Synchronic

And Prison Disorientation

Justin Benson and Aaron Morehead appear to be an incredibly interesting filmmaking team that sprung up while I was in prison. Though they have done some unsung work in the MCU mines on “Moon Knight” and other Marvel shows, they’ve also been active in writing and directing a few genuinely odd, uncompromising science fiction indies that are as much about big ideas as they are about the fascination with big ideas. “Synchronic”, however, might be their most audacious movie yet.

At the start, we see only a bunch of anonymous junkies strung up on a new street drug, falling prey to hyperreal hallucinations. So far, so familiar, motel beds and loose syringes, unlikely couples being warped and mangled by what they see. But what we eventually glimpse is a little stranger – not so much hallucinations as much as outlandish, otherworldly humans and their worlds crashing into ours. The walls and halls protecting us, penetrated by half a man, a quarter of a woman, wordless, haunted, doors becoming doorways. This is one strong street drug. Schedule 1? Asking for a fed.

The drug in question is called Synchronic, and it is tripping up a pair of EMT workers who have seen far too much in the last couple of weeks. The production sprung for Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan as these two characters, mostly for the names on the poster. However it is ultimately a rare treat to see these two really drill in to some character acting, and it’s interesting to see two guys perceived as avatars of manhood (Mackie as a Marvel hero, Dornan as man-meat in “Fifty Shades Of Gray”) play voices of authority who aren’t too sure of what’s in their path.

Early on, what’s in that path is a mixture of the concrete and the fantastical. These two men are seeing corpse after forgotten corpse, and you can tell doing this graveyard shift work is wearing them down. But Dornan is the family man fretting because his teenage daughter is missing. The viewer immediately ties this into Synchronic, but Dornan isn’t depicted as a movie character – his grief comes from simply not knowing where his child has gone. Mackie is the single fellow, but he has begun to use drugs to help him make it through his shift, which of course jeopardizes his relationship with his work partner.

For a while these conflicts shares space within the plot with Synchronic itself, though it’s not long before the movie turns into what you want. Synchronic is actual, real time travel in drug form, and taking it lets you at least partially stay in the modern world while you fade into yesterday. Briefly, this is a sincere exploration of the popular meme about time travel being not entirely as cool for a Black man as it is for a white guy. Mackie finds himself taking Synchronic to find out the truth about his friend’s daughter. But these are the laws of nature we’re talking about – Mackie just has to know more than what these increasingly-fraught trips are telling him, even as the drug takes a considerable toll.

“Synchronic”, like the other Benson/Moorehead joints, utilizes an aggressively low budget in order to skewer the typically-linear perceptions of inexplicable science fiction events. I know people will always enjoy stuff like “The Terminator” and “Back To The Future”. But the idea that your actions could puppeteer the space-time continuum in, well, real-time and you could perceive it with your own eyes and your earthbound intuition is about as nonsense as the idea that aliens might land on Earth and immediately speak English. As these time trips keep occurring, the movie becomes decentered and destabilized. That violent shift in perspective gives this movie a structural edge that keeps the viewer at a distance, but in a way that makes you lean forward. These two filmmakers have established a solid methodology to genre films, less interested in matters of the heart and more aggressively pitched towards the viewers who find it rewarding to experience just a bit of discombobulation.

Now that I am out of prison, I still enjoy movies that disorient and sometimes disturb. But in real life, I seek a calming influence. Recently I used a VR headset for the first time, and it was an AWFUL experience, I almost threw up. I haven’t had the chance, but maybe I’d say no to roller coasters too. I have drank alcohol many times since I’ve been out, but each time I’ve refrained from getting drunk. After prison, slow and steady, please.

For most people looking at a sizable sentence, you’re very likely going to arrive first at a state prison, which will serve as a holding pen. This is a tremendously destabilizing experience. Typically, these places are indoors, and you don’t go outside – they find an open-air ceiling to justify “outdoor recreation”. The surrounding area will either be clogged, or borderline empty. The men surrounding you will be a sea of changing faces. Some will be there for hours, some for just the weekend. Officially, they are not supposed to house federal captives and state prisoners together, but as a federal inmate I was housed with state convicts the entire time, and I understand many different institutions refuse to follow the same rules.

I was fresh off the street, so I wasn’t prepared for the ecosystem inside, and no one helps you prepare either. I quickly found myself playing basketball every day. On the surface, I had no problem with what I thought were prison rules. Except that if you throw elbows, if you foul a guy, you’re going to get it TWICE as bad. Prison ball isn’t the assumption that every bit of violence is tolerated, it’s the fact that any aggression you show will be returned twofold. I found a lot of peace on that court, but prison rules also mean that people don’t like to lose. I kept playing basketball, and the hours spent on that court made me a much better player. And every once in a while, I had to spend the rest of the day worried that the guy I beat might follow through on his threat to brain me against the floor. If you ever find yourself playing prison ball, remember this: don’t try to set a pick.