I Have A Lot to Say About How Peter Strickland’s “Cold Meridian” Has… Nothing to Say
I was getting my MA in Film when I was first introduced to Peter Strickland, a British director that my Music in Film professor adored for his use of sound in films like Katalin Varga (2009) and Berberian Sound Studio (2012) — the former of which I searched for desperately until I found it online (it’s streaming on Mubi now, though! Yay!), and the latter of which we were all assigned to watch that weekend. And, interestingly enough, Strickland’s In Fabric (2018) screened at a film festival in the city in which I was studying.
So you can say I’m really into Peter Strickland’s career, comparatively speaking.
So when I read that Mubi also just started streaming Cold Meridian (2020), Strickland’s newest short, I was excited to see what he’d come up with now. The first thing any casual filmgoer needs to know about this director’s work is that he is obsessed with sound, and he experiments with soundtrack, sound effects, and ASMR to the point that he made an entire film (Berberian Sound Studio) about the process of creating sound effects for horror films.
In Cold Meridian, though, Strickland takes his themes to an entirely new level by making this short even more meta and self-referential. For one, he exposes the camera (my film professors would push me to call this the “cinematic apparatus”) that’s filming the mysterious subject of our film. But even more significantly, Cold Meridian exposes the people viewing the video. The subject narrates that the viewer is number 14,732, and says when the viewer paused and turned off the video the night before. When we see this viewer, she’s watching the video on her laptop just as we Mubi subscribers are (most likely) watching it on ours. This self-referential image appears about a minute into the film and elicits a sense of discomfort, making us feel as though we too are being watched. Cold Meridian is not a scary film, but like all of Strickland’s work, it intentionally unsettles its audience.
The most obviously notable aspect of the film, though, is the sound. Of course. Immediately, we hear the narrator’s hair getting washed with more sonic detail than any of us are cognizant of in real life, when we wash our own hair: We hear the soap’s friction against the narrator’s scalp, how it bubbles up between each strand of hair. It’s both disgusting and oddly satisfying .
In his introduction of Cold Meridian, Strickland calls this sound “sensual without being erotic,” and the film retains this quality all the way through. Even the sound of the narrator’s voice is heightened — we can hear her tongue separate from the roof of her mouth, her teeth touching, and her saliva gathering. It’s sensual in its intense corporeality, but uncomfortable, like when someone chews in your ear.
But excellent ASMR work and crisp cinematography aside, this isn’t Strickland’s best work. Technologically speaking, I appreciated it, but it didn’t bring me the satisfaction that I wanted it to bring, nor did it make me think. What I like about Strickland’s films is their power to stay with the viewer, and in this regard I found Cold Meridian lacking.
Cold Meridian is experimental, so I obviously did not expect a plot. I like plotless films — just not this one.
My problem is difficult to explain because experimental film transcends explanation. When I watch something like Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) or Un Chien Andalou (1929), I come away satisfied not because the film makes sense on a logical level, but because it triggers some feeling within me that lives beyond logic’s reach. It’s the same reason why a painting of a woman, or a blue square, or a lone sailboat might make a person laugh or burst into tears. Art — including non-narrative art — is uniquely, inexplicably powerful. And as an audiovisual medium, film has the unique ability to assault not just one but two of our senses.
Cold Meridian just felt meaningless. I loved the exploration of the spectator-subject relationship and the reference to streaming and on-demand entertainment, but I was baffled, for instance, by the inclusion of the naked dancer photos. Though we are introduced to the dance studio in the beginning, before the title card, we all but forget about this detail by the time we actually see the dancers mid-performance. Furthermore, the piece sets up their interaction to look like a woman fending off a rapist (think Rape of Persephone or The Rape of the Sabine Women — very neoclassical, very dramatic), which did not surprise me because the rape and/or violation of women is a huge theme in Strickland’s work. Katalin Varga is a creative take on the rape-revenge drama, in fact.
But in Cold Meridian, the relationship between the dancers evolves from a rape to a dance, to an erotic battle of some sort, to a fight, and by the end of the film I have no idea what is going on. More importantly, this doesn’t make me feel anything. When I fish around for some meaning it might have, or for a relationship between it and the narrator/viewer sections, anything I find is purely intellectual and bereft of the eery, uncomfortable tone of the rest of the film. Is the dancers’ sexually aggressive performance furthering the commentary on postmodern society’s desensitization towards watching graphic material (bringing to mind some of Warhol’s print work)? I am not sure, and worse yet, I don’t particularly care. The sexual confrontation pulls me out of the film completely because it does not make sense. It does not speak to me.
And when it comes to art, if the piece doesn’t speak to you — or more so, if it has nothing to say — what’s the point?
