Door (End of Snivvelyzashuns)

End of world narratives were to be David Anderson's speciality during his time creating experimental animations for Channel 4. Starting with 1986's Dreamless Sleep, his contribution to David Hopkins' Sweet Disaster series, he showed a flair for conveying the disquietude of a hauntingly fragile reality on the brink of unravelling. In the dwindling stages of the decade he teamed up with American author Russell Hoban, and a brace of five minute pieces was formed under the banner of Deadtime Stories For Big Folk. The first of these was Deadsy from 1989, which went on to inspire the "Mark" entry of the "Drinking & Driving Wrecks Lives" series of PIFs. The second was Door from 1990, a grisly tale of ill-advised choices that is, for me, as perfect an animated short as they come. The busy, overstuffed and wildly abstract nature of the visuals (created through a combination of stop motion animation and pixelation) keeps us swamped with a nightmarish mix of stimuli, yet it never detracts from the elegant and poetic simplicity of the narrative. The agitated atmosphere gets only increasingly sinister as it goes, culminating in the kind of ghoulish punchline that could only work in animation, and which has festered persistently at the back of my head throughout the years.

Though overtly apocalyptic, Door does not explicitly link its narrative to the subject of nuclear war, giving it a different, more folkloric flavour to its predecessors. Dreamless Sleep centred on a couple who awaken shortly before the detonating of a nuclear weapon, sensing that something in their environment is profoundly amiss but being unable to pinpoint the source until the blinding flash of oblivion is upon them; like When The Wind Blows from the same year, it made a harrowing statement by bringing the all-encompassing matter of nuclear war to the personal level, from the perspective of innocents who were powerless to change their fate. Deadsy took a more comprehensively allegorical approach, presenting a humorously macabre monologue about a gender-bending personification of death and nuclear proliferation (whose grim spectre also haunts the action in Door, where they put in a cameo appearance). In Door the threat of nuclear annihilation exists on an entirely subtextual level. The central characters, an unnamed man and woman, discover a key marked with a tag, "This Is The Wun". After much deliberation on its meaning, the woman suggests that "This Is The Wun" indicates that this is the key to the one door that should never be opened, lest it unleashes something with the power to warp their reality beyond all recognition. Sadly, their inability to agree on how to manage this most gargantuan of responsibilities reaps devastating consequences. You don't have to reach in far to locate the nuclear allegory, although it can be interpreted quite a bit more broadly than that, evoking as it does the stories of Pandora’s box and the Garden of Eden (for a welcome change, it is here the male figure who makes the fatal move and dooms everyone), suggesting that there may be something innate in the human psyche that compels it toward its own destruction. Compared to Deadsy, where vanity and the lust for domination were the driving forces for cataclysm, the snake in this particular Eden (which isn’t exactly a paradise to begin with, mind) is simple curiosity. The risk is in going so far, in our quest to keep pushing ourselves beyond our limits, that we end up crossing a line from which there can be no going back. Door explores the possibility of how a single and all-too human error might seal not only our own undoing, but cast the whole world into ruin along with us - very pertinent in an age where destroying the world had apparently become as straightforward as pressing a button.

As with Deadsy, Hoban himself takes up narration duties in Door, voicing a couple of characters who remain offscreen until the closing moments, one of whom is relating the cautionary tale of the “wun” key you had better not mess with the other. Our first hint that these are specifically the voices of a post-apocalyptic landscape comes with their speaking in the slurred, degraded dialect that previously appeared in Hoban’s 1980 novel Riddley Walker (Hoban reasoned that people would hardly be speaking in BBC English following the collapse of civilisation and another dark age), and which I will state upfront that I am not going to attempt to accurately transcribe here. Connoisseur Video, the people behind the 1992 VHS release David Anderson: Works On Film, were nice enough to include a full transcript of the Deadsy monologue on the inner sleeve, in Hoban’s degraded survivor tongue, but they didn’t bestow that same honor on Door. The dialogue remains close enough to contemporary English that it is still intelligible, so I will be treating it as though it were more or less the same, but for the two key phrases: “This is the wun”, in relation to that very special key, and “the end of snivvelyzashuns we knowit”, the outcome that the characters most fear. We hear the story of the man and the woman (represented by two-dimensional cut out figures), who inhabit a world ("a great big some kind of place") consisting of innumerable doors and have many adventures navigating the surprises they conceal. Even before they discover the key that has the power to dramatically alter their destiny, there is something terrifying and intensely alien about this world, depicted as a sphere covered in a surreal hodgepodge of doors, none of which seem to offer any clear path or exit, only a deepening of chaotic entrapment. It resembles a puzzle box, of the sort that is liable to confound anybody curious or masochistic enough to try engaging with it. At one point a door swings open to reveal a figure positioned within a corridor who is seemingly incapable of doing anything but banging their head interminably against a brick wall, a sign that they've encountered a few dead ends too many. Some of the doors conceal pleasant surprises, which the man and the woman enjoy, while others sound as though they were assembled from the building blocks of nightmares ("You opened them, you would just keep falling for a long time"). 

On the making of documentary that appears on the Connoisseur Video release, Anderson shares that he came to the project wanting to explore human relationships and what causes us to self-destruct at an interpersonal level, with Hoban being the one who chose to take that interest in destruction to the cosmic level. Door actually feels like a perfect amalgamation of their respective fascinations, with the script putting a lot of emphasis on the dynamic between the man and the woman (it's never stated, but we presume they are a married couple) and their constant bickering, as interminable as anything the maze of doors has to offer. The clue that they are a husband and wife arises from the distinctly humorous nature of their arguing, indicating that they have known each other for a little too long ("Sometimes they would say, why did we ever come here anyhow? Then one of them would say it wasn't my idea, and the other one would say, well it wasn't mine neither, maybe we could go some other place. Only they didn't know any other place."). Their adventures within the world of doors becomes a metaphor for navigating through life within a partnership, with all the highs, lows and tedium it can bring. When we join them, their relationship hasn't yet been corrupted, but it has reached a point of stagnation, where it is wearing but ultimately survivable. It is the discovery of the wun key that drives an irrecoverable distance between them; the woman suggests that before making any decisions, they at least sleep on it, but the man is unwilling to wait and sneaks away with the key, intending to seek out the wun door and uncover the answer by himself. This amounts to an act of infidelity (it isn't a stretch to see the act of inserting a key into a keyhole as a penetrative one), and effectively severs their partnership; his search for the door takes him far away from the woman and they are not reunited. On an allegorical level, the relationship is a reminder that we are all in this wun world together and need to figure out how to make it work, with the division over the key indicating the failure of conflicting parties to handle a mutual responsibility that should perhaps never have fallen into the hands of mere mortals to begin with, a device that stands between life as they know it and total devastation. Eventually, the man found a strange rotating door and attempted to get close enough to see if it had a keyhole - in doing so, the narrator tells us, he ended up getting sucked in by its spinning motion and was dragged into the ground to his demise. A fortunate turn of events, for the woman was right about this being the wun key you had better not mess with, and if the man had gotten any further it would have meant "the end of snivvelyzashuns we knowit"!

At this point the narrator's companion speaks up, challenging him on whether he's certain that the man didn't get as far as inserting the key into the keyhole. The narrator responds that he doesn't think that he did. His companion then makes the short's most chilling observation - if the man did commit the deed in question and brought about the end of snivvelyzashuns, they would not be in a position to even know the difference. The final sequence pulls back to show the sphere of doors, now broken and disintegrating, and revealing the identities of the narrator and his companion, a couple of disembodied heads drifting and slowly decaying amid the debris of the ruined world. The narrator reiterates that he doesn't think the man opened the door. "Wow, what a lucky us," says his companion, and the film fades to black.

 

On the VHS documentary, Anderson clarifies that he saw the epilogue as happening several centuries after the events involving the man and woman, with the talking skulls representing the subsequent generations who have lived with the consequences ever since. Within context, they can hardly be described as survivors, given their advanced state of decay; they are rather fragments of this damaged landscape that have been floating in infinity for so long that they've lost sight of what they had before. The grand irony is, of course, that the "snivvelyzashuns we knowit" already ended long ago, and what they now know is barely civilisation at all. Their continued existence doesn't speak to the resilience of humankind (could the skulls even be described as human?), but to a decline happening gradually but definitely, their inability to distinguish between the so-called snivvelyzashuns of then and now representing another dimension of that ongoing decay. The legend of the man and the woman with the wun key might be exactly that - a simplified legend, now that the characters are far removed enough from the events in question that set the world on its course of irreversible descent, but its purpose has been subverted, to reassure listeners that the world was saved, making it a denial of a reality that should perhaps be all too stark, but is ultimately too bleak to accept. Door closes, then, by presenting us with a paradox, in the contrast between the man's fatal need to know what lurked behind that wun door and the skulls' desperate need to not know the truth of their hopeless situation. Curiosity might be the factor that propels us to our ruination, but having opened those doors that would have been better off remaining closed, to what extent would we sooner remain ignorant of the consequences? Which of our proclivities is stronger - our need to know, to understand and keep pushing ourselves into unmapped worlds, or the ability to close our eyes when we're on the cusp of uncovering something really unpalatable? It is also possible to read a degree of conscious irony into the second skull's closing statement, as though he wishes that the current state of snivvelyzashuns would be brought to an end.

I honestly don't remember when I first saw Door. I first knowingly came across it in 2012, back when I had started my mission to locate each of the Sweet Disaster series, which led me to check out some of Anderson’s other, less elusive projects, and I found that it had this instant and uncanny sense of familiarity, like the thing had already been haunting me for the better part of my existence. It is possible that I had seen it, or at least an excerpt from it, somewhere before and not quite taken it in (I don’t know if you-know-who would have covered it in his Cartoon Club), but I'd like to think that its freaky ambience just struck a chord with me because it felt so reminiscent of some half-remembered nightmare I'd once had (there is a third option, which is that I’d seen the McEwans lager ad that Anderson later animated using many of the same sets as Door). I do recall becoming utterly obsessed with it then and there in 2012. Not because I was fearing any imminent apocalypse, but because I was, at that point in my life, having a hard time coping with uncertainty in a more generalised sense (in a way that leaves you wide open to intrusive thinking), and I found the ending chilling but also strangely cathartic. I didn’t know if I saw something defiantly reassuring in the notion of being damned and being unable to tell the difference, or if that inability represented an entrapment in itself, if you couldn't see beyond and had no lingering appreciation for what you'd lost - I just liked that the characters acknowledged that they would have no way of knowing either way. It seemed exonerating, a reminder of how we're all just crumbs of debris floating around in space with only a narrow inkling of the bigger picture, and in those circumstances there's not a whole lot we can do other than to learn to trust whatever our own judgement is telling us. What a lucky us indeed.