The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Wednesday, April 3, 2019 — 5A

About 20 minutes past the intended start time, we still stood 
outside the Michigan Theater’s screening room in claustrophobic 
gridlock. I realized I had no idea what I had gotten myself into.
Welcome to the Ann Arbor Film Festival’s ‘Films in Competition 
9: Animation.’
My editors and fellow film writers warned me, an AAFF first-
timer, these films would be weird. Fourteen animated shorts and 
countless emotions, all derivatives of discomfort, later, I don’t 
know if “weird” is the right word.
They kicked off the competition with a 1975 animated short, 
“Quasi at the Quackadero.” Anthropomorphic ducks go to an 
amusement park, the one named Anita repeatedly croons the 
name “Quasi” in a bone-chilling way, and I can’t tell you much 
more than that because I think I’ve blocked it out.
I learned two things. First, this festival attracts a crowd. I’m 
talking an eventual 30-minute delay to the start-time, due to the 
monumental task of getting everyone into the theater. I’m talking 
energy: The AAFF title sequence began, and someone clapped 
along to the moderately catchy backing tune. Someone shouted, 
“Oh, Quasi!” Oh, Quasi. I did not laugh once. My reaction was 
fight or flight. As I registered laughter around me, I came to a 
second understanding: This festival attracts a subcommunity, one 
I am not a part of, and don’t plan on joining. It felt like one of those 
scenarios where you’re sitting among a group of friends, closer to 
each other than you are to them. They’re laughing at something 
and you only vaguely understand it, let alone find it funny, so you 

experience this discomfort — equal parts pain and longing — not 
so much for inclusion but for the vexation to cease.
As my level of discomfort became unbearable, I began to coach 
myself through it. Yes, a few of the shorts were so thoroughly, 
unproductively disturbing, that I had to go to my happy place. I 
think “Hedge” did the most damage: Child leashes, squadrons 
of women kissing each other nonstop, and again, I can’t tell you 
much more than that because I’ve blocked it out.

I wasn’t the only one who reacted this way. During one of 
several films that should have come with a warning for those 
with photosensitivity (but didn’t), consisting of a stream of 
flashing shapes, I glanced over, and my fellow moviegoer’s face 
encapsulated everything I now try to render in words. Her mouth 
was slightly open: Shock. It was shaped in a partial smirk: Slight 
bemusement, or the facial version of Where am I? Her eyes were 
wide: What am I looking at?
When I realized I had over an hour of this ahead of me still, 
I attempted a change in mindset. To try and find it funny, too. 

Resign to the absurdity. Stop expecting art to have a purpose and 
seek pleasure alone.
It didn’t work. I still saw text used profusely and always for 
the purpose of propagandistic, stale messages. I saw half-
assed, hypocritical criticisms of human dependence on religion, 
technology and other familiar targets. Underneath it all, I saw 
a troubling idleness that shrugged and said, yes, this is enough. 
Flash some shocking graphics, prop up the images with recycled 
critiques, pepper it with opaque, self-indulgent tidbits and you’ve 
got yourself a work of art. What about the audience? What do we 
have to gain from that?
There was one, fleeting moment of reprieve in the competition: 
“Sun Zoom Spark.” Containing some of the most stunning 
graphics of the night, the film alternated between images of 
industrialized and untainted geography, appearing like blotted 
graphite compositions. A poetic, mesmerizing voiceover stitched 
the scenes together, providing compelling commentary on 
our changing notion of mistakes in a world with the CTRL + z 
function. At times, the speech felt stilted, but I’ll take preachy 
over pointless any day. At least the former is direct and aware 
of the communicative potential of art, rather than smugly self-
content.
Granted, I did experience some version of the subcommunity I 
spoke about. Leaving the theater with my friends, we debriefed on 
our almost synonymous experience of the shorts as a bad omen of 
a direction artists are moving in. We had the same questions for 
each other: What was that? What was that for?
And I’m still not convinced that weird is the right word. I’d say 
puzzling at best, dispiriting at worst.

For ‘Animation,’ weird doesn’t feel like the right word

ANN ARBOR FILM FESTIVAL COVERAGE

JULIANNA MORANO
Daily Arts Writer

I’m going to put the following 
very 
plainly: 
The 
music 
of 
Liverpool group Her’s is fuzzy 
dream pop, pleasant and dynamic. 
They released their latest studio 
album, Invitation to Her’s, last 
summer. On Mar. 27, 2019, while 
touring to support the album, 
both members of the group were 
killed in a traffic accident. The 
band was driving through the 
desert of Arizona around 1 a.m. 
on the way from Phoenix to Santa 
Ana when a truck driving the 
wrong way down the highway 
hit them head-on. All parties 
perished in the crash. The bodies 
were unidentifiable. Everything 
in the car was lost to fire.
It’s a cliche at this point for an 
artist to die a tragic death, only to 
finally gain the appreciation they 
sought after they have passed. 
This is not the case for Her’s. It 
is unlikely that they will gain 
posthumous fame in the manner 
of Van Gogh. More likely, they 
will slowly fade into obscurity. 
Many who stumble upon their 
music won’t even know they have 

passed. To their fans, it is an 
unspeakable tragedy. To most of 
the world, it is meaningless.
Her’s second-to-last Instagram 
post features them posing in the 
diner from Twin Peaks. In the 
comments, they promise a fan 
that they will return to Phoenix 
for another show. Their social 
media pages have now become 
a jarring, unplanned memorial 
to the dead that once occupied 
them, unfulfilled dreams and 
shattered plans, once-innocent 
posts now a depressing reminder 
that the good times can’t last.
It’s not just Her’s. Facebook 
and 
Instagram 
are 
digital 
graveyards; millions of users 
have perished since they created 
their 
accounts. 
They 
aren’t 
quite memorials — memorials 
are 
planned, 
crafted. 
More 
accurately, they are snapshots, 
their profiles eternally frozen in 
time the moment before tragedy 
struck.
The implication of this for the 
legacy of the artist is drastic. So 
much of the legend of a musician 
comes 
from 
the 
mystery 
surrounding their lives, but the 
wall 
between 
the 
cultivated 

output of an artist and their 
personal lives has been eroded, 
for better or for worse. It’s no 
wonder we’ve seen artists like Jai 
Paul (and, initially, The Weeknd) 
who react to this new form of 
public scrutiny by embracing 
anonymity.
The Exploding Hearts, a turn-
of-the-century power pop band, 
suffered a similar fate as Her’s. 
They crashed outside Eugene, 
Oregon while on tour when the 
driver fell asleep at the wheel — 
only the guitarist was spared. 
This was before the Internet 
became omnipresent, so they 
live on solely (in a broad sense) 
through the one album they 
released.
For a lot of people, myself 
included, music is a way to escape 
into another world, akin to sports 
or reality television. The stakes 
seem lower, fake somehow, but 
sometimes 
it 
becomes 
clear 
that 
the 
walls 
keeping 
our 
distractions separate from the 
pain and mundanity of our day-
to-day lives are thin. At any 
moment, a few seconds of chaos 
could bring them crashing down. 
All it takes is a mistake in traffic.

Her’s: Death in a digital age

MUSIC NOTEBOOK

JONAH MENDELSON
Daily Arts Writer

When 
“Get 
Out” 
hit 
theaters two years ago, people 
were pretty confused: Why is 
the guy from “Key and Peele” 
making a scary movie? What 
does a comedian know about 
horror? After I saw “Us” 
last weekend, I started to 
contemplate how a comedic 
mind could leap over to the 
dark side. The film — as 
unsettling and horrifying as 
it was — provoked moments of 
chuckles from the audience. 
I couldn’t help but wonder 
(cue 
Carrie 
Bradshaw’s 
contemplative 
pose) 
what 
is the connection between 
horror and humor?
I 
immediately 
thought 
of Mel Brooks. In my mind, 
horror and humor had one 
place and one place only, 
in 
Mel 
Brooks’s 
“Young 
Frankenstein.” The monster 
made the film “scary,” but 
overall the film is a comedy. 
Brooks and the late Gene 
Wilder 
sprinkled 
horror 
tropes throughout the film 
by 
mocking 
them, 
from 
dance 
numbers 
to 
Frau 
Blucher (neigh!). Yet, Brooks 
and Wilder’s parody of old 
monster horror is just that, 
a parody. The same goes for 
“Scary Movie,” “Shaun of 
the Dead” etc. So where does 
horror and humor lie for 
Jordan Peele? Has comedy 
influenced his horror? What 
about vice versa? Are they 
connected at all? Did he have 
a midlife crisis and realize 
comedy was dead? How did 
this sketch comedian turn 
into a master of fear? And 
most 
importantly, 
is 
the 
continental breakfast sketch 
a spiritual prequel to “Get 
Out”?
For answers, I turned to the 
true master of horror himself, 
Stephen King. King does a 
good job at explaining the 
overlap of humor and horror 
in a 1993 CBS interview. “It’s 
a childish thing the way that 
humor is the two (humor and 
horror) closely allied,” he 
explained, “They both elicit 
— when they work to their 
best — a vocal reaction in the 
audience.” According to King, 
there is a connection between 
horror and humor because 
they both create some sort of 
eruption within us, one of fear 
or amusement, respectively.
Personally, I can’t stand 
being 
scared. 
In 
fact, 
I 
actively do things to avoid 
being scared. I will not enter 
my bathroom if the shower 
curtain is closed because 
there is a 1000 percent chance 
someone is in there, trying 
to 
kill 
me. 
Additionally, 
I 
distrust 
any 
mirrored 
medicine cabinet, because I 
know for a fact when I open the 
cabinet no one is behind me, 
but when I close that cabinet 

there will be a murderer and I 
will not be prepared. I detest 
surprises so much that when I 
was thrown a surprise party I 
cried because I thought I was 
getting kidnapped and I never 
fully recovered. Obviously, if 
you like being scared you’re 

probably not OK, but I get it 
if you follow Stephen King’s 
logic. The same way I like to 
be amused by comedy and 
elicit a vocal reaction, also 
known as laughter, you may 
like to get the shit scared 
out of you to elicit a vocal 
reaction AKA bloodcurdling 
screams — if you’re into that 
kind of thing.
In 
an 
interview 
with 
Cinemablend back in 2017, 
Eric Eisenberg asked Jordan 
Peele about the relationship 
between comedy and horror. 
“They’re two sides of the 
same coin,” Peele said, “Any 
really successful or great 
horror movie, you go and see 
an audience there’s going to 
be laughter from nervousness. 
They’re both about building 
the tension and releasing in 
some way.” For Peele’s horror, 
it’s all about building tension. 
Look at “Us” and “Get Out,” 
they build in tension, making 
the 
audience 
physically 
uncomfortable and nervous. 
I swear, after I saw “Us,” I 
didn’t have any fingernails, 
meaning I bit them all off 
from the anxiety the movie 
caused me.
Similarly, look at humor 
from 
the 
perspective 
of 
tension. Comedy asks the 
same questions as horror, 
just with a lighter take. The 
building tension in comedy 
is the setup, a question to 
be answered, a premise to 
explore; the answer is the 
punchline. Like in horror, the 
question begs the audience 
to 
wonder, 
what’s 
going 
to happen? The changing 
answers in both genres elicit 
different 
reactions 
in 
us 
based on how those answers 
make us feel. They keep us on 
the edge of our seats with fear 
or leaning back in stitches.
I started thinking about 
what 
makes 
things 
scary 
versus funny. If the setup is 
a question and the answer is 
the punchline is the answer, 

what is the horror equivalent? 
And what makes something 
scary instead of funny? If 
building 
tension 
creates 
questions, then the answer 
has to be the thing that elicits 
our reactions. For example, in 
“The Shining” the question 
is, what is in room 237? If the 
answer was a walrus with 
a British accent instead of 
a rotting corpse, does that 
make it funny? What if in 
the SNL digital short “D*** 
in a Box” Andy Samberg and 
Justin Timberlake revealed 
that the thing inside the 
box was a hungry poisonous 
tarantula? Is that scary? If a 
family identical to your own 
showed up in your driveway 
but the only difference was 
that they all wore bowties, is 
that still scary?
All this tension makes me 
think of the 2014 “Key and 
Peele” short titled “Aerobics 
Meltdown.” The sketch is 
an old video from the 1987 
Jazz Fit Championship. The 
video opens with a line of 
text that reads: “Everything 
you are about to see is true.” 
A line of spandex-clad women 
with big hair stretch as two 
male 
dancers, 
Flash 
and 
Lighting, played by Peele 
and Key respectively, enter 
in 
similarly 
shiny 
purple 
costumes. All is well in this 
aerobics video until the video 
cuts into behind the scenes 
footage that displays itself 
more clearly. The news is 
given to Lighting through 
various cue cards that his 
wife and daughter have been 
hospitalized from a hit and 
run. Between pieces of bad 
news, cards are interlaced 
to remind Lighting to “Keep 
dancing.” Lighting’s face falls 
as he continues to dance. The 
tension builds as the director 
asks if Lighting would know 
anyone 
that 
might 
want 
to hurt him or his family. 
The recognition comes to 
Lighting as he looks over 
to his competitor and Flash 
gives him a sadistic wink. 
The clip ends with Lighting 
strangling 
Flash 
and 
the 
video cutting out. But the 
reason I bring this sketch 
up is it is a perfect example 
of the building tension that 
Peele loves to utilize in both 
his humor and horror. This 
sketch, albeit dark, provokes 
a shocked kind of laughter 
that can only be attributed to 
the genius tension-building of 
Jordan Peele.
I think the answer to 
the 
horror 
and 
humor 
conundrum 
lies 
in 
the 
answers themselves. If the 
answer makes us laugh, it’s 
comedy. If the answer makes 
us shit our pants, odds are it’s 
a horror film (or you need to 
get your bowels checked).

BECKY
PORTMAN

DAILY HUMOR COLUMN

Musings on the harmony
between horror & humor

Films in Competition 
9: Animation

The Michigan Theatre

In the next week, the Book Review 
will be featuring works from Willow 
Books, an imprint of the Detroit-
based small publisher Aquarius 
Press. Aquarius was co-founded in 
1999 by author and professor Randall 
Horton and Heather Buchanan, 
its current owner, a University of 
Michigan-Dearborn 
alum and former Poet-in-
Residence at the Detroit 
Public Library. In 2007, 
Aquarius Press launched 
Willow Books, a project 
“to develop, publish and 
promote writers of color” 
that quickly became its 
flagship imprint. Willow 
Books 
publishes 
over 
40 single-title authors 
a year and uplifts writers through 
an impressive network of funds and 
resources. Writers were recently 
recognized at Willow Books’s annual 
LitFest readings, which took place in 
Portland, Oregon on Mar. 30.
“Don’t let your heritage be 
past tense.” It’s a warning and 
a plea, the title of the last poem 
in Sokunthary Svay’s “Apsara in 
New York,” a collection of poems 
in which Svay does just that: Fight 
to keep her culture a part of her 
present while exploring her roots 
and their intersection with her life 
as an immigrant living in the Bronx 
on an intimate and moving level.
Svay and her family came to the 
U.S. as refugees from the Khmer 
Rouge regime, which held power 
in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. The 

regime, guided by its communist 
philosophy, sought to turn the 
country 
into 
a 
self-sufficient 
agrarian 
society. 
People 
were 
forced into the countryside to work 
as laborers on farms, where many 
died from starvation or overwork. 
By the time the regime was 
overthrown by the Vietnamese 
in 1979, it was responsible for the 
deaths of just under two million 
people.

Central to many of the poems 
is, as Svay puts it, the Khmer 
American communities’ struggle 
with the dark legacy of the Khmer 
Rouge. Poems about the genocide 
and its aftermath are interspersed 
among those detailing Svay’s life 
in the Bronx, giving readers the 
distinct feeling that while the lives 
of the Khmers continue on, they are 
never really free of the aftermath of 
the regime.
The crossroads of Svay’s identity 
as a Khmer and American are 
reflected in the title of the work. An 
“apsara” is a female celestial figure 
in Buddhist and Hindu religions, 
something that is placed among 
food vendors, one dollar pizza and 
the 2 Line in “An Apsara in New 
York.” Svay’s poetry depicts her 

experiences in a startlingly vivid 
and emotional way. It is easy to feel 
her annoyance at being repeatedly 
mistaken as Chinese and her 
pain from the loss of her brother, 
who readers know is dead but not 
exactly how or why. Svay is a gifted 
writer who transports readers 
from the Bronx to Cambodia with 
ease.
A highlight of the collection is 
the focus on Svay’s relationship 
with her mother. As her 
mother’s only surviving 
child, the two share 
a special bond which 
Svay 
communicates 
flawlessly. In “Mother’s 
Call,” 
the 
strong 
personality 
of 
her 
mother and the dry, 
witty 
humor 
Svay 
employs 
throughout 
her 
poetry 
are 
fully showcased. The “Mother 
Monologue” poems also provide a 
more serious but touching insight 
into the relationship between 
the two women as they grapple 
with issues like money problems 
and marriage. Svay portrays the 
personalities of herself and her 
mother in such a realistic way they 
feel familiar and known just a few 
pages into the collection.
Svay, a singer herself, reveals her 
love of music through poems like 
“Diction” and “Music Doesn’t Put 
Food On the Table,” as well as her 
mother’s occasional exasperation 
with that love.

‘Apsara’ a beautiful tribute

BOOK REVIEW

SOPHIE WAZLOWSKI
Daily Arts Writer

Apsara in New 
York

Sokunthary Svay

Willow Books

2017

Read more at 
MichiganDaily.com

