Ah Pook Is Here

It's maddeningly difficult to represent the work of William Burroughs in any visual medium, though animation definitely has advantages over regular film in this respect, but 'Ah Pook is Here' succeeds to a greater degree than most.

The short is mostly taken up by a grotesque creature, with Burroughs's voice, philosophizing while smoking a hookah. The audio seems to have been cut together from various sources subjects include Ah Pook (the Mayan god of death), Control, politics, and "stupid, greedy, Ugly American deathsuckers."

This line, taken from 'No More Stalins, No More Hitlers' on Dead City Radio, is Burroughs at his prophetical best, "...the rulers of this most insecure of all worlds are rulers by accident. Inept, frightened pilots at the controls of a vast machine they cannot understand, calling in experts to tell them which buttons to push." Now imagine it being said by a demented little creature that looks like a cross between a chicken and your spleen.

Firstly, to me it takes a little more than a bizarre little creature in a bizarre environment for a film to be considered surreal, although it clearly is fantastical. It seems that once a director or a work has received the "surreal" stamp, it is meant to be revered as intellectual genius, and in many ways considered above criticism, which is true as I have seen many films with very strong surrealist elements without this stamp, which are never as highly regarded in this way. All we really have here is a strange little gremlin talking a lot of nonsense about politics and humanity, which I found very uninspiring.

One line clearly intended to be very dramatic which resounded as rather hollow to me was more or less as follows. "The iron will dictators are finished. There will be no more Hitlers, No more Stalins. Nations will be destined to have puppet leaders over and over." This is not prophetic and it is not even accurate. Putin is being named Tsar Putin for a very good reason. It is also very arguable how much actual control Hitler himself held. Also the level of dictatorship invoked by the Bush administration can be debated at great length. Clearly many African dictators still exist, such as Mugabe. The largest problem with this film I would say is that it fails in any value it WOULD have had, which would be if it was at least thought provoking. My personal reaction was. "If this film was much longer I couldn't be bothered listening to it."

I suppose you may find this interesting if you're the type who enjoys studying philosophy regardless of what the philosopher is saying, but to me, quite annoyingly, films like this which present themselves as surreal, original and intellectual are very overrated, merely based on the self pertained pretension which they hold. My main point is that it is just a mellow, quite short film, and isn't to be taken very seriously, as it is not particularly effective to any dramatic end, or awe inspiring on any large scale.

This is an animated short that probably will make most people shake their heads and say "huh?!" repeatedly. And, while I freely admit that it was strikingly original, it was also generally incomprehensible and rather ugly....but original!! To describe the film adequately would probably require us both to be under the influence of massive amounts of drugs--it's that strange. And so it's fitting that the film is an odd reading by William Burroughs (an on again, off again drug addict and writer).

The film begins with a world-like object made out of scrap metal (or something) and bombs and rockets flying about it. Then, out of the blue come two creatures that look like demons and chicken guts. The whole time the primary one rants on and on about bad government and why America sucks.

While there must be a lot more to it, this really is the gist of it. If you dislike America or like really weird things, then this is right up your alley. Otherwise, it is slow going and difficult--though I still must applaud the odd artistry and design of this amazingly bizarre work of art.

A puzzling short I saw years ago and rewatched again just recently, Ah Pook Is Here was hard to wrap my head around those years ago, particularly if you're just tuning in after not paying attention at first. But the point is fairly simple behind the surreal animation (that yes, and the detractors point out, is fairly ugly- but so are the topics it describes). From William S Burroughs, the author of Naked Lunch (and actually narrated by him), Ah Pook Is Here features philosophical riddles: "If Control's control is absolute why does Control need to control?" and "What does death need time for?" It's a short that doesn't provide many answers, but gets a point across and does what it aims to do as a six-minute short.

Possibly only for William Burroughs completists - the writer narrates a despairing tirade against mainstream American ills framed in a sci-fi apocalyptic context, an organic planet in a symmetrical, monochrome universe. The reassuring, lilting, pensioner's voice, the cool despair and horror of the words, Pook the turkey, Burroughs' representative, suicide as response to compromised life. The theorem-like clarity of the animation makes it watchable.