Across three features Tyler Taormina has cemented himself as one of the most vital contemporary voices in American cinema. After the positive reception to his 2019 feature Ham on Rye, his follow-up Happer’s Comet, made at the height of the pandemic with a crew of two and a cast of family members and friends, remains underseen (though a streaming release on MUBI helped). Those who have seen it, however, will see its curious blend of doom and optimism echo throughout his latest, Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, one of the most idiosyncratic Christmas movies we’re likely to see for a long time.
While Taormina refers to Christmas Eve as a kind of impressionism, and indeed the descriptor fits — DP Carson Lund’s camera refracts and manipulates the twinkling lights of neighborhood Christmas decorations into alien-like beacons, flickering indicators of an uncertain life flashing by — his films have a pointillistic quality. His belief in collective narration means he’s adept at seamlessly integrating many perspectives into a single impression, foregoing pompous omniscience so that each point — whether a point (or many points) in a life span, or a point in an unfolding history — adds equally to a whole. Taormina’s trust that the picture makes sense without having to take several steps back to ponder it all is what gives his films an unfamiliar grace.
Ahead of the November 8 release of Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, I had a quick chat with Taormina about collective narration, nostalgia, and the emotional weight of the suburbs.
Chris Cassingham: I rewatched Christmas Eve last night. What struck me this time, especially, was this idea of collective narration, which you put within a sprawling family. I wonder what this family means to you, and maybe to what extent it relates to the impression you have of your own family or other families you know?
Tyler Taormina: I think that, more than any other film I’ve made so far, this film is indebted to Franco Piavoli’s Voices Through Time, in that the collective protagonist approach has been the case for all these films.
However, in this one it really uses the ensemble to explore aging and different phases of life, and Christmas in a large extended family could be the perfect opportunity to study the aging process within a community. So I think that while this wasn’t my conscious intention going in, I had a really specific understanding of how the film was about aging through this cast when we were doing the locations, actually. For example, I realized when we were designing all the rooms that the living room, foyer, kitchen area were the family’s shared spaces, which have all the Christmas decorations. But when it came to every room outside of that, every peripheral space, I noticed that they all represented different phases of life. Whether that be the teenage bedroom converted into a workout room, or the kid’s playroom, or this sort of computer room that is long unused and defunct.
It just became really clear to me how this family is not only — let’s call it an impressionistic reflection of my own family — but an opportunity to realize that all these people of all different phases of life are all at the threshold of tomorrow, just as Christmas Eve is at the threshold of Christmas Day, and they all are about to go through a point of no return. I wanted to understand, maybe just for selfish reasons of my own fears of aging, what all that entails.
CC: This fear of aging, is that something that’s appeared within you recently, or has it been there for a long time and this was the time to explore it?
TT: It’s not necessarily a fear of death or anything like that, but rather what I’ve feared for a long time is what I would lose, you know? Those parts of me that I think I’ve clung to in my identity that are the parts that I perceive as pure, right?
I think a lot of it has to do with my relationship with music and how a lot of my friends — we all were in bands together — a lot of us stopped making music, and it almost seemed to be an expectation of aging, like, “You’re too old for that guitar, what are you doing with that? You’re not in a famous band or anything. Why are you touching that guitar anymore?” So I think that this loss of music is a sort of grand expression of loss of whatever we lose during aging. I think all this factors into it.
CC: Another thing that really struck me was just how much, compared to your other films, Christmas Eve is really looking to the future, both its promises and its uncertainties. Paradoxically, the soundtrack is largely composed of pop music from the ’50 and ’60s. I wonder what this era of music evokes within you, especially as it relates to the other themes we’ve already talked about?
TT: I think that, to a point, Kenneth Anger has been there for me at the beginning of several of these projects. For example, in Ham on Rye, actually, it was his Kustom Kar Kommandos and the rendition of that song by the Parrish Sisters really was my idea for the centerpiece scene of that film.
And then for Christmas Eve it was Scorpio Rising. So for some reason I just had him in mind. I think nostalgia actually does play a big role in this film, and in Ham on Rye in a similar way, where there’s a nostalgic weight that we put on ourselves, and we’re now obsessively doing this through commodification and consumption.
But I think that there’s implications of wearing that nostalgic weight and that almost funnels our actions in a certain direction. And in this and Ham on Rye’s case, the deviation from that direction is a painful act, or that it can be a painful act; whether it’s the kids betraying the family units to go explore themselves at night, or the character of Splints, played by Sawyer Spielberg, who is like the sort of bottom of the barrel of deviance of familyhood.
CC: Do you think we have a responsibility to kind of break away from the weight of nostalgia?
TT: In some ways, yes, of course, we have a lot to be wary of in consuming the nostalgic dictates of the past and all of the sort of conservative qualities that are inherent to that. But I realized, actually at my sister’s wedding last year, that some people can just wear the ritualistic mandates easily and less critically. And those people have a much better time, whereas people like myself maybe feel like the lights are on too much to dance, so to speak. And I love dancing, by the way, but I feel like there’s a critical element and awareness in my life that is very important for human beings, at least some of us, to have. But it also impedes upon grace, which was a huge realization for me. It’s basically like the allegory of the cave, really.
CC: I felt that element of grace really profoundly during the scene where Uncle Ray’s story is read aloud in front of the family members. We see an important shift in his demeanor across the scene that I don’t want to spoil. Can you talk about what that scene means to you and why you wanted it in the film?
TT: When people ask if this film is autobiographical, I’m like, no, it’s just impressions of memories, but actually this did happen to me. My uncle, which the character of Ray is loosely based upon, came up to me one day when he was in town for a funeral. And it was just me and him in the house and he placed a manila envelope on the table and it was huge and he said, “Ty, I’ve been writing this novel for the past 10 years and no one knows about it. I’ve been writing it at the bank at my job when the boss isn’t around.” And he was nervous, he was very nervous to do so. And it touched me so much and it stuck with me forever. And I think — I don’t want to tell your readers how to interpret this scene — but I think that there should very much be a connection between that scene and the final images of the film that Emily sees in the window. I think that there’s these trends within the families, within families everywhere, perhaps, of these things that have yet to be unearthed.
CC: You and I have talked before about how emotionally loaded the suburbs are to you. What are you gaining — if that’s even the right word; that sounds a bit transactional — but what are you, for lack of a better term, gaining by revisiting them in your films? Is there something you haven’t quite unearthed or grappled with completely yet?
TT: Well, I’m not really a hundred percent sure. I feel like the suburbs are a really loaded point of study for me because it’s my past and I’m not sure anyone really ever catches up with their childhoods. I don’t think that’s possible actually. So as of now they have remained a very fertile ground for exploration, especially when the exploration deals with questions of becoming.
But also I think the suburbs are really a great backdrop for American stories because I believe that the construction of suburbia is very much the physical or the geographical manifestation of American ideology, the way that the suburbs are born out of a sort of pastoral nostalgia. Back in the time of their advents, which is a long time ago, nostalgia was right at the core for conservative ideas, which were basically like, get me away from all these fucking weird urban people who aren’t white, you know? Even the lack of city centers in the suburbs, there’s just so much that speaks to what I think everyone in America is dealing with now, to some degree or another, whether they realize it or not, which is the alienation of late-stage capitalism.
So I think that they just really provide the perfect grounds for me to talk about a lot of the things, or rather express a lot of the things, that I want to express.
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