Deeper, deeper, deeper.
Over 33 years, special effects guru and stop motion maestro Phil Tippett (Star Wars, Jurassic Park, RoboCop, Dragonslayer, Starship Troopers) has been handcrafting a nightmare. One could imagine his neighbors walking past his chamber of miniature wonders and asking, Tom Waits-style, “What’s he building in there?”
Deeper, deeper, deeper.
What he’s created is a postapocalyptic psycho-Discordian archaeological dive into the hidden depths of a dying world. There’s a narrative of sorts in Mad God, but it’s episodic and disconnected. It’s less a story than an anthology built around exploration of an ecosystem. It’s a story as much as Alice in Wonderland is a story, if Alice was a masked and leather-armored interloper, and the Red Queen was a festering mass of teeth and sores, waddling on chicken legs through a landscape of shitting deities and mindless, faceless, disposable laborers. Through this vile realm of decay wanders the Assassin, a figure dispatched from a war-torn world above to descend into a protean pit of predators and prey, decay and desecration, dead deities and corporate mascots.
Deeper, deeper, deeper.
Those 33 years have given Tippett time to create one of the most disturbing and visually dense films of all time. It feels like he personally selected every pebble, hair, and scrap that he used to construct this uncanny vista, a world like our own but reduced and rotted to its most corrupt, rotten, rusted components. Monsters wander – but not. They have their twisted place in this world that Tippett has created, a world that makes its own horrifying, disgusting sense, and yet is also a commentary on our own world, its violence, its twisted religiosity, its perversions of the natural order. It’s also profoundly contemplative, wildly funny, and exquisitely beautiful in ways both scatological and eschatological, but mostly because Tippett is an extraordinary artist, seamlessly fusing stop motion, puppetry, mime, fluid and fire effects, the gigantic and microscopic.
Deeper, deeper, deeper.
There is a key, grisly sequence in Mad God, a scene of vivisection as a deranged surgeon digs into the still-struggling carcass of something like a human. As he yanks and shreds at innards, he pulls out the ephemera of a life: coins, jewels, artifacts, dreams, memories, gore. This is what Mad God truly is: a hellish accumulation that, in its entirety, creates a divine comedy.
Deeper, deeper, deeper. Deeper into the mind of Phil Tippett.
Don’t miss our interview with the filmmaker, “Behold! The Mad God, Phil Tippett,” at austinchronicle.com/screens.
This article appears in July 1 • 2022.