Concessions

My friend got up and left about 15 minutes into Craig Baldwin’s
Mock Up on Mu at Northwest Film Forum last Friday. “I have to
go,” she whispered. “I can’t do it.” I can’t really blame her. It was a
weird day—slow, aimless, upward of 90 degrees—our brains
were sleepy from beer and poached from sunshine. And
maaaybe sticky, puffy, and befuddled isn’t the best mindset in
which to enter a crazy-ass sci-fi narrative collage about postwar
conspiracy theories, the occult, and L. Ron Hubbard. Maybe. Just a
hunch I have.

Baldwin is clearly a mad genius—Eraserhead hair
bouncing as he head-bobbled through a brief introduction (“If you guys
can weather 110 minutes of this…”)—and Mock Up on Mu is
an astoundingly precise and manic achievement. A pioneer of
collage filmmaking and anti-copyright-law activist, San
Francisco−based Baldwin uses found footage to create elaborate
documentary mosaics—reappropriating and impaling mass media on
its own shiny sword.

Funny, smart, bonkers, and at least half an hour too long, Mock
Up on Mu is
completely exhausting. Baldwin overlays his own
original scenes (shot with true
B-movie hammery) with an epileptic
stream of Hollywood movies, educational science videos, stuff blowing
up, crazy people yelling, deserts, mutants, and old-timey rocket
ships put-put-putting through space. The overstimulation is worth
it.

Baldwin’s story—which is oddly cohesive, given his composition
style—is, broadly, “a take on [California’s] major industries:
the military, entertainment, and religion.” Specifically, it’s a
kind-of-true exploration of the relationships between L. Ron Hubbard
(annoying sci-fi author turned cult maestro), Jack Parsons (founder of
Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Lab, Aleister Crowley devotee, and “the
devilishly handsome magus of an occult-sex magical sect”), Lockheed
Martin (not actually a person), and Marjorie Cameron (would-be Whore of
“Babalon,” Kenneth Anger
orbiter, and sassy redhead). There is so
much going on at every second, in every corner of the screen, that I
almost completely forget what happens. Plans are hatched and foiled,
space is colonized (“It’s your old bosom buddy L. Ron Hubbard calling
from the moon!”), Hubbard bloviates, Cameron seduces, Parson fakes his
own death and is reincarnated as a B-movie star, Crowley lurks below
the earth’s surface. The great and sinister Xenu, “sticky
figments,” Scientological “clear”-ness, and all that fascinating
nonsense makes its requisite appearance—for all you Scientology
obsessives out there (myself included).

After the movie, exhausted and addled, I discovered this text
message from my erstwhile pal: “Oh man, stumbled home, not sure if
light was all weird or it was just me, had to lie in the dark for
some time. Speaks to power of the movie. Felt like I was at Ikea
times a zillion.” And that was after just 15 minutes. I’m still
recovering.

lindy@thestranger.com