MovieChat Forums > Upstream Color (2013) Discussion > These goddamn jumpcuts...

These goddamn jumpcuts...


Ok, so yeaah best movie eva, 15/10, "you dont get it, you dont get the transcendence of this masterpiece"... Oh, trust me, I get it, I get all the idiotic plot... and its BECAUSE I get it that I don't care too much for this movie. Yeah, worms, cycle of life, pigs as metaphor and connection of the human life, people recording nature sounds... Yeah yeah Shane, you are very deep and profound... But something that baffles me, that apparently nobody doesn't, it's the stupid, non-coherent, confusing, pretentious and LAME AS HELL jumpcuts shown when Shane and Kris are hanging out. I mean, my god, aren't they the WORST of this movie, like by far? I don't get them at all. Are different timelines? Is there any kind of continuity? Like the scene with thr guy with beard. I can tell you that this scene like knocked me out. What's the point? Where is the sense? Time travel doesn't have to do anything with this movie. So what's the answer? Can you explain to me?

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I can try to help out a little.

The whole worm/pig/orchid thing is not all that important, what's important is that they form an ecological loop, and this loop allows telepathy to exist. That's the premise, what if telepathy were real? The answer is that people would use it in different ways, and others would be used by it.

The guy with the beard is one of the "Sampled", his wife doesn't understand why their marriage suddenly got so messed up, all she sees is that he's become distant and withdrawn, like some trauma has happened to his mind, but it's invisible, including to him. She actually believes there is something she should be doing to get their marriage back to an OK state.

She has the asthma attack, goes to the hospital and doesn't make it, the man is heartbroken. Since the Sampler has the pig with his worm, he has a psychic link to the guy, he is able to eavesdrop on him while he has this awful experience. How would you feel if you knew someone was collecting impressions from your psyche at your most painful and personal moments?

Now here is the deeper stuff: One of Carruth's themes is that everyone is always acting on incomplete and imperfect information. We know that the worm/pig/orchid thing creates telepathic links, but no one knows the whole picture. The Thief sees one part, the Sampler sees another, the Sampled only know they are messed up, they don't know why.

The big mistake the Sampler makes is that he thinks the link is one-way, that he can enter and read other people's minds in complete safety and with impunity. Kris is the first one to figure it out, she reverses the link and "makes" the Sampler. She then kills him, because entering someone else's mind is a power that no one would knowingly tolerate being used on them.

Does that help?

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Yeah, I get that. So what do you mean, that the different "timelines" (or whatever the hell they are) are like attempts the farmer does to manipulate the pigs, therefore to manipulate the subjects? But sorry but doesn't make still any sense. Pigs don't erase their memory, actually they are very smart, they aren't fishes! So why throughout the whole movie we see the subjects like forgetting stuff that they supposedly did (if that is what the timelines are), or say, if the pigs don't actually forget stuff? Ok, I don't know how a pig brain works, but if a pig meets another pig one day, the next day it could recognize that pig. And even if that were true, sorry but it is lazy! How can even understand how telepathy works from a pig to a human? That's very confusing. Wouldn't be so much better just to remember people vaguely and that's it? That's a lot much coherent. The guys notice that they are connected, or meet before, or something like that because the pigs they are connected with. Why don't leave the concept right there? Why all the stupid repetitive conversations? Telepathy? Ok, well that's lazy and poor justified.

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