window is slightly open. The wind glides in.