"you should take the time to look at it. it tells a story."
"about what?"
"about me."
As goodbuddy Bryan Enk continues to bring his body of work from the workmanlike port of Vimeo to the open seas (and much larger audience) of the YouTubes, one of his key works remains at the former. A dark suburban fantasy, Pink Coffins occupies a key place in Bryan's oeuvre, and it's not an easy work to unpack. That it exists in two versions - the initial 52-minute cut created in 1995 and a two-hour, four episode version released three years later - makes analysis more difficult, and the world is extended further by the two-decades-later companion piece The Passion of Paul Ross (which I reviewed years ago, right here.) But the very existence (and the experience) of these multiple manifestations serve as a lovely extension of the parallel lives, bodies, and worlds explored in the work itself.
Yet for all of its otherworldly flourishes it remains a deeply personal work for Bryan. He told me as I was revisiting the full work that the original version (hereafter referred to as PC52, to make things easier on Your Writer) was his favorite of his own films. I recalled a preference for the four-episode cut (as it was the first of Bryan's films I'd ever seen, at the start of our friendship) but on revisiting I found that PC52 was the neighborhood movie I remembered PCI-IV to be. And PCI-IV had become.....quite something else.
So. Pink Coffins unfolds over a couple of nights (Halloween, then mid-December) in a mythically-charged Bowling Green, Ohio. PC52 patiently takes us from scene to scene as we meet the duos populating this liminal zone: Paul and Doug Ross, a pair of ne'er-do-well brothers bent on achieving notoriety by unearthing interred coffins and painting them pink; Anthony, the troubled young man across the street from them, attempting to enjoy his evening with Veronica, whom he met at a bar; and Sam, a just-as-troubled psychic next door to them, who vainly attempts to persuade roommate Todd that Veronica isn't who/what she seems and that Anthony's in real danger.
I suggested that Pink Coffins was an act of skin-shedding - still employing the tools Bryan used as an undergrad filmmaker yet looking ahead to a larger future. Not a huge analytical leap; the first words of the Se7en-esque closing credits are GOOD NIGHT BGSU, a farewell to Bowling Green State University. Bryan's theatre work at BGSU informs much of Pink Coffins: we move linearly from place to place, each couple's story unfolding patiently like scenes in a play as each pair of actors bounce comfortably off one another. In the absence of a plot there's a disquieting mood that takes hold from the very start and only escalates across each scene. The consumer-grade video gives the thing a texture that serves it well.
And if young Bryan's use of some decidedly UNlicensed tunes feels like the retention of freedoms allowed an undergrad filmmaker, it helps attain a larger-budget grandeur. This isn't just a young punk putting his favorite tunes into his movie; Bryan uses the songs to shape the mood, the edit, the progression of the film at hand. The film's placid prologue is set to Type O Negative's "Paranoid", and with a patience very rarely taught to undergrads accumulates a strange but undeniable emotional heft as Paul Ross steels himself to confess his crimes to the authorities. And the song continues to play as the deep emotional release promised in this scene is jauntily passed by, a pair of uninterested but clearly aware cops breezing past penitent Paul, a what-the-fuck moment that registers comedy underneath the heavy song, even as it bestows some menace upon the ambiguity of the moment. The songs in the rest of the movie are never just there - they often feel diegetic, yet jolt us when they stop, more than once, at moments of realization or mystery throughout the rest of the movie.
Enk's earliest works plundered his favorite movies with joyous abandon, but the movie posters that line the characters' walls exist as signifiers of much more than the taste of the actors and their director - one senses that the faces of Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche are taking in more of the events unfolding before them than we ever could. There are some overt, even fannish, references to some of young Enk's favorite filmmakers. but other moments find Enk applying what he learned from his favorite filmmakers and giving their gestures his own twist - even the credits that arguably spoof those of Fincher's Se7en become even more unsettled as Enk introduces then corrects spelling errors within them.
Something given voice within each of the couples of the film is our legacy, an ongoing preoccupation with what we will leave behind, what mark we'll leave upon the world. The characters share this preoccupation with their creator, on the loose in the world outside university, attempting to shape his own legacy with what he hopes will be some kind of thesis. The shape as well as the mood of Pink Coffins is informed by Bryan's senior year study of existentialism; the film is in part an illustration of Kierkegaard's Three Stages of Life's Way, with each couple repping The Religious Life, The Ethical Life, and the Aesthetic Life. (My own such studies happened a few years prior and one time zone over from Bryan's. My B- means this aspect went by me but it's not a bad skeleton upon which to flesh out a story exploring these impulses.)
PC52, then, is an act of taking stock. An expansion of the acting ensemble. A summation of our man's work, so far, and a lighting out for further territories, with a thought to what the future might bring. It ends with one of our couples accepting that maybe they weren't meant to be remembered but embracing the freedom of being nothing, nobodies. An undergrad existentialist realization, but a cheerful one. The final shot is of these characters' makeshift grave markers, a letting go and embrace of the unknown...
....that switches to a negative, the pink turning a vibrant purple.
We can look at that last gesture as an underscore of the shift in perspective. Revisiting it I tend to look on it as the door opening to the world through which PC52's more unearthly characters entered the film, a portal to other places. A door that the resolution of PC52 didn't close. Hell, maybe it's the door through which Enk returned to Bowling Green for PCI-IV...
A thundercrack kicks off each episode, then a prologue before a rather rocking opening theme by the band Paper Plate, with different credits each episode. Enk's favorite filmmakers won't be absent from this version (nor will all of the unlicensed tunes of previous), but this opening leaves the Se7en pastiche in the dust. Even if he can't escape the orbit of Bowling Green or these characters who inhabit it, they are addressed now by quite a different artist.
The story's expanded. (The logistical mystery behind the expansion I prefer to leave unsolved - did everyone keep their costumes for two years? had young Enk really cut out that much dialogue?) Episode 1 (Faith Healer) largely revisits the first half hour of PC52 - Paul's non-arrest, Anthony and Veronica, Sam and Todd. The expansion begins in earnest in Episode 2 (The Doppelganger Effect) and the Brothers Ross, the impostors in the trunk, and the stranger next door take focus. Jason Hugh Smith's Intruder becomes a much more overt presence of evil, and the deepening of his character allows much of Pink Coffins' story to gel; Todd's violent outburst in PC52 and PCep1 can easily be written off to just the psychic vibes given off by Smith here, which fester beautifully in this episode and grow stronger across the remaining episodes. Episode Three (Creeping Through the Macabre) mixes things up further with new characters, including a wildly unpleasant elder Ross brother (a caustic turn by Brendan Cain) and a Mystery Girl (Elizabeth Cashman), escalating matters on multiple fronts. And under the watchful, unbelieving eyes of a pair of increasingly checked-out cops, Episode Four (Bury Me Standing) builds to a suitable, even powerful climax, including a brief but startlingly well-executed fight scene ("it took a few tries," Bryan told me of a particularly remarkable piece of business) and a final reunion that offers a powerful emotional payoff that puts a button on the whole thing.
It was a pleasure to step back into the liminal zone of my friend's Bowling Green, and renewing the acquaintance with the people who populate it and the actors who played them (Steve Bishop and Joe Hunsaker as the Brothers Ross, Andy Hunsaker as Todd, and John Klump giving some lived-in paranoia as Sam). I'm not sure what Bryan's plans are for this, one of his finer, most personal early works. As Ohio has recently become a hotbed of indie horror activity I'm hoping it will take its place among the off-kilter opuses set and shot there, and continue to extend Bryan's presence in that community. I hope more people will experience Pink Coffins for the first time, and that they find it as thrilling, funny, and moving as I do,
