Fifty Percent Grey (aka Heaven Is A Place Where Nothing Ever Happens)

Content warning: suicide, graphic head injury

Anybody looking for their fix in offbeat ghoulishness who only has a scant handful of minutes to spare would do well to seek out the 2001 computer animation Fifty Percent Grey. An early project from Irish film-maker Ruairí Robinson (who did not persist with animation as a medium thereafter, although dystopian narratives remained a favourite subject of his), it starts out by evoking the kinds of plot devices well-ingrained into the popular psyche from classic Twilight Zone installments, in which a protagonist finds themselves thrust into an unknown situation and tasked with making sense of where they are and where they might be headed from here. It takes an archetypal nightmare scenario - the threat of being mired for all eternity in a featureless space with no prospect of growth or change - and milks a whole lot of twisted fun from it. The result is a note-perfect bundle of dark humor and existential dread mixed with just the slightest dash of visceral horror, all packed in to slightly less than three minutes. The early-millennium CG animation might look a tad primitive by modern standards, but has a grotesque expressiveness that perfectly compliments the morbid underpinnings of the narrative. Fifty Percent Grey was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short in 2002 but lost to Pixar's submission, For The Birds. No surprises there - the gentle cartoon slapstick involving the big-eyed feather-brains was always more likely to placate mainstream sensibilities than Robinson's ingeniously sick vision of the hypothetical next world (besides, this was the same year that DreamWorks beat Pixar rather unceremoniously to the first award for Best Animated Feature, so it is nice that they at least got to triumph in the other animation category). Fifty Percent Grey, though, definitely strikes a stronger chord with the desolation in my own psyche. Actually, it was a fairly good year in terms of quickies - also in the running was Cordell Barker's Strange Invaders, one of my all-time favourite animated shorts, so you are urged not to sleep on the competition.

The film sees a man - his name is not cited in the film itself, but the synopsis on the Irish Film Institute website indicates that we are to call him Sgt Cray - wake up in what appears to be the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a grey, barren landscape that seems to stretch out into infinity. We can deduce from the dripping blood and the visible wound in his chest, which rapidly closes up, that he is an ex-human and likely died in combat. He still has his gun, and the battle armor that blatantly did not protect him. Cray gets up, and notices a television set situated immediately before him, causing him to drop his helmet in surprise. He activates a video recording, which greets him with the upbeat announcement that, "Congratulations, you are dead!" and welcomes him to Heaven, where it promises he can enjoy eternity in peace and tranquillity. Cray looks around and, noting that the monotonous world around him bears no resemblance to the paradisaical images flaunted in the video, sets off in the hopes of encountering something more. Cray keeps on walking, until eventually a speck appears on the horizon; he rushes excitedly toward it, only to find himself face to face with the very television he'd contended with earlier, distinguished by the helmet he'd abandoned right beside it. He has, in fact, been walking in a circular loop the entire time - there is nothing to this "Heaven" except endless grey inertia. Horrified by the implications, Cray puts his gun to his head and shoots himself, hoping to end his entrapment but merely restarting the process - he wakes up in an identical grey landscape, in the vicinity of yet another television. Cray activates the video message, which greets him in the same upbeat tones, the crucial difference being that this time it welcomes him to Purgatory, advising him that he's here because mistakes were made. Cray inserts his gun into his mouth and fires it once again. By now, a clear pattern is emerging, so you can probably guess where this is headed next, although you might not be prepared for the smattering of body horror that accompanies Cray's next awakening, as he rubs his head to find a sample of his pulverised brains leaking out. His wound immediately heals, and Cray finds himself faced with the same inertia and yet another television. "Congratulations, you are dead!" proclaims the video recording. "Welcome to Hell! You are here because..." This time, Cray doesn't wait for the message to finish - he turns his gun on the television and blows it to smithereens. He then puts the gun to his head, whereupon he discovers that he only had a finite number of bullets, leaving him stranded in this grey monotonous "Hell". Not that it makes any difference, given what his other two options were.

I've seen some viewers forward the interpretation that Cray was in Hell all along and the looping inertia part and parcel of his damnation, but that reading gets a hard disagree from me. I think it's much funnier if the implication is that all three places are indeed exactly the same. Besides, what I find objectionable about the all-Hell interpretation is that it hinges on the need to presume that what Cray is experiencing now is somehow karmically proportionate to sins committed in life, and I see that as contrary to the absurdist nature of the short. The kind of person Cray was in life is really of no odds when the joke is that we are all inherently fucked. Having said that, the fact that he is a soldier does seem to be of greater significance than merely accounting, in narrative terms, for why he would have that gun on him, suggesting as it does two potentially contradictory readings of the situation he has come from. We might equate military combat with heroism, but it does entail the rampant destruction of life. The clue there may be in the title - life is never completely black and white, and it's possible that the afterlife has followed suit, with any potential rewards and retributions merging together and cancelling one another out, leaving us to tread an interminable grey platform signifying the intrinsically murky terrain of human existence. (The title is also a cunning reference to the 50% grey layer technique, which is used to add light and texture to pixel imagery.)

How I'm inclined to interpret Fifty Percent Grey is as less as a commentary on human notions of morality than on the television's role as an authoritative voice. It is a horror short in which the chattering cyclops emerges as our villain, albeit in a somewhat different manner to the child-abducting television set in Poltergeist. The afterlife (in all three of its purported dimensions) is infused with a troubling corporate coldness; it appears that God/the Devil/Charon/whoever cannot be bothered to greet any of its denizens in person and instead leaves a pre-recorded video message to do the heavy-lifting. The television is the closest thing Cray has to a companion (mimicking how the television might function as a substitute for social interaction in real life), and his sole means of making sense of the world around him - the joke being that the world around him never changes, but the narrative the television is feeding him does. Horror and humor alike arise from the discrepancy between what is promised (or threatened) on the TV screen and what you actually get, with Heaven, Purgatory and Hell all constituting the same experience as it is continuously repackaged and resold. One of the sharpest gags, with regards to Cray's so-called Heavenly encounter, is that the closing statement actually sounds more ominous than inspiriting, the alleged perk being in the opportunity to, "Sit back and unwind as you contemplate the mysteries of the universe," followed by the baleful reminder that, "You have all the time in the world!" What is immediately chilling about this afterlife is the total indifference of whatever higher powers are pulling the strings - and, to my mind, the horrifying stasis with which Cray is faced is a reflection squarely of this and not anything that he might have done in life. Even the Heavenly images that accompany the original message have a distinctly lackadaisical quality, a banality that's reminiscent of the kinds of still images that once populated old Windows screensavers. It offers a paradoxical glimpse into a vision of a promised land that is blatantly not there and yet one that effectively mirrors the unbearable vacuousness of the space Cray already occupies.

As the short progresses, the television becomes less of a proxy for these indifferent higher forces than an oppressor in and of itself. There is a visual clue hinting toward this early on, when Cray walks away from the television set, and we see an eerie shot of with TV in the foreground, appearing to dwarf the wandering man. It gives the impression of dominance on the part of the television, that it "knows" something that he does not. The TV's non-benignity is reinforced through its persistent presence yet shifting appearance, as if different layers are being stripped away to reveal the corporate malevolence lurking underneath - Robinson incorporates a witty sight gag in which the televisual technology is downgraded the lower Cray descends in his metaphysical journey. I'm not sure, but I think he may even have a laserdisc player in "Heaven", while in "Hell" he gets a clunky-looking model of VHS machine. I am, unsurprisingly, won over by the latter's retro charm - I would say that, of the three options on offer, it would be better to be in Hell, if you at least get to gape at truly vintage home video technology. That's just me, though.

Fifty Percent Grey was released in the same year as Richard Linklater's feature animation Waking Life, and in some respects represents a more brutally comical variation on the same basic formula, where the (potentially deceased) protagonist repeatedly fails to find their way out of an increasingly oppressive otherworldly state of being. In both films, the protagonist intermittently turns to a television set for guidance, the television representing a window through which to view and process the grander scheme. In Waking Life, the punchline to one of these sequences is supplied by an advertising jingle that breezily proclaims, "Now I'm free to see the world!"; this alludes, jokingly, to the liberation that both the television and Wiley's possible disconnect from the corporeal world should theoretically provide, all while he remains incongruously in his sedentary position as a passive observer (at the time, Wiley is engaged in channel surfing, an act that implies the intersection of creativity and passivity). In Fifty Percent Grey, I've no doubt that the central gag lies in the tension between the television's dual function as a mode of escapism and and a means of numbing spectators into accepting the status quo they are looking to transcend. Cray engages in warfare with the television as it attempts to exert control over his perception, striking back with a vengeance at his every effort to duck out of the narrative it projects onto the void and instructs him to consume, its rhetoric becoming more aggressively damning (quite literally) with each round. Cray might have the right idea at the end, in resolving to shoot the television and silence his opponent before it can complete its final condemnation, but it registers as rather a hollow victory. After all, it's not like he has anything else to stare at out there, except into that infinite grey abyss.