Director: Myles Wheeler
Running time: 1hr 25mins
Where were you eight years ago? Myles Wheeler was making Like a Dog or a Boat, you tether it. A spectacular, kitchen-sink documentary charting a fateful week when he locked himself out of his spare room. And strangely enough, the film ends with another eight-year leap; as Wheeler spends a post-credits sequence discussing his paper round – which he maintained for eight years, and which remains the source of a recurring anxiety dream for him.
Sometimes a film will fall into your lap at exactly the right time. Or your mind will do the gymnastics to make it relevant to your present situation by any and all means. I’m not sure it matters, either way. We use art as a more comfortable way to address the aspects of our lives that give us sleepless nights – it provides us an uncanny recreation of the world, behind a protective screen of artifice, just distant enough for us to approach our deepest, darkest fears.
Well, sort of. Culture can do that, if we dare to be introspective about the way it makes us feel. Or we can end up obsessing, prattling or bantering about its minutiae; desperately battling to rebuild the emotional barriers it may have briefly stripped away.
Like a Dog or a Boat is intriguing, because through the travails of Wheeler, we arguably see this struggle unfold in intense detail.
Following a fateful week, during which he locked himself out of his university bedroom – and Wheeler’s landlord shrugged and went on vacation without giving him access to a set of spare keys – he opts to make the best of a bad situation, by documenting his adventures beyond the safety of his room.
Having literally been locked out of his comfort zone, however, Wheeler initially constructs a new one. The camera simply being there changes every interaction – the Observer effect providing a new proverbial door behind which to hide. Whenever things threaten to get too real in the moment, the fact he is carrying a camera, making a film to entertain some theoretical, absent witness, means he can mask as an entertainer rather than a person. At a time when he has been experimenting as a YouTube creator, the persona of the eternally riffing vlogger means he can all too easily pull himself back from the brink of an existential tirade, and instead deliver a series of baffling puns, or bizarre cut-away segments.
The first third of the film may be unwatchable to viewers of a certain age or temperament. Admittedly, it is a lot to take in; the relentless barrage of chirpy noise, and experimental stand-up material, makes it feels a little like being taken hostage by Rupert Pupkin, rather than being walked through a slice-of-life documentary.
But as the film draws on, the façade fades – shrinking from the long-term exposure to the darker, sadder aspects of life, which Wheeler’s locked door has now prevented regular retreat from. In particular, the tone shifts as the reality of his father’s illness is allowed to filter through the second and third acts.
Visiting his parents, Wheeler takes the time to sit down and record ‘chats’ with both – at which point we learn his father has been diagnoses with Parkinsons. And while interactions with his parents are still filled with love and light – drawing on lifetimes of happy memories – it is here that an underlying uncertainty finally begins to seep out of Wheeler’s presence. Initially still trying to deflect with humour in the moment, the narration – coming together in the edit – finds a different version of the filmmakers, one who cannot escape from introspection, against the weight of the library of footage he now has to painstakingly revisit.
Through the continued interactions with his parents, who have good days, bad days, and good days again, Wheeler on screen, and in the edit, finds himself unable to distance himself from his own concerns anymore. The unsettling fears and uncertainties still triggering those anxiety dreams of paper delivery rounds, years after he has left that behind.
And remarkably, in the process of Wheeler bearing this shift on film, he also presents us with an opportunity to confront our own inner conflicts. It takes us one step closer to the sources of our trauma than horror or sci-fi can.
When we talk about the uncanny, and enabling us to contend with emotions and experiences too raw to tackle directly, we reflexively find ourselves thinking in grand images, with distant, sweeping themes. But the most remarkable thing here, is that the uncanny is found in a realm of absolute everyday banality; a world which we might mistakenly call recognisably trivial. But here we can consider the everyday rituals and façades we present in our own immediate realities – how are we dodging the things that have, or are affecting us; and which of those can we even control?
There would probably be a temptation among many viewers – and indeed, critics – to write documentary off as pretentious, self-obsessed, or centring largely (illness aside) on subjects that don’t matter. But I think the most interesting thing about it is how over the course of its 85 minutes, it shows repeatedly the importance of the things we supposedly deflect as not mattering – the places where, without attention, we can let some of the most important aspects of our lives and psyches slip between the cracks.
In the eight years since he made this film, Wheeler has taken the lessons from his film, and developed into a first-class filmmaker. As an editor, he was key to helping the archival horror of HUNGER come to life. Meanwhile, his own bitter-sweet comedy, Hi from a mayfly might be built on a fantasy premise, its story centres on the crucial understanding of the ‘trivial’ moments of human life as being the most formative – the places which might not seem fitting for grand narratives, but where the practicalities of addressing our hopes and fears actually reside. It is wonderful to get this snapshot of him as a creator, and a person, eight years earlier on his journey – and fascinating to wonder where he will end up eight years from now.
And I am also thankful for Wheeler being willing to bear all – both with the creation of this project, and its distribution now. It’s important to look back at where you have come, and consider where you are going – and this film can trigger that kind of introspection in audiences.
In my own case – in one of those coincidences which seems infinitely more interesting to the person caught at its centre – I was digging through an old notebook yesterday, and stumbled upon things I wrote down in 2018. Buried amid pages of debt payment plans from the doomed film festival I once hosted in Norwich. After that, I found notes planning a film criticism website, which obviously became Indy Film Library – the seventh festival of which is about to feature two aspects of Wheeler’s work. And I also found the skeleton of my own creative writing project, which I might have been too afraid, or too immature to approach at the time. In critical writing, I have rebuilt my confidence, but also found ways to deflect talking about myself, or what I actually think and feel as myself, to be my own creative force. But in this introspective mood, it’s time to trust myself. Eight years has also made all the difference for me. Maybe it’s time to at least try and put those lessons to work creating something of my own again.
