Review of ME (2024) ★★★★, by Don Hertzfeldt, meaning, and where to watch

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After mulling over and digesting ME for over two months, it’s clearer to me than ever that this is one of the most complex works by one of the most interesting and unique filmmakers of recent times. Almost always existentialist, Don Hertzfeldt’s cinema seems to delve deeper and deeper into our finite cavities to reflect on the meaning of life, turning the most trivial details of everyday life into moments of pure humor —either as an initial premise or as a result— or into scenes of strange beauty and sadness in equal measure. His worldview, which is not unique, has transcended cinematographically in part due to his particular visual style, even within animated cinema —a medium known for its creative freedom and imaginative potential— but also thanks to a kind of narrative, auditory, and creative gift that, combined with the aforementioned, has led to the fact that in most of his films, viewers find ourselves embracing life in all its deformity. The attention to detail and attraction to absurdity in It’s Such a Beautiful Day, which makes one think about life not to be happy, but to live it intensely, as a stimulus for memory, despite (or perhaps because of) its bitterness, or the biting, occasionally melancholic, and almost always luminous World of Tomorrow (including the entire —so far— trilogy), which presents a fatalistic future full of possibilities (ones that are either frightening to imagine or quite amusing), under the notion that feeling sadness makes us feel more alive, and from the joyful, naive perspective of childhood. These are two of the most gratifying examples of a filmography that has passed through all kinds of twists and tribulations, which have been both the cause and consequence of the creative processes and technical learnings that shaped, for example, the last mentioned “trilogy” and, of course, ME.

Let’s not forget that the author of short films like Billy’s Balloon or Rejected (over 24 years ago) first started experimenting on a tablet in 2014, three years after both he and his nearly 60-year-old animation camera collapsed, leaving behind a series of (unintentional) flashes and light leaks that further enriched the last of the three parts that make up It’s Such a Beautiful Day. Empty, both of ideas and familiar tools, the exercise in a digital medium helped him conceive the concept of World of Tomorrow and allowed him to animate the first part at record speed, fitting each piece perfectly (including the unscripted audio of his four-year-old niece) and naturally, unlike the process of working on the second part. Because, although it may seem so from the previous example, developing an idea is not always an easy task. When imagining World of Tomorrow Episode Two: The Burden of Other People’s Thoughts, Don Hertzfeldt almost forgot the fun that the entire creative process of the first part had entailed (which, like this second part, included drawing and looking through books with his niece while recording her voice). Here, that narrative development once again became a puzzle, especially when he realized that in the second part, the spontaneous audios from his niece, now a year older, stopped being short and expressive reactions (easily editable) and turned into long, uninterrupted monologues. A bunch of wild ideas and imaginary lands that didn’t fit into the story he had planned to write gave way, with his niece’s help, to a freer experiment that, even so, still fit within the imagination of the first part.

And we arrive at the third part, World of Tomorrow Episode Three: The Absent Destinations of David Prime, key to partially understanding ME. Don Hertzfeldt himself recounts how, in the “homemade” traditional animation he worked on, moving the camera while filming was a painful experience that involved calculations, manual adjustments, and numerous precautions to avoid even the slightest mistake, which would mean redoing countless scenes frame by frame for hours. To avoid complicating things —as he himself describes it— he limited himself to a few zoom-ins now and then, using a flat and simple staging, which also affected the color and the “richness” of the backgrounds in his films. He accepted the strange fate of directing without being able to move the camera for 20 years, relying on other resources (such as splitting the film frame so that the frames within the frame could move and be manipulated). With the leap to the digital environment, all these problems disappeared; it was time to break old habits and reignite his interest in animation, which had been exhausting him constantly. For Episode 3, he decided to learn some basic principles of directing that he had never been able to apply to his work with the tools he had. Although limited, breaking through this mental block inspired much of the writing of this short film and, in turn, marked the first step for Don Hertzfeldt beyond what he calls his “silent film era,” leading to a truly silent film, ME, which is, at the same time, a musical.

In ME, Don Hertzfeldt chooses to shift gears a bit, and although once again undeniably observant and existentialist, he distances himself even further from the humor that characterizes him and from questions like transcendence or memory, diving headfirst into operatic grandeur, musical odyssey, and darkness, exploring themes like trauma, technology, and humanity’s isolation from itself, all under the umbrella of art as something to be felt rather than understood. Because, although his new film continues to reflect on the meaning of our existence, here he doesn’t want to focus so much on the meaning of life or death (or on whether we are as much as we remember), neither from a metaphysical nor a more earthly perspective. This time, instead of leaving phrases like “you will only get older,” “you’ve been dead before,” or “now is the envy of all of the dead” for posterity —and Tumblr— he has decided to create a film without dialogue, and as in other instances, he gives great weight to music (here original), leaving it up to the audience to decide what dialogues they want to have with his work and what it means. Let them be the ones who decide, in most cases, what they are watching (although I personally believe this has always been the case).

ME is a project initially conceived as a collaboration with a famous and respected musical group that was derailed by a series of sexual abuse allegations against one of the members, leading Don Hertzfeldt to cancel the original idea and start developing the project solo. Rumor has it that the group in question was Arcade Fire, as around the time the film was conceived and later released, the band put out the album WE (and if you rotate the letters… ahem), and in the physical format, you can see, if you look closely, both a frame from World of Tomorrow and a drawing of a giant eye with arms and legs that appears to be the work of Hertzfeldt and looks quite similar to the one in ME. Along with all these creative changes, after the possible delays (perhaps including those caused by COVID, which certainly had its own share of disruptions) and the crises stemming from having half of a project thought out (as the album was released in 2022), possibly already developed and scored with a story adapted to the album’s lyrics, we learned on November 30, 2022, about the announcement of artificial intelligence entering our lives, something that has significantly affected artists, though other professions as well. To what extent has all this influenced the final result of ME? It’s impossible to know (unless the author tells us), but the existence of this work and the fact that we’ve been able to see it and reflect on it has already made it worthwhile.

Eye of We (Arcade Fire) and ME (Don Hertzfeldt)

Don Hertzfeldt’s visual simplicity once again transcends, in a story that begins as a dark and vulnerable self-critique and evolves into something much larger, like a reflection on humanity’s limited capacity for beauty and unlimited capacity for horror. This can be applied to the moment we are living in as much as to the one that took place during the planning of ME —COVID, lockdowns, denialism, countless deaths, the economy, mental strain, and other consequences— or to any other possible future. It includes Forbidden Planet as the germ and seed of ME, encapsulating his concerns about the universe’s secrets, thoughts on traveling through the vastness of the stellar oceans and knowledge —even if it’s from the couch—, the contrasts between fleeting life and the infinity of worlds, and so on. Because the present, the past, and the future are part of the context accompanying ME‘s release in 2024, which in some ways synthesizes the mess left behind after the pandemic tragedy, rising fascism, and the technological deterioration that has undoubtedly characterized recent years. Just think of the millions of dollars, euros, and all sorts of currencies rushing to invest in and fund large language models (LLMs) that consume endless planet resources, not to mention heating it further, or the urgency of the rich to travel to other planets or dive to the ruins of the Titanic until they implode. Just thinking about this, I said, allows one to see in this 20-minute short film a reflection on the repercussions of technological advances that, while seemingly intended to improve our lives, allow us to stay connected or even get rich by investing in cryptocurrencies, laundering money, or using them for transactions related to various illegalities, while the severe consequences of their use become invisible or too normalized to notice.

But then again, it makes just as much sense to think of that interpretation as it does to consider another possibility, because there’s a chance that ME, in its dystopian view of the world, will remain relevant despite the passage of time and the changes it brings. First of all, because its cryptic and abstract montage, which includes a healthy dose of science fiction, opens the door to multiple interpretations. But also because, in the history of humanity, ethical dilemmas will always arise from progress that puts the planet at risk, whether from advances that have been used to annihilate millions of people in wars or genocides, or others that have triggered climate change or pose a risk to public health and the depletion of Earth’s resources (that now much more technological Gaia, which will also eventually shut down at some point). Even in terms of the pursuit and realization of personal dreams in the current neoliberal context, which implies a total commitment to those dreams, there’s room for interpretation. What’s more, even in the “I don’t get it” there will be merit, because in not understanding, there’s often a need to analyze a film even more. And despite not being among Don Hertzfeldt’s most well-rounded films, it’s rounded in its own way and contains some visual and sound moments that will stay with you for a while, even for those who think the meaning is “too obvious.” In any case, Hertzfeldt himself gives us a clue: it’s not about your phone.