“Your Existence is a Mistake!”: A Reflection on That Cold Dead Look in Your Eyes

 1. “Your existence is a mistake!”

That Cold Dead Look in Your Eyes

 

That Cold Dead Look in Your Eyes/Tes Yeux Mourants is a black-and-white existential horror film from visionary painter, actor, and filmmaker Onur Tukel. The film follows Andy (Max Casella) as his personal life descends into chaos against a backdrop of mind bending WiFi signal boosters and grim promises of a coming plague. It’s topical, but That Cold Dead Look in Your Eyes manages to transcend its contrivances to deliver a story that’s as timeless as it is bleak.

That Cold Dead Look in Your Eyes opens--in color--on a happy couple in the process of furnishing their apartment. Andy jokes that his girlfriend (Nora Arnezender) is obsessed with her father Dennis (Alan Ceppos), a world-renowned photographer whose pictures cover nearly every wall of their shared residence.

But by the opening credits, the couple’s relationship has soured and reality itself has seemingly begun to decay as well. Everything is black and white. Andy and his girlfriend sleep in separate beds in the same apartment. He is accosted by a homeless man and a guy who’s a little too interested in his motorcycle. His coworkers hate him. Dennis is coming to stay for a week while his daughter/Andy’s former lover is away on business. And, more troublingly, Andy is haunted by flashbacks(?), hallucinations(?), and/or visions from a plane of existence outside his own(?).

These vignettes of a life backsliding into madness are intercut with closeups of a blinking box, the nature and origin of which remain murky until, on the advice of his manager-cum-mistress, Andy consults a cohort of “desperate people, beaten wives, the disabled” at an improvised homeless shelter in Brooklyn. The most pitiful of these, an elderly woman left blind and disfigured by an acid attack, informs him that these “theta boxes” not only increase WiFi speed, but disrupt the psyches of those unlucky enough to live within their range. She also tells him that Tupac is still alive. Regardless of the veracity of this blind seer’s information, the tale she spins allows Andy--and by extension, the audience--to contextualize some of his more bizarre visions.

For instance, the horny clown.

2. “She's a Carnival”

The archetypal "clown gf"

The figure of the clown has been with us since time immemorial. She sat beside our ancestors at Lascaux, spinning lurid yarns of unlikely couplings between mammoths and lusty cavewomen; she cavorted down the Roman thoroughfares arm-in-arm with Nero, and with Caligula before him; she danced through the Tarot deck bedecked in a traveler’s humble garb; and now, come Mardi Gras, she beckons from Bourbon Street back alleys, promising pleasures untasted and unknown. Again she recurs, and perhaps finally finds her ultimate apotheosis, in That Cold Dead Look in Your Eyes.

Andy first encounters her outside an art gallery while he waits for Dennis to complete his business within, and is reminded of a pleasant afternoon spent with his (now estranged) girlfriend. This in turn prompts him to call her. But, while he’s on the phone, the clown’s performance turns lewd. She pantomimes various sex acts as Andy tries to bridge the gap between himself and his girlfriend, distracting him from his attempts at reconciliation and making a mockery of the very action that reduced him to his current position--his affair with his boss (Candace Jean-Jacques).

The scene recalls the fiction of Thomas Ligotti, wherein clowns are often used to illustrate the absurdity of human existence, its horrific contradictions and inadequacies in the face of that yawning black void that awaits us all on the day of our final sunset. Despite Andy’s high-minded floundering, the body always has its way. That Cold Dead Look in Your Eyes is run through with black comedy and Tukel, like the clown who features so prominently in his film, uses it to both undermine and heighten whatever sympathy the audience might have for Andy.

3. “Like a razor blade slicing through an eye…”

Un Chien Andalou

Though Tukel’s decision to shoot That Cold Dead Look in Your Eyes primarily in black and white could have come across as a trite gimmick--perhaps an appeal to some classic of surrealist cinema--he integrates this stylistic flourish into the plot in such a way that it would be unthinkable to present the film in any other format.

It’s no coincidence that the monochrome aesthetic of That Cold Dead Look in Your Eyes recalls the samples of Dennis’ photography we see throughout the film: Dennis’ domination of Andy is so complete that his life has been subsumed by the photographer’s art. Indeed, That Cold Dead Look in Your Eyes has more in common with John Carpenter’s movies In the Mouth of Madness and Cigarette Burns than it does with Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou or David Lynch’s Eraserhead. Andy is completely emasculated by his girlfriend’s father; his agency in the plot and, by extension, his life is nonexistent. He is exactly the kind of loser his co-workers accuse him of being.

He’s just like us.

4. “Today’s my birthday”

The voice of a generation

By the end of the film Andy has truly lost everything, from his girlfriend, to his apartment, to his grip on reality. He has resigned himself to living with the drug addicts, battered women, and acid attack survivors, and the tragic fates of his cohort make his own predicament seem even more pathetic by comparison. Andy was brought low by his own libido.

As the newest arrival to the shelter tells Andy about the maelstrom of bad decisions and addictions that brought him there, we learn that that very evening is Andy’s birthday.

He’s turning forty, and will enter middle age sitting on a couch beside a man he wouldn’t have looked twice at not even a week ago, watching his farce of a life play out in front of him on a flatscreen TV. One final humiliation.