Ident (aka Maybe I'm A-mazed...)

There can be few talents at Aardman more under-championed than Richard Starzak.The Bristol-based studio is so synonymous in popular consciousness with the work of Nick Park that it would be quite accurate to describe just about any of its non-Park talent as under-championed - not least studio founders Peter Lord and David Sproxton - but Starzak has always struck me as a particularly fascinating example, in part because he can be readily posited as a freakier, more sour-tasting counterpart to Park, epitomising the weirder body of work taking place at Aardman as Wallace and Gromit were winning the public's hearts. Back in 1989, when Park was preparing his breakout short Creature Comforts, Starzak (or Goleszowski as he was known at the time) was another rising claymation whiz getting the chance to flex his idiosyncratic muscles. Both had earned their stripes by working as animators on Aardman's most ambitious project to date, the apocalyptic Babylon, and each was given the opportunity to create their own five minute piece for the upcoming Channel 4 series Lip Synch, an anthology of five shorts designed to showcase the studio's individual talent. From the start, Starzak established himself as a darker, more surreal voice than any of his peers - his contribution, Ident, was by far the strangest of the five, an absurdist fantasy charting a day in the life of a beleaguered everyman as he navigates the walls of a maze and the dystopian society housed within, modifying his identity in an effort to blend in with the various social pockets he encounters, before his dog finally shows him that there may be a better way (maybe...).

Naturally, Ident didn't receive half the attention that Creature Comforts did, which is not say that it made no impact whatsoever. Like Creature Comforts, it did eventually lead to its own spin-off series...of sorts. Ident boasts the very first appearance of Rex the Runt, the two-dimensional plasticine hound who would go onto become Starzak's signature character throughout the 1990s, here featured as the pet of our chameleonic protagonist. It was followed by a trilogy of shorts exploring the further adventures of Rex, once he'd slipped the maze and learned to talk and walk upright - How Dinosaurs Became Extinct (1991), Dreams (1991) and North By North Pole (1996). Rex finally received his own full-fledged TV series in 1998, which the BBC bizarrely attempted to market as a kind of fill-in Wallace & Gromit, airing it in various lunchtime and early evening slots across the Xmas/New Year period. Brilliant though it was, Rex was never destined for the same kind of mass appeal as Wallace & Gromit - again, I fear that Starzak's humor was always too random, unsettling and off-the-wall compared to the altogether warmer eccentricities of Park's creation. This was 3 AM student insomniac television, awkwardly shoehorned into the niche of festive family entertainment; I'm not sure what stuffing-addled viewers made of it in the dying embers of 1998, but whenever Rex was repeated the BBC typically tended to squirrel it away in the late late hours.

Before he teamed up with Wendy, Bob and Vince, Rex led a humbler but stranger existence as the loyal companion of a phallic plasticine being living inside a labyrinthine dystopia. Compared to subsequent incarnations, this Rex is less anthropomorphic and largely behaves like an ordinary dog. He does not possess the gift of the gab, although in that regard he's at no more of a disadvantage than any of the maze's "human" inhabitants. Lord has stated that Aardman never settled on a unifying theme for Lip Synch, although the title suggests that dialogue and communication are of significance to all five shorts, and Ident is unique among them for containing no discernable dialogue (Barry Purves' contribution, Next, is an almost completely dialogue-free experience, but not quite). The characters all speak gibberish, although the nature of the gibberish changes according to the speaker. One character, who may be the protagonist's girlfriend, communicates by reciting letters of the alphabet in sequential order (although she skips the letter "g" for some reason). Another, presumably his boss, haughtily regurgitates the word "blah" over and over. The climax of the short has the protagonist head to the nearest watering hole, where he engages in drunken blather with its patrons (albeit before he's even touched a drop himself). Clearly, nothing of substance is communicated in their garbled murmurings, but the characters engage in rituals designed to give off the appearance of interchange, all the while revealing the fundamental disconnect between the participants. The failure of the protagonist and his girlfriend to see eye to eye results in both parties coming out worse for wear (and the possible breakdown of their relationship). The protagonist's display of over familiarity with his boss results in reproach. Masks are a recurring feature of interaction in the maze; the protagonist both annoys his girlfriend and appeases his boss by donning a mask and obscuring his true face. The backdrop his work environment consists of an assembly line of identical masks, suggesting that the protagonist is either involved in their manufacture, or (more likely) signifying the erosion of individual identity amid the capitalist grind.

In creating Ident, I strongly suspect that Starzak was influenced by Jan Švankmajer's 1983 film Dimensions of Dialogue, a collection of grotesque visual metaphors on the damages dealt by the inadequacies of human communication, particularly the manner in which the speakers aggressively distort one another's appearances as part of their pseudo-conversations. In Švankmajer's film, a succession of humanoid figures constructed from various household objects (vegetables, cooking utensils, office stationary) devour and regurgitate one another, grinding each other's basic components down until all differences are completely eradicated. The characters in Starzak's film endure a more comical but no less devastating evisceration, the emotional toll of all this assimilation being reflected the various scars accumulated by the protagonist throughout the course of the day. The discord with his girlfriend causes his face to be smeared with clown make-up (literally making a fool of him), while the mask he puts on for his boss appears to be altering the basic shape of his face, as his identity becomes conflated with the outward guise he is forced to assume for his daily survival. The characters do not literally consume one another, as in Švankmajer's film, but there is nevertheless a sense of them preying on one another's vulnerabilities in order to assert their own supremacy, with characters physically shrinking after enduring a particularly withering personal blow. Our protagonist is not an innocent in this process - in addition to the damage he unintentionally inflicts on his girlfriend by failing to understand her, he takes out his anger on a maze denizen significantly smaller than he; a denizen who approaches him to ask a question (he holds up a card with a question mark, which seems an appropriate reaction to the general situation), bringing an opportunity for connection and the sharing of knowledge, but whom the protagonist would sooner antagonise than attempt to understand. The inhabitants are a motley collection of figurative Minotaurs, brutally goring one another at evert turning, the grey, oppressive walls of the labyrinth signifying that they are all prisoners of their own conformity (entrapment and isolation are also central themes to at least three of the five shorts in Lip Synch).

As a counterpoint to the gloomy conventions of life within the labyrinth is the character of Rex, who does not exactly accompany the protagonist on his journey throughout the day, but the two of them have a tendency to keep running into one another. Rex is a faithful friend (although there are limits to his loyalty, as we see at the very end of the film), constantly seeking out his master and appearing to speak to some kind of latent urge that is contrary to the will of the maze. It could be because Rex is a dog, and therefore entirely lacking in human pretension. I suspect, though, that Rex is a largely symbolic character, a manifestation of the independent self our protagonist is repeatedly required to suppress in order to blend in inside the labyrinth. Rex signifies the protagonist at his purest and most honest toward himself. Significantly, the dog's appearances are usually heralded by the protagonist taking the time to examine himself in the mirror, reinforcing the idea that Rex "speaks" on behalf of his master's reflection. At the start of the short, Rex objects to the protagonist's (relatively low-key) efforts to smoothen out his wrinkles; he later barks aggressively when his master returns from his dispute with his girlfriend in full clown make-up, signifying the disparity between his inner and outward identities - he has become unrecognisable to himself. Although the dog and protagonist frequently appear to be at odds with one another, there is a surprising display of tenderness between the two when the latter is inebriated. He induces inebriation as purely a defence mechanism, to emulate the rituals of his peers, but just for a moment he lets his guard down and shows a smidgen of affinity for his overlooked friend.

It is ultimately through a mirror, and the guidance of Rex, that our protagonist is able to exit the labyrinth altogether. Rex demonstrates to him that the mirror is actually a portal to another world, if he can muster the gumption to cross through it. There is a strange duality to the very concept of a mirror providing the means of escape - the function of a mirror, after all, is to reinforce the concreteness of whatever environment is juxtaposed with it, the ubiquitousness of mirrors around the maze suggesting that they, like the masks, are tools of oppression, reflecting only the greyness of the walls and the inhabitants' inevitable slide into debasement. Rex's demonstration of what lies beyond the mirror is naturally a call to look past surface appearance, but also evokes the importance of self-empowerment and of taking charge of one's own destiny. Earlier in the film, we saw the protagonist pass a window revealing only the unending passages inside the maze, and obscure it with a picture of an altogether different world, a sunlit one with greenery and open spaces; a perfunctory and seemingly futile gesture of escapism, yet in the end he discovers that such a world was lying in wait for him the entire time. All that was keeping him boxed in were the limitations of his own mind. His earlier action constitutes a rejection of the maze, but in the most superficial way possible; the potential for ingenuity is in him, but at first fulfils no greater function than the masks, as a defensive means of covering up what is undesirable while leaving it fundamentally unaltered. At the end of the film, he finds a way out by acknowledging and fully embracing his potential as an individual, not simply as a means of escapism, but of empowerment to go against convention and change his circumstances.

Unfortunately, the basic limitations that have dogged him all the while are not so easily overcome. For all the beauty of that final revelation, Ident reaches a humorously - and disturbingly - pessimistic conclusion. The protagonist leaves the maze behind him and sets out in a new direction, only for the same cycle of hectoring and alienation to continue beyond its walls. He meets another figure who his double in almost every way, an encounter that at first appears to bring both parties joy, before they suddenly turn on one another. Given that the protagonist has seemingly escaped into his own psyche, this lashing out against his own doppelganger can be interpreted as an expression of self-loathing, a sign that he will never be contented with any reflection that he sees, and effectively always banging his head against the walls of a maze, whether literal or metaphorical. In the background we see the silhouette of Rex watching the entire sorry exchange play out, before he finally decides that his master is a hopeless case and goes his own way. Unlike Park's signature canine, Rex doesn't have the infinite amount of patience required to play guardian angel to an obtuse human (or whatever our protagonist is) and would sooner go and seek out his own pack.

As an endnote, when Creature Comforts received a spin-off television series in 2003, it was ironically Starzak, and not Park, who was the main driving force behind the project. While for the most part Starzak was able to keep his more acidic sensibilities to the sidelines, it seems that he had been interested in taking the concept in a darker direction; apparently, he wanted to do an episode based around animals in a vivisectionist lab, but the higher-ups talked him out of it.