Light is Waiting (Michael Robinson, 2007)
Light is Waiting is my second encounter with Michael Robinson, but it might as well be my first, since Onward Lossless Follows, which I first saw in a college course, has all but vanished from memory. From what I recall, both films distort and layer pieces of American popular media, unleashing sensory assault in the process. They’re readily approachable experimental works because they’re wildly pitched between camp and horror.
Light is Waiting deconstructs an episode of the sitcom Full House. We open on two young children, who are given an assignment to watch the news. Caught between watching the news and watching a more entertaining show, they decide to watch both simultaneously, a decision which requires them to move a TV up a flight of stairs. When they drop the TV, all hell breaks loose. The screen violently strobes the colors of the American flag, before electronically slowed down voices ask what happened.
Eventually, we see footage of the Full House family on vacation in Hawaii. This colonial footage, framed as avuncular sitcom, is vertically reflected, such that the everything seems to be pouring out of the center of the screen. It’s as funny (there’s a shot where the dad’s ass shrinks and grows that made me chuckle), as it is scary, all set to creaking, booming bass notes. Eventually, we get blue, white, and red strobing again.
Robinson’s distortions are especially powerful as primal horror imagery, featuring loud noises, talismanic, twisted American symbolism, and loud grinding noises, all elevated by the fact that it’s an episode of Full House. The use of the TV is deliberately outdated (I kept thinking about the set from All That Heaven Allows), adding to the sense of unmoored pop culture detritus. The film exorcises a latent evil lurking in our collective subconscious.