After the Lights

Lights feature strongly in Edita Bodilsen’s latest film. Specks of light in the sky, the bright illumination of cityscapes at night, blurred sunrises through windscreens on twisting freeways, a single bulb as the main character sits sleepless and stares out into the darkness. We’re not sure what he’s thinking when he finally closes his eyes. In the next shot, we see him through glass as he rests his head against the window. We can see the landscape drifting past, reflected, reduced to glowing and moving points of light.

After the Lights follows Barry Guiler as he travels to Muncie, Indiana from his home in Omaha, Nebraska. As far as road movies go, it’s not the longest journey ever attempted. It’s a relatively straightforward drive across three or four states. But for Barry, it’s quite an ambitious undertaking. He doesn’t travel much, and has rarely travelled more than a few hundred miles from his home in Omaha. Except once, when he was three, when he was abducted by aliens.

Bodilsen’s film is not really a sequel to Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, more a piece of fanfiction filmmaking that ponders what might have happened to the little boy that was taken and returned in Spielberg’s film. After the Lights is filmed in a documentary style, and follows the now 46 year old Barry as he travels back to the town where the abduction took place, and investigates aspects of his past that he often doesn’t dwell on. He sits in a diner and stares out at the traffic on the freeway, the automobile lights burning out of the fast-disappearing evening sunlight. So often in the film he sits alone, and seems meditative and elsewhere, but quickly turns back to the camera with his full attention.

“You know, Muncie was used by sociologists for experiments in the 1920s and 30s. They used it to study typical Middle American life. They called it Middletown in the reports they wrote. Maybe the aliens were doing something similar. We don’t know what they called the town in their studies.” He laughs, knowing he is baiting the expectations of the film crew, who maybe are expecting a UFO obsessed abductee to be reeling off conspiracy theories and claiming the US government is involved. Instead, throughout the film, he is level headed and often philosophical, using logic rather than paranoia to power his arguments. “We don’t know if they were even experimenting, do we? Maybe they’re not like humans. Maybe not all intelligent life in the universe experiments on each other. Would the development of advanced technology that can travel such distances have not necessitated the development of advanced morality? Like us experimenting on animals? Maybe it was more of a social call.” The weak smile returns, and he seems to retreat into himself. Vulnerability is never far away.

The film starts with a normal working day for Barry. He has been an care assistant at a mental health facility in Omaha for eight years, and we meet him as he’s finishing his last shift before the road trip. The atmosphere is excitable, as his colleagues and some of the patients are wishing him well, or joking about his travel arrangements. There are rumours that he is going off with the aliens again. He is well regarded by the patients, it seems. His nervousness bubbles up in good humoured overstatement. People question his special powers. It seems good natured, even if it could be interpreted as bullying. There is a poster pinned to the notice board with the slogan “The truth is out there”. A crowd of colleagues from across another part of the medical center come over to wish him well. “Who’s stolen my anal probe again?” asks one of the patients.

Back home, it seems less jovial. There are obvious signs that Barry lives alone, and isn’t that great at taking much care of himself. The apartment isn’t all that tidy. A television buzzes away in the background without anyone watching it.

“I’ve never really thought about actively pursuing a career, about building a future. I’ve kind of coasted into this job. You know, I guess disruptive events in your childhood can leave you trying to catch up all the time. You miss the important milestones when decisions have to be made or decisions are made for you. Not so much the abduction, really. More my mom’s state of mind. Her breakdown, the whole time we spent in Rapid City. It creates a kind of drag that prevents you leaving childhood until it’s a bit too late to get going properly.

“We spent a lot of time around mental health facilities, and I suppose it became a kind of comfort zone. Mom wasn’t really able to look after herself after all the stuff that happened. She barely slept. She had a lot of problems with anxiety. You know.”

Barry looks into the lens often. He is used to being examined, perhaps. He drinks tea gently and occasionally looks down at the noises in the street below.

“I didn’t do too well education-wise. And then I spent some time believing I should be an artist. Because there was such unrest within me, I suppose. Or a refusal to accept prosaic reality. Day to day life. I spent quite a lot of time in care, different people. I’m not even sure if I was studied by the government, like the rumours say.”

A computer takes up most of the space in a corner of the room opposite the hyperactive television. It has books stacked around it, paper amassed in an unsteady pile. Barry crosses the room and sits on a swivel chair, clicking round idly on the computer screen.

“Nowadays things are coming back to … aggravate me more than they used to. I might have believed in the past that I’d be able to move on with my life, but the internet is like an echo chamber for speculation, rumour, accusation. It was the invention of same organisation as UFOs - DARPA - so I guess you’d expect some similarities.”

Bodilsen uses a montage of some of the more lurid clickbait headlines concerning Barry. There are claims that once he was returned from the alien craft, he has been subject of countless US government experiments and research projects, that he knows the truth and knows the government knows the truth, that the government and the aliens are experimenting on everyone.

“People even say that the abduction was a government project. It’s difficult for me to remain neutral on the subject. This is something that happened to me, or is supposed to have happened to me, but I was too young to remember. I had moved past it all by the early 1990s, I think. Now, with the internet, the whole paranoia is back with vengence.

“I’ve had to doubt everything in my life. These stories are so unreal. My mom’s illness and us moving round kind of detached us from normality, from the comfort of normality. I doubt everything on a daily basis.”

He steps across the room, pointing to carrier bags full of paper and envelopes. He reaches into a drawer and lifts an automatic handgun.

“I have more to worry about from my fellow humans than any alien beings. I get so many letters. I get so many threats. So many times I have people come to the door wanting to talk to me. They all have theories. Many times I have had intruders breaking in during the night. It is so sad. The vast emptiness in people’s lives that they want me to reassure them. They want me to confirm something that I don’t really know is real.”

He stands by the window, looking down on the street again. Light from traffic flares up the wall behind him.

“Have you ever had to use the gun?” asks a voice behind the camera.

“I guess we ought to get going.”

He examines the gun for some time, as the lights fade out to just specks against the sky.

“We went to Devil’s Tower a few times when I was a kid, but it didn’t really mean that much to me. All the things that happened, it was reported as a train crash, a chemical leak. Only locally were there rumours as to the real nature of events up there. But they’ve sure spread since then, like ripples in stagnant pond.”

Barry is driving, occasionally watching the lights of cars up front on the freeway in the morning haze, turning to the camera for an occasional confession.

“I say we, but I’m not sure who the people were that took me. It wasn’t because of the events that supposedly happened there, just as tourists. My mom couldn’t travel there. She found it difficult to cope with the whole over-the-top-ness of everything. We settled in Rapid City for a while, while she was getting treatment. Then I moved to Omaha, half-way home, maybe. Halfway back to Muncie, although I can’t ever remember ever going to Muncie. I don’t have a place I can call home, I don’t think.”

The sun dazzles for a while as it breaks through cloud. Bodilsen’s camera lingers as Barry turns to speak several times but gives up after each attempt. Instead, the camera meditates on the freeway ahead, at the cars that shimmer above the tarmac and the flecks of morning sun reflected on their bodywork.

“It’s difficult for a kid to understand mental illness, because you are developing your own view of the world and can’t conceive that something like that could go wrong. That imagining things could be a problem when as a kid you’re imagining stuff all the time. But adults have to accept the consensus reality, the shared rules and expectations and understanding of the world, or the culture you live in. To have had to discount what my mom told me, to have to accept an official version of so many things, like my displacement and successive care facilities, means I have ended up being sceptical about everything. Everything. I find it difficult to believe anything at all, which is a frustrating position. This event I was supposedly involved in, the supposed benevolence of the government in looking after me, anything my mom said. A doubt that overpowers everything.”

The camera watches traffic through the windshield for some time, sometimes following the signposts as they approach and then arch over the car, more often lingering without apparent interest on the tailgates of the vehicles in front. They form a loosely static row that drones hypnotically along the anonymous freeway.

“The doubt is what stops me having any kind of realistic relationship with anyone. It’s not just the nutcases. Regular nice people that I might spend my time with. Lack of trust, I suppose, that’s what doubt is. I don’t think I’d be able to trust anyone even if I wasn’t at the centre of a conspiracy theory. It’s the modern world, isn’t it. No one can trust anyone. We trust nothing. That’s how these conspiracies start in the first place.”

Later, in the diner, Barry watches the other guests with some anxiety, as if he is expecting someone. He doesn’t seem to have eaten much, and his mood appears more melancholy.

“It’s rare for me to be so far from … where I live. I’ve never really travelled that far, not seen the world at all. I can’t fly. I can’t get on a plane because the whole sensation of taking off from the ground seems to just drag out some kind of primal fear from me. Even getting in an elevator makes me super anxious.”

He looks out at the fading light, at the customers coming and going from the doorway of the diner.

“It’s not there anymore, anyhow, the house where it happened. I looked on the internet. It’s a way of travelling for fearful people like me. The house where we lived when it happened. It’s all gone now. So I don’t need to make that pilgrimage.”

The drive continues into the evening. Barry is quieter, more apprehensive. His attention flicks back and forth from the rear view mirror, increasing in agitation. The camera crew follow his eyeline, and track spheres of light growing in the rear window. Barry seems to accelerate, but the lights hold and continue to increase in size. He says nothing, and drives without taking his eyes from the mirror. There is still a weaving row of traffic in front, lit garishly in the headlights.

Then suddenly Barry has pulled over, and is arguing with someone through the side window. He steps out of the car and loud voices can be heard in the darkness that surrounds the vehicle. There is an awkward repositioning of the camera, and then we’re able to see Barry arguing with a man beside the car.

Later, he’s driving again, calmer, focussed.

“One of my stalkers. This guy says he works for the government, says he’s paid to tail me. They chat on the internet if they see me. What is missing from these people’s lives that they must fill them with such nonsense? I’d be interested to know the results of alien research into human life. They could only conclude that paranoia is its main motivation.”

He pulls the car over again, after a time spent travelling silently.

“I never said why I’m making this journey, and you’ve not asked. I’ve heard that my father is still alive, and perhaps we’ll bump into each other. Perhaps I’m looking for my origins, same as humanity when it looks up at the stars. Maybe I’m interested to know what the aliens and sociologists were interested in when they came visiting. Did they choose this place at random? I’d like to see what it’s like, why it has attracted such interest.”

The film ends with an extended sequence of shots of life in the town in the early light of morning. People picking up groceries and dropping children at school, grabbing breakfast and collecting trash, clocking in at factories and opening the shutters of storefronts, activities that could be happening anywhere.