On Thursday night, writer-director Shane Carruth's Upstream Color premiered at the IFC Center. Like his first movie, Primer, it is a richly detailed, deeply confusing viewing experience. Afterward he answered some questions. The audience seemed to be filled with film students, and they asked a lot of stuff about his decisions in editing, sound-design, and casting. But no one had the balls to ask "hey, what was that movie we just watched, you know, about?" This guide will answer that question. Obviously, SPOILERS AHEAD. First, here's the trailer:
Upstream Color - Theatrical Trailer from erbp on Vimeo.
Plot Summary—with spoilers!
The Thief grows worms with mind-control properties. After an unsuccessful night out trying to sell the worms to potential victims as drugs, he happens upon Kris, our protagonist, at a club. He knocks her out with a stun-gun, force-feeds her the worms, and kidnaps her. Over the next few weeks (or months?) he keeps her occupied copying out pages from Walden, by Thoreau, while he drains all her bank accounts. Later, he abandons her. Kris realizes that she is still infected with the worms, which run under her skin. She tries but fails to get them out with a knife.
Then, attracted by an unseen force (or the strange music he blasts from his speakers), she is lured to The Sampler, who de-worms her. The Sampler then gives these worms to a female pig, which establishes a mind-bond between Kris and the pig. Kris moves on with her life. Having been fired from her job, she finds a new gig at a copy shop. One day on the train, she meets Jeff, played by Shane Carruth. They are attracted to each other, aided perhaps by unseen forces, and begin dating. Meanwhile, The Sampler samples nature sounds around his farm, and plays the sounds to his pigs, which appears to exert effects on the many people he has already de-wormed and mind-bonded to the pigs. Kris and Jeff continue to date, and Kris discovers some of Jeff's mysterious backstory: he has previously also been infected and de-wormed, and during his infection he was made to steal money from his firm, and as a result, he spends most days working on an abandoned floor of a hotel and looking sad.
They take a trip, where they find themselves drawn back to the pig farm. Meanwhile, The Sampler has been having problems with some pigs: some are acting rowdy, another got pregnant. He gets rid of the resulting piglets by putting them in a bag and throwing them off a bridge. The dead pigs go downriver, where they decay, and the products of their decay are absorbed by the local orchids, which are collected by two women. These orchids will sprout worms, which The Thief will use to continue his work. Meanwhile, Kris is acting even weirder than before because she's upset about the piglets, because apparently the pig mom was her pig twin. Her and Jeff fight and make up, and with his help, she begins to realize what's happened to her. Eventually she goes back to The Sampler's farm, and shoots him. Then she gets his files, and notifies his other de-worming clients, who converge on the farm. They adopt their pig twins, and she seems to be happy. Even though she totally killed the wrong guy, because it was The Thief who really screwed her over.
Kris and Jeff hanging out and having a good time
FAQ: Answers to your most pressing Upstream Color Questions
Q: What is the worm?
A: it's a naturally occurring organism with a complex life-cycle: it lives in pigs or humans, and then when they die or decay, it takes up residence in orchids, where it grows back into worms that infect humans. In humans, it makes people susceptible to hypnosis, and when transferred to pigs, it somehow forms a connection between the human and the pig, so that they share experiences.
Q: Who is The Thief?
A: he's a guy who has discovered how to use the worms to perpetrate fairly low-level mortgage fraud in a highly time-consuming way. He also appears to have been a previous victim of The Sampler, as he appears with the other Sampler victims at the end of the film. He also appears to be chilling with some neighborhood kids and teaching them about the worms.
Q: Who is The Sampler?
A: he's a guy who has discovered how to de-worm people, and pass their experiences to pigs, which he enjoys playing weird sounds to, to see how they react, and how those experiences influence the people the pigs are connected to. Also, he enjoys walking around creepily staring at people he's de-wormed, who for some reason don't seem to notice that he's there. Don't judge— a man's got to make a living somehow. But he's kind of a dick because he doesn't treat his pigs with respect: he just uses them as a weird tool to manipulate people, which is wrong, and he throws a bag of piglets off a bridge, which is super-wrong.
Q: What's Jeff's problem?
A: besides having a thing for crazy girls, Jeff has been previously infected and dewormed, as evidenced by the scar on his ankle. Presumably, this worming caused him to steal from his work, and to get divorced. He seems to have dealt with it better than Kris. Since they've both been dewormed and connected to pigs, their attraction can kind of be explained by the attraction their pigs feel for each other back at the farm. Also, when the pigs get aggressive, Jeff gets aggressive, punches some people at work, and gets fired.
Q: What's up with Kris' uterus?
A: Late in the film, Kris finds out that her uterus is all scarred up, as if some kind of cancer had been removed. This seems to be related to her pig-twin, who had the piglets that The Sampler threw in the river. Maybe during the pig delivery, the pig's uterus was messed up, and Kris is suffering from a sympathetic physical reaction. It's unclear whether Jeff's pig-twin is the father of the piglets, but we'll go out on a limb here and say he was.
Q: What's the deal with shooting The Sampler?
A: Kris blames him for what's happened to her, even though he's really only responsible for the part where she goes nuts because her pig has lost her piglets, not for the whole Thief-mortgage-fraud thing. So she shoots him. It's unclear what's the deal with the scene at the end where The Sampler is hanging out with Jeff and Kris while they eat lunch on the abandoned floor of the hotel, and then Kris sees him, and then he keels over with what appears to be a heart-attack. Let's say that was probably her imagining that part or something.
Q: So what's the deal with Walden?
A: it's a book about being connected to nature and experiencing reality directly, without conceptualizing things, which seems to be related to Carruth's message here— Kris and Jeff don't really understand what's happening to them— they just experience it. And what's happening is part of a natural process that exists in the world— the worms aren't aliens or anything weird like that. They're just natural mind-control worms.
Q: So what's the big message here?
A: At the Q&A, Shane Carruth kind of suggested "it's up to the viewer to decide what it means"- but that's what all obsessive-compulsive genius directors say, and is wrong. There are several big messages here:
a) Don't ever go to clubs
b) Sometimes people don't know exactly why they do things
c) Your attraction to your insane girlfriend or boyfriend might be based on a previous exposure to mind-control worms that you both had
d) Trichinosis is no joke
e) Shane Carruth's movies are what you get if Terrence Malick directed a film based on a Philip K Dick book— these are the only two important related artists so stop drawing other connections because you're wrong, wrong, wrong.
f) Shane Carruth might grow as an artist if he was forced to make slightly more commercial movies, because this one got a little "weird for weird's sake", which can happen if you don't have contraints like "needing to get distribution" or "caring about what people think." It's not like Carruth needs to go make Iron Man 4, but it would be interesting to see him try to make a movie that could be understood and enjoyed beyond an audience of obsessive hipster film nerds.
Kris shooting The Sampler
Related reading:
Upstream color cast and crew info at IMDB
Upstream Color overview at Wikipedia
Upstream Color reviews at Rotten Tomatoes: currently at 84%
Good Shane Carruth interview at IO9
Another good interview at Indiewire
