Through a Screen Darkly: A Conversation with Micaela Durand and Daniel Chew

Sep 21, 2023

Like the nuclear family, the internet shapes us whether or not we choose to relate to it. In 38, the final short in a triptych by filmmakers Micaela Durand and Daniel Chew, a woman approaching middle age becomes obsessed with her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend, whom she encounters only through the prism of social media. The new girlfriend is young, hot, and confidently provocative—or else knows how to manipulate the channels through which she is perceived to appear that way. 38’s protagonist takes these qualities for granted and studies them with the cautious piety of a disciple still testing her belief. Attempting to calm her vexed infatuation, she consults a friend: she wants to know if he finds the new girlfriend attractive. “I don’t fantasize about flat images,” he responds. The sentiment contains a little white lie, the same white lie many of us wield hopefully, defensively every day. Who wouldn’t like to believe that the mysterious, intimate terrain of their desire is impervious to the contorting deceptions of the world wide web?

The films that make up this series—First, Negative Two, and 38—are invested in this hopeful suspension of disbelief, and together create an atmosphere in which it is continually tested. The internet appears variably as a site of adolescent play and a debauched public square, where atomized, overworked souls confront and combat their loneliness. In the films, its architecture can never be escaped. People log off, but they never quite leave the internet behind: its warping tendencies are reproduced everywhere in New York, a city full of mirrors and strange reflections, and its interruptions—which masquerade under the polite banner of “notifications”—punctuate and also produce the conditions of ordinary life.

Released between 2019 and 2021, these films are now playing in a collection on the Criterion Channel. I spoke over Zoom with the filmmaking duo about the project’s genesis and collective effect.

How did you decide to start directing together?: Daniel Chew: We went to NYU and began working together while we were in a sophomore-year class called Sight and Sound. In that class, the students were divided into film crews that would rotate between different production roles. Micaela and I were already friends, we had similar film tastes, and we were both disillusioned with a lot of NYU’s film classes, which required students to pour money into their films. We were looking for a way to express ourselves cheaply, and we found that in the art world, where things were more DIY. We were specifically interested in internet art, and the idea that you could make something in your bedroom and then release it into the world. So, we started trying to find a creative outlet outside of school, hanging out around New York.; Micaela Durand: I remember one of Daniel’s films involved him getting up to Hula-Hoop in front of the screen. He was more interested in a conceptual approach to narrative, and I guess you could say I was into pained protagonists—someone usually died in my films. I think the films we make together still embody our distinct styles, but we’ve found a way to be in dialogue.; The net.art movement was inspiring because people were doing their own weird thing behind the screen, uploading it, and calling it art. A thing then was to take a source file that existed online and transform it, have it ricochet from artist to artist, and as in a TikTok, the source became less interesting than the versions out there. We loved that—how a story can form like a tumbleweed.

What was the genesis of these films?: Chew: Our initial goal was to make a feature where the lives of three different protagonists were intertwined. We were a bit naive about how film funding worked and thought we could channel our experiences in the art world into film. Obviously, no one in the film world took us seriously, and after sitting on the script for a while we decided to divide the film into a trilogy of shorts. First was done with the smallest budget imaginable, but then we were able to use it to create interest in Negative Two, which then led us to funding for 38.

In First, the internet is charmingly ambient: you get glimpses of it through the demanding messages sent to the protagonist, which are captioned at the bottom of the frame, but the choreography of the film is otherwise playful. You get the sense that a day could go anywhere. But by the end of the series, in 38, the internet feels like a space of intense, claustrophobic obsession. Were you thinking about the films as archiving these various stages of feeling produced by the internet?: Chew: I like to think of the films as being about how each generation has chosen to approach the internet. We saw in Gen Z a nihilistic approach to it. The protagonist of First is able to be playful online because she understands the mediated construction of personas. As millennials, we have a different point of view, because our worlds have been shaped by Facebook, Instagram, and the idea that your online self is an authentic reflection of who you really are. The protagonist of Negative Two is a millennial, and he takes the internet so seriously that it shapes his desire completely. And in 38, the protagonist is on the cusp of being Gen X; her introduction to social media is a breakup. Her engagement with the internet is colored by unfamiliarity, and then her need to adapt and to realize that this is how the world works now.

Durand: The protagonists aren’t meant to be generalizations, but certainly age plays a part in how we see and are visible to others. These were also just kinds of people we wanted to bring to life and hadn’t seen as main characters before. I was interested in the liminal space that each one finds themselves in, and how the internet is a vehicle for them to get to that place. All of them, despite whatever they give off—their generational malaise, anhedonia—are caught at this threshold, oscillating between being fine and performing being fine. That space of ambivalence was important to us because it is where we deal with our entanglements.

You’ve said elsewhere that in these films you’ve attempted to conjure the internet without actually depicting it. There’s something very melancholy about structuring a film around an absent presence. It feels like a determining factor in the lives of the characters, and yet it often leaves them with a vacant look: they seem bored, unsure, and deeply alone. I wonder how each of you feels about the mythology of the internet as a site of gathering: if that’s something you believe in, or if it’s something that you feel fundamentally pessimistic about.: Durand: I like this tweet by Ed Halter that was like, “The internet was better when it was optional,” because I do remember that time. I remember logging in for pleasure. But now the internet is how we work, evaporate, pay our debts, cruise—it’s a fact of life. I won’t say it’s worse now, but I have nostalgia for when it was not intertwined with my livelihood. In the early aughts, I could be more wild online. I had what Chris Kraus calls “the freedom to be wrong.” Maybe the melancholy you sense is this fatigue of having to “connect.” We weren’t seeing films about the internet embodying that mess of feeling. So, it became a challenge for us: how can we show that in a cinematic way, without relying on an ugly interface?

Chew: The internet is always depicted as an exciting, crazy space where everything is happening at lightning speed. We wanted our depiction to be a little bit more banal, because we spend so much of our lives scrolling, sitting around, and staring lifelessly. The potential of connection can be lonely.

The films also depict analog versions of feeling alone in a crowd: each of your protagonists seeks out the experience of the club, and of dancing in a dark room—which winds up being strangely lonely, if enthralling. And yet this loneliness seems to be embodied, and that embodiment is a salve for the alienation they otherwise experience in their daytime lives. What attracts you, as filmmakers, to clubbing?: Durand: Clubs can be so liberating and also so oppressive. I see them as analogous to online platforms. You have a shared space where you can be the loudest and the most unhinged, or be totally ignored—but you’re still navigating social cues. Clubbing is like that too. It’s a way to escape, surrender, and get away from your consciousness.

Chew: In a club, you can feel alone in a crowd, but you can also lose yourself to it. An “oceanic feeling,” as Freud would say. Which is a very different mode of self-relation than being online.

New York City serves as the setting for all three of these films. But it’s also a feeling, an atmosphere, and a vantage. The protagonist of First, played by Mae Wangmo, experiences it from the ground level: she walks everywhere, and almost everything she encounters becomes a potential object for play. But in 38, the last film in the series, the city is all skyscrapers, and the film’s protagonist experiences it from above. Downtown appears as an entirely new landscape. Why was it important to you for these stories about desire, self-determination, and loneliness to be set against the intensification of downtown’s gentrification?: Chew: Because we are still operating with very small budgets, we rely on our community to act in our films, but also to fill all the roles behind the camera. These films could never be made without their support, and the narrative becomes a reflection of that. The films reflect a time and also the scene we are a part of; the gentrification of Chinatown has been and is currently still happening in New York. With the films we were also thinking about what it means to be Asian or Chinese and have a familiarity with both sides of the gentrification question, how you navigate being part of a scene that is potentially destroying the neighborhood you grew up around.

Durand: Our second film, Negative Two, was funded and premiered at the Shed. There was contention around that space, which also made us look at all the spaces in New York that we pass through. At that time, there were these “underground” queer parties happening at hotel bars, which is why we shot on the escalators of the Public Hotel—an ironic name given the fact that it was taking over a public park for a housing project. These films are in part about the complicity of the people in these spaces, who are trying to advocate for the “underground” when they’re actually just taking away other necessary spaces, like public housing.

A lot of our friends acted in our films, and they were really generous and gave us access to their apartments. Our sets look lived-in because they are. These films are, for us, a portrait of a New York that we know deeply.

Mirrors are everywhere in your films—your characters perform in front of them, often for themselves, but they also appear in the reflective surfaces that make up the architecture of the city, unaware that they’re being caught by the camera. All of them seem to be making quiet but effortful attempts at control: they very consciously produce images of themselves, often in the form of selfies or of photos taken by friends, but these images are disseminated without them. I’m curious if you think these attempts at self-determination—in the world of the film, and in the world of the internet—are futile, or if there’s something hopeful about them too.: Durand: Mirrors are stand-ins for screens, and became, for us, a way to suggest the internet without showing it. The proliferation of mirrors on our grids and in architecture is shocking to me; they’ve become a norm. We had so many conversations with our director of photography, Eric Yue, where we tried to figure out how we could show, for example, a conversation through a reflection, which taps into a surveilled mode. We’re stalking the person, and we’re watching them in ways they don’t know—which is how we get to know someone today, by lurking.

Chew: A lot of the mirror scenes are about rehearsal and the multiple attempts and acts of repetition that go into producing videos uploaded to the internet. The perfect selfie is plucked from hundreds of images that have been captured. Even TikTok videos that seem off the cuff are rehearsed multiple times to capture the perfect off-the-cuff moment. The control that the protagonists perform is somewhat futile in the face of algorithms and the interest of the corporate companies that control our online social lives, but in trying to craft their own image, these characters are learning something about themselves and how their image is read and proliferates online.

What references did you consult and draw inspiration from when you were making the films?: Chew: We really like the urban ennui of the films of Tsai Ming-liang, especially Vive l’amour. Samuel Delaney and his writing about urban space and desire have also allowed us to feel connection through perversity in the New York we inhabit.

Durand: One film that we really love is The Human Surge, by Eduardo Williams. It’s about the internet, and crossing borders, and it’s constantly putting you in an unexpected location. And we love Andrea Fraser. We love people who expose something about the world in a form that wouldn’t otherwise be called art, people who intervene or disrupt conventions.

A lot of what we liked, and still love, is a bildungsroman. Céline Sciamma’s Water Lilies is a big inspiration. We’re constantly thinking about how we can make something that’s not a cliché of what a queer movie is. We want to find ways that disrupt those narratives, to create something more nuanced and open.

What is the cliché of the queer movie? What are its qualities?: Chew: For a racialized queer movie, it’s always the story of coming out to your family, which creates a dichotomy between a Westernized version of self in rebellion and the traditional, racialized other. Especially in the context of the U.S., the gay subject is usually aligned with a cosmopolitan liberal subjectivity that stands in contrast to the racialized and conservative figure of the parent.

While making our films we were also thinking about depicting identity markers and how that experience is influenced by our existence online. These films could be called queer stories or racial stories. We wanted to make films that commented on those themes but weren’t able to be described completely through those frameworks.

Families are conspicuously absent in the films. In First, we get the sense that the protagonist probably lives with family, but that family is never shown. And in Negative Two, the idea of family is referenced, because we know the protagonist is from Seattle and that his family is from China. Family isn’t otherwise present, and yet each of the protagonists has intimate relationships with friends that are very meaningful. Why was that important to you?: Chew: Part of it was that we wanted to avoid the cliché mentioned above. It’s how you can read queerness into the films: the families depicted on-screen are the families the characters have created with the people around them. But I also love my family; I have a good relationship with them.

Through a Screen Darkly: A Conversation with Micaela Durand and Daniel Chew

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