You Are Here is a 2010 Canadian philosophical speculative fiction film written and directed by video artist Daniel Cockburn, which he also co-produced with Daniel Bekerman. Cockburn's first feature film is "hyper-inventive and categorically hard-to-describe", initially billed as a "Borgesian fantasy" or a "meta-detective story", and later as "part experimental gallery film and part philosophical sketch comedy." In You Are Here, Cockburn makes use of the techniques and concepts he had honed over the previous decade as an experimental video artist with "a narrative bent", and "works them into a complex and unique cinematic structure." The film mainly follows a woman (Tracy Wright, who died of cancer seven weeks before the film was released) searching for the meaning behind a series of audiovisual documents from other universes, seemingly left purposefully for her to find, some of which are shown as vignettes concerning figures such as the Lecturer (R.D. Reid) and the Experimenter (Anand Rajaram) interspersed throughout the film. She finds so many of them that they fill a space which she calls the Archive, and herself its Archivist. In time, the Archive appears to resist her attempts at cataloguing and organizing it, and she receives a cell phone instead of the usual document, leading to a fateful encounter with others.
The film features music composed by Rick Hyslop and visual effects by Robert James Spurway, and makes use of excerpts from films by fellow Canadian filmmaker John Price. It has been presented at over forty film festivals worldwide, and compared to the works of Charlie Kaufman, Jorge Luis Borges, and Philip K. Dick. The film is a recipient of both the Jay Scott Prize in 2010, and the EMAF Award in 2011, and with few exceptions, has been received enthusiastically by critics.
Plot A lecturer discussing "the awareness of the self as a solitary construct" shines a red dot from a laser pointer on to a screen showing ocean waves crashing onto a shore. He instructs his audience not to follow the dot. The key, he says, is to somehow allow the pointer to act as a guide into the footage of the waves while simultaneously following one's own thought processes, one's own path.
Elsewhere, people call into an office with bright red threads strung across it, reporting their whereabouts to a team of trackers. One such person, or persons, is "a crowd of people named Alan", described in a philosophical voiceover about getting taxis to random street corners whenever they are ordered to do so by the trackers. They also ponder a near-death experience, a forgotten password, and an ominous door located on the outer side of a high-rise.
An experimenter is seen in a room of his own devising, designed to be a model of an information processing unit, demonstrating that the mind inside need never understand any questions or commands, nor what is written in response, which is in Chinese, a language he cannot read but does learn to write, with a tool in the form of books of instruction, which permit him to give correct answers despite not understanding them either. After going through this experience, even after having left the room, he no longer believes he understands anything he hears or says.
A reclusive woman searches for the meaning behind a series of audiovisual documents that connect to alternate universes, including a tape of the Lecturer, who is later seen on the beach being bothered by a group of children whom he eventually turns into a new, albeit both frustrated and frustrating, audience—they bury him up to his head in the sand and train the laser pointer light on his head. In time, the woman finds so many items, they fill a room in her apartment and calls it the "archive", and herself its "archivist". One such document, in a voiceover by a child, tells the story of a celebrated inventor who secretly develops a red eye implant given to every person in his world; once activated, the eye shows only what he sees, so that when he is imprisoned for this, they share the view from his cell, effectively sharing his imprisonment.
The archive appears to resist the woman's attempts at cataloguing and organizing it. She receives a cell phone instead of the usual document. She makes a call and follows instructions until she encounters a pair of field agents, going from place to place in a taxi, reporting their whereabouts. They welcome her as one of their own. There is a car accident which kills Alan, who, even in death, continues to morph from one body to another. Alan holds a red ball in its hand, which the archivist takes and places in her archive, which she then locks up forever.
The final scene is from the viewpoint of a shelf in a room with a red ball on it. The room appears to begin to move in a rocking manner from side to side.
Characters and cast The Archivist • Tracy Wright The Lecturer • R.D. Reid The Experimenter • Anand Rajaram The Assistant • Nadia Capone Voice of the Philosopher • Hardee T. Lineham The Trackers (Verna, Hal, Sharon, Bob) • Shannon Beckner, Richard Clarkin, Jenni Burk, Robert Kennedy The Field Agents (Marcie, Edgar) • Nadia Litz, Alec Stockwell Narrating Alan • Scott Anderson Alan in the stairwell • Emily Davidson-Niedoba The Children • Shae Norris, Rosie Elia, Isaac Durmford The Inventor • Peter Solala Child's voice • London Angelis
Themes and interpretations Anxiety about uncertainty in the digital age Though it is never explicitly invoked, You Are Here is primarily about the Internet and the information society. At a festival question-and-answer session in Utrecht, Cockburn said the film comes from anxieties and feelings "that are very specific to the current digital age". In an interview with Adam Nayman, who notes that Cockburn's previous short pieces carry a recurrent theme of technophobia, Cockburn said he wanted to make a movie that expressed anxiety about a world where mapping and archiving the world is more substantial than the world itself: "Photography or video is already one step removed from reality. The second step away from reality is: how is it stored, how is it findable? There's the world, there's pictures of the world, and there's this multitude of search engines that you can use." The entry for the film on Vtape, Cockburn's usual distributor, quotes a blog review touching on these themes from the first sentence:Do you suffer under the tyranny of Twitter? Is your life story written in status updates? Are your thoughts search engine optimized? When you picture the future, do you imagine Mark Zuckerberg's sneaker stomping on a human face—forever? If so, you may find comfort in You are Here. In a similar vein, Cockburn, said the film is all about "location, or at least talking around the idea of location ... the non-specificity of place ... closely connected to the anxiety and uncertainty-of-selfhood that I hope is somewhere near the movie's heart."
Despair or hope Cockburn has related how, at the 35th annual Toronto International Film Festival, in response to someone asking the actors what they thought the movie was about, most of the actors having just seen it for the first time, R.D. Reid said: "I think this film is about the attempt to deal with a deep-rooted despair", which surprised Cockburn, since they had not talked about it: "I was really gratified to hear him say that. I thought that is a very appropriate interpretation of the movie." In the same exchange, Cockburn also noted: "A couple of people have written about it being hopeful, which I'll accept." In his interview with Cockburn, Adam Nayman argued that the film was hopeful "insofar as it urges the viewer to simply take stock of his and her reality and act accordingly," to which Cockburn replied: "It's gratifying to hear it positioned that way."
Inspiration and influences In a number of interviews, Cockburn has said that You Are Here is ultimately related to a period when he went through a paranoid-delusional breakdown: "everything I saw, read, and heard was some sort of message to me that needed to be decoded." It was a period of "intense meaning-making ... I'd be looking at any text I'd encounter like a menu or road sign and I'd scramble the letters around and see if there were any different codes there that needed to be deciphered." After a long time, he realized that this behaviour, which was emotionally exhausting and troubling, had emotional underpinnings: "It became something that wasn't just an enjoyable intellectual play. ... In a number of ways I worked through it, and part of that was figuring out what the emotional reasons were." That experience "stayed" with him and worked its way into "just about everything" he wrote or directed:You Are Here is a compendium of characters dealing with the question of whether their life is just a series of random events, or whether there's some "Great Code" at the heart of it all. It's a cerebral concept, but when you're in the middle of it, it's scary and exciting and sometimes even funny, and that, for me, is the heart of the movie.
Cockburn's literary influences for You Are Here include Paul Auster and especially Jorge Luis Borges, "where he talks about imagining the path that someone travels in their life and how if you could see that path it might somehow form a shape", that is, a trace "that no person will ever be able to know or see or understand."That idea is structurally the heart of the movie, but it's also key to the emotional resonance. All the characters are struggling to come to terms with the fact that they can't know the bigger picture of the universe they're living in. They can't know how they relate to the other pieces. They can't see the traces they are leaving.
His film influences include the directors Todd Haynes (Poison and I'm Not There in particular), "for how he plays with film language with multiple styles in one movie, or the same character being played by multiple actors", and Charlie Kaufman (Synecdoche, New York), which "came out just as we were beginning to cut You Are Here". The film was a Rosetta Stone of sorts, "in its willingness to seriously mess around with the supposed rules of filmmaking and storytelling, but ultimately being a comprehensible and moving experience that hits you on levels you didn't even know you had." It gave Cockburn a lot of hope for his own film.
The end credits of You Are Here ambiguously suggest the film may or may not include an accurate representation of American philosopher John Searle's ideas. The scenes with the Experimenter are based on Searle's Chinese room thought experiment, which Cockburn described in 2016 as "sort of a pessimistic cousin" to the Turing test: Cockburn, who believes strongly in acknowledging his sources, telephoned Searle to seek permission to use the Chinese room; Searle was "very busy" but later gave "succinct approval". In the Nayman interview, after Cockburn tells this story, he remarks that he forgot to credit Douglas Hofstadter who wrote Gödel, Escher, Bach, which was the source for the film's "headache" word puzzle.
Production Financing and development