I Lived In A Dead Girl’s Room
a foreword by Andrew McAlpine
Citizen Kane. The Godfather. La Dolce Vita. We Live in a Dead Girl’s Room.
Or at least that’s the way it should be. Seriously. This isn’t a case of wild hyperbole, clever pomo revisionism, or even silly overstatement. I can’t and won’t claim that We Live in a Dead Girl’s Room is the best movie ever made, just that it’s one of the best movies I’ve ever seen (’cause who really cares about Rosebud, anyway?). In the pantheon of my heart, it remains untoppleable.
I suppose I should reveal my autobiographical connection to the work before I proceed. I did, in fact, go to the same high school - Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology - as the fine gentlemen that produced this masterpiece (although I confess I never knew them personally). As the name might suggest, TJHSST was focused on right-brain thought through and through. We had classes like Supercomputing, Molecular Biology, and Transmissioethnic Hypercomputations. Every freakin’ student there had an IQ of like 35627, an internship with the CIA, and a full ride to the Ivy League of their choice. As a kid who ended up going to a middling college, getting an English degree (academia’s equivalent of the appendix) with a less-than-impressive GPA, and looking to Starbucks for my career path, it was easy to feel a little bit lost in an atmosphere of overachievement.
And that’s where Videotechnology comes in. Whereas most of our senior classes were designed to start looking professionally at the world of science and technology, Videotech was gloriously useless, left-brained, and entertaining. We didn’t have to map charts of fungus growth or create database systems. We created juvenile, ridiculous videos and - in some miraculous loophole of the pre-YouTube universe - got a grade for them. It was a haven for artistes, idiots, and any other kids who managed to slip through the academic cracks. And in a class characterized by weirdness, We Live in a Dead Girl’s Room was the weirdest of them all.
The film broke every boundary of the class - films had to be five minutes long, and it was forty. Our teacher emphasized traditional storytelling and pacing, and it isn’t so much a narrative as a collection of hallucinatory tangents. The rest of our little films were all cute and nicely packaged, but it was actually hilarious and disturbing and spilled out all over the tape. My films haven’t aged very well at all, but We Live in a Dead Girl’s Room is as totally awesome as it was the first time I saw it (not to mention that it has one of the best soundtracks ever). While we were making student films about our stupid high school crushes, these guys were shooting for the moon and hitting it straight on the crater.
So, I’m going on for way too long. But remember this - before I Heart Huckabees and Garden State made quirkiness hip, We Live in a Dead Girl’s Room took us off the deep end and back again. It doesn’t matter what my personal connection to the movie is - the only thing that matters is that I got to see it. And now you can, too. So just watch the damn thing, already.
