The Bed You Sleep In, 1993
An
unhurried, almost soporific succession of long and medium establishing
shots of a bucolic logging town in the Pacific Northwest
provides an entrancing and deceptively tranquil prelude to the
impending - and perhaps, unavoidable - tragedy of The Bed
You Sleep In. As the film opens, an unassuming,
middle-aged, independent contractor named Ray Weiss (Tom Blair)
struggling to keep his foundering lumber mill afloat receives the
Pyrrhic news that his company has been awarded a contract to supply
timber for an unnamed project: a potentially lucrative deal that
has been rendered non-executable by his inability to provide the
materials because of a log shortage caused by a protracted (and
indefinite) delay in obtaining a regulatory permit that would
allow the local companies to mine animal-protected areas of the
forest beyond their nearly consumed, designated logging area. The
ongoing and ostensibly irreconcilable conflict between private
industry and environmental protection has resulted repercussions
throughout the local economy of the insular community, creating
widespread closure of mills and the reluctant forging of international
trade agreements by desperate, blue-collar entrepreneurs despite
their thinly veiled - if not immediately explicit - jingoism and
xenophobia towards their foreign commercial partners. Nevertheless,
the pressures of work and financial survival invariably recede
when Ray drives to the nearby woods to spend his silent hours wading
in the shallow waters of a pristine creek and fly fishes. It is
a predictable ritual that his second wife Jean (Ellen McLaughlin)
has learned to accommodate, even learning to weave her own emotional
needs into his recreational pastime by occasionally accompanying
him on his fishing trips to steal moments of intimacy. However,
the Weiss' comfortably settled relationship eventually becomes
strained when an unsuspecting Jean receives a long, expurgating
letter from Ray's troubled, college-aged daughter Tracy who has
unexpectedly decided to cancel her trip home a week before her
anticipated arrival.
Jon Jost creates
haunting and culturally incisive examination and demystification
of non-conformity and self-reliance - what Herbert Hoover describes
as the endemically American character of rugged individualism - in The
Bed You Sleep In. Loosely recalling the
ecological meditation of Mitsuo Yanagimachi's Himatsuri and
Kiyoshi Kurosawa's subsequent film Charisma,
Jost alternately juxtaposes distended, alienating images of the near
desolate industrial town, idyllic shots of the lush and scenic
northwestern landscape, and elliptical (and deliberately fractured)
episodes of Ray's business and domestic life in order to examine
the dynamic, often conflicting interrelation between independence
and survival, personal freedom and anarchy, self-discipline and moral
law. Citing a passage from Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Every violation
of the truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab
at the health of human society", the film illustrates, not only
a violation of filial relationships, but more importantly, an overarching
implicit contradiction in the country's celebrated maverick spirit that
actively participates in environmental destruction even as it seeks
communion with - and oddly champions the cause of - nature and wildlife. In
exposing the innate duplicity of a culturally fostered national trait,
Jost provides a compelling and incisive argument for personal and global
responsibility, accountability, and balance.
© Acquarello 2004. All rights reserved.
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At
an unidentified, vestigially western community in rural Utah, two
old friends, a real estate prospector named Wes (Tom Blair) and a
struggling, third-generation rancher named Larry (Robert Ernst),
sit at the counter of a diner and bide their unhurried morning over
bottomless cups of hot coffee, reminiscing over their last, uneventful
hunting trip and engaging in idle town gossip by envisaging scenarios
for the mysterious disappearance of a local woman (a baffling case
that ironically unfolds in a new lead during their casual breakfast
meeting). Boasting of a busy schedule as a result of his thriving
speculative business, Wes presumptuously enlists the underemployed
Larry on a personal errand to the pawn shop in order to buy a hunting
rifle and ammunition for his adolescent son Phillip (Phillip R. Brown)
who will be joining them on his first deer hunting trip, before instinctively
announcing to the diner proprietor that he will pick up the tab for
the two meals. It is this implicit (and perhaps intentional) penchant
for grandiose gestures and self-absorbed myopia that inevitably betrays
a hint of the film's trajectory when, unable to convince a bank manager
named Dick (Rick Blackwell) to invest in a "sure fire" partnership
venture to lure potential buyers from overpopulated cities in California
and Arizona into property investment in the quaint town (perhaps
sponsoring periodic real estate junkets), Wes then shifts focus to
the subject of Larry's delinquent loans and magnanimously instructs
Dick to draft the overdue interest payment from his own account:
a condescending gesture that not only tests the tenuous relationship
of the lifelong friends, but ultimately exposes the source of a deeper,
underlying gulf between Wes and his silently-suffering family.