written in 2019
my first experience with "Disco Pigs" was an old intro to film textbook i got my hands on when i was 14. it detailed, with stills, the first few minutes of the movie. i'm sure it was just to illustrate the pure technicals of shot-reverse-shot and cross-cutting, but the images held such a power that i was afraid to see the film, lest the punctum dissolves upon seeing movement.
this sequence of images embodies the most provocative element of the film. past Pig’s bloody brawls, past Runt’s treatment at a specialty school, and past their own parents who treat them as pariahs, this opening is the portrait of childhood that cannot be tolerated by an uncaring, stolid world. a lack of development that nearly everyone conceives of as disturbing (until we see Pig “rescue” Runt from a boarding school, where the students cheer them on). this is also an incredibly unsubtle sequence, as is the rest of the film, possibly a “sin” derived from the typical theater-to-screen adaptation. but the visual language, however “jabbed-in-the-eye,” also reflects the characters’ perceptions of each other. what, exactly, could be subtle about this relationship?
after seeing the movie, it is apparent to me that the still frames remain objects that the moving “recreation” (in my mind) does not compare to. and i mean it; they are two different pieces. the frames did not suggest any more than the images, stacked on top of each other on the page, could. they were isolated, trapped in their moments, and immovable in their convictions. the moving film sequence, however, suggests something doomed. for one thing, movie brain tells us there is 85 minutes left in this story. and for another, Pig and Runt are, as a unit, untenable. the world we know cannot allow this to continue.
"it’s blue. blue is the color of love."
there were no illusions before about the bigness/smallness of the world. no convictions about the cruelness of humanity. no beliefs about the systems that kept them apart. there was only the understanding that, outside of Pig and Runt, king and queen, everything else was stupid, useless detritus.
maybe it is a type of catharsis to cut out a vital organ. Runt sits alone on an ever-expansive beach, looking out into the “big blue.” those pictures in the textbook: those images have always been dead. maybe that’s where they held their power. when we see Runt, bloody and out-of-breath, lost in a wide shot of sand, she is perhaps too alive and too lost. she exists in real-time, and can no longer retreat to Pig.