Life and Stuff (aka Not Asleep, Not Awake, Always Tired)

About midway through Kumar Satkunarasa's Life and Stuff, the protagonist meets someone who shares their philosophy about life being harder for people who aim to exist than for those who just want to survive. It's a philosophy that Life and Stuff automatically calls into question, through the images that it juxtaposes with this statement. The people who are supposedly trying to exist are all shown in silhouette, bustling about their nondescript business in an indistinct mass. Its visual representation of a person who just wants to survive, meanwhile, is a picture of an impoverished child, who seems real, and their plight immediate, but is also invisible to these indifferent silhouettes. The aspiration to exist is exposed as an absurdity, being the luxury of those who do not have to worry about day-to-day survival. But it's also in this statement that one of the key tensions of the short is vocalised - the need to feel that our being in the world is having some kind of meaningful impact versus the feeling of drifting passively through. It seems significant that it occurs about midway through the runtime, and is spoken by the only character whose words the protagonist seems (momentarily) inclined to take heed of, and who doesn't immediately fade into the backdrop of their life. It is, in truth, a mere extension of an idea that had already occurred to the protagonist earlier on, when they'd arrived home from school to find their parents arguing over the TV remote, and wondered if anybody really grows up, or just grows old? This is the uneasy concept at the heart of Satkunarasa's four minute piece, which travels through the entirety of an individual's lifetime in a gut-churning pace - it isn't simply that life is short, but that it potentially has no cumulative effect. That, far from progressing our way from bright potential to silver wisdom, we might be stumbling down lonely corridor after lonely corridor, ending up nowhere. The protagonist feels perpetually callow no matter where they are in life, waiting for some epiphany or final meaning that never comes to them. Even as they lie on their deathbed, their life fails to flash before their eyes and put it into any kind of coherent perspective. 

Life and Stuff was completed for Satkunarasa's degree while studying at Bournemouth University, and combines computer animation and various repurposed clips and images to create a collage effect, a representation of a life pulled together from various odds and ends, amounting to a string of memories as ambivalent as the short's title. We are spurred ever onward through these humdrum chronicles by the relentlessly forward motion of the camera, never stopping to linger for long at any of the transient sights as we're whisked along an assortment of drab domestic spaces, sunlit beaches and, in the short's most grotesque sequence, down a toilet u-bend to mingle with life's literal shit. Satkunarasa presents it all with the same doggedly sardonic tone as his 60 second piece One Day, regarding the mundane details of a single day in the life of an office worker, the highlight of which was an idle train of philosophical thought they swiftly berated themselves for daring to momentarily entertain. The title was cheekily deceptive, appearing to suggest that something eventful might occur, but in actuality indicating that this self-contained day was much the same as any other. Life and Stuff is a macroscopic expansion on that same theme, guiding us through a complete lifetime in a way that is implied to representative of the broader human experience. The crucial difference is the shift in perspective. One Day was narrated in the first person, suggesting that Satkunarasa might be speaking directly from his own experience. Life and Stuff is told using second person narration, switching the short's tone to that of an instructional manual and the protagonist to a hypothetical; even details that would appear distinguishing, such as their larger than average head at birth, are presented as expected bumps in the road, thrown in to make their being that much more challenging. We follow them from their days as a disaffected school kid navigating the confusion of adolescence, through their menial career as a warehouse worker and into their twilight years of contemplating that they now have more to look back upon than forward to, an aching realisation related somewhat incongruously in Satkunarasa's distinctly youthful-sounding voice. We'd do well to keep in mind that Life and Stuff is a student film, and it conveys the fear of what lies ahead from a certain vantage point, from which old age is a distant threat on the horizon that still looms frighteningly large in its inevitability. These are the anxieties of a student gearing up to enter the real world, someone who is really only at the beginning of their journey but can already feel the passage of time taking its toll as their youth already seems behind them. Even its earliest stages, there are haunting reminders of how this story must invariably end. The protagonist's conception is heralded by a leaf falling from a near-bare tree. The skeleton in the school classroom is a grisly symbol of the bodily destruction that awaits us all, although its vacant eye sockets and hollow grin are equally suggestive of the emotional disconnect that keeps staring the protagonist in the face.

I saw Life and Stuff while it was making the festival rounds in late 2012, and the thing that stayed with me about it was its depiction of an overwhelming loneliness, that sense of being adrift in a world where everything seems to be functioning around you, not with you. A moment that particularly stood out was the one where Satkunarasa seemed to be evoking the visual language of Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi (1982), when the protagonist gets their first job cleaning an office skyscraper and is troubled by a timelapse sequence of a busy city that seems to be thriving just fine in their absence. It put me in mind of that specific sequence from Reggio's film that occurs about an hour in, when we glimpse a solitary worker through the windows of an office, their life running parallel to the constant flow of traffic outside. In general, the people in the "Grid" portion of Koyaanisqatsi move in sped-up swarms, making it difficult to pick out and focus on any particular person. The metropolis is depicted as a chaotic Babel in which the voice of individual is all but unintelligible, with this one shot giving us a fleeting impression of an isolated figure subsisting in a world that seems totally unaware of their existence. In Satkunarasa's short, a running feature is the persistent feeling of distance that accompanies the protagonist throughout life. A younger sibling is mentioned precisely once, and purely to be the set-up of a joke involve a Kinder Egg, the parents are forgotten as soon as the protagonist sets foot into the working world, and the schoolmates and colleagues exist only to emphasise the protagonist's alienation. The female companion acquired during the short's middle section is the only secondary character who gets close enough for any semblance of a genuine connection to be formed, and for the protagonist to learn a few of the traits that mark her out as an individual, such as her fondness for Sesame Street and for rouge lipstick. This is presented at first as an almost miraculous intersection between two souls on equally adrift trajectories (the coffeehouse sequence where their bond is solidified shows the rest of the world buzzing by in a very Koyaanisqatsi-esque fashion), although the prospect of it bringing mutual healing is too romantic to weather Satkunarasa's unrelenting sardonicism. The longer they stay together, the more their common understanding deteriorates (something implied to coincide with their waning sexual intimacy), and the distinguishing traits of our Sesame Street-watching significant other are distorted into signifiers of insurmountable differences.

 

Truth be told, and in spite of that persistent feeling of alienation, I don't think the protagonist of Life and Stuff leads such a bad life. The breakdown of that long-term relationship is the most upsetting thing that happens to them, and even then it ends on more of an anti-climactic note than an openly traumatic one. Indeed, they get to finish up in a position that many would envy, with all their years of manual labour paying off and enabling them to retire to a coastal community by the equator to live an idyllic existence of fishing and looking up at the stars (of course, if we read between the lines, then it's possible to conclude that they were left so heartbroken, in spite of Satkunarasa's detached narration, that they were compelled to put physical distance between themselves and their ex). Yet even in their laid back new routine they remain fundamentally adrift, indulging in the childishly creative but explicitly solitary pastime of creating constellations that exist only to them. They find themselves in a culture where they literally speak a different language to their neighbours, at point that makes them a curiosity to the local children. All the same, they do seem to form an understanding with the children that overcomes this communication barrier - as the protagonist enters old age, the children have grown up into adults and assist them in their daily routine of pushing their boat out to sea, having potentially become a found family to them. Still, the short ends poignantly, with the protagonist worrying that their contribution has amounted to nothing, their ultimate thought as they shuffle off this mortal coil being the terrifying hypothetical that nobody left upon it will even notice their absence. Of note is that the animatic uploaded to Satkunarasa's YouTube channel contains an epilogue, not present in the final film, in which we learn a little more about how life goes on after the protagonist's death - that the local community pay to have their body flown back to their town of birth for burial (a gesture that could be taken as either an act of kindness or definitive rejection), leaving nature to deny them their mark by eroding their name from their tombstone. The finished short feels more impactful for ending where it does, with the onset of oblivion, and the haunting dual implications of the closing statement, "Your heart stops". It suggests both that time has abruptly run out and that the protagonist already anticipates the answer. They've tasted enough of life's indifference to know.