"Girl on the Escalator"

I recently had the fortune of re-encountering an inspirational piece of multimedia. After being asked to find “cool Youtube videos” I instantly recalled an adapted version of the Charles Bukowski poem “Girl on the Escalator”. I was drawn to this short film the first time I saw it because it made real all the things I visualize when I read a poem or book, or listen to a song. Made by filmmaker Kayhan Lannes Ozmen, this visual poem translates Bukowski’s lines into roughly three minutes of sleek editing and staged shots. By bringing the internal to the external, Ozmen echoes Bukowski’s style of cultural critique through the images he conjures, blending the nostalgic with the nitwitted.

The visual poem opens with a shot of a moving escalator and its natural rhythmic, whirring sound while the title comes into frame, its font calling to mind 70s slogan t-shirts with its bloated serifs. Soon the audience meets the speaker, but only through voice over done by a gruff, pack-a-day, wash-it-down-with-a-whiskey sounding man. This speaker notices an attractive couple on an escalator, which sends him spiraling into sophistic stanzas on the dance of desire and condemnations of American culture. The speaker travels from his mind, to the boyfriend’s thoughts, and through the girlfriend’s hypothetical life. This movement from first person narration to third person omniscient allows Ozmen to tracks the speaker’s sentiment through a collection of visually interesting and varied shots. The cool toned lighting of minty greens and dusty blues creates the feeling of being in a sterile mall and conveys Bukowski’s penchant for the dashed American dream while the girl’s appearance calls to mind his hot-headedness. The girl dons a red dress in the opening and closing scenes, and wears orange tones in the rest of the short film, highlighting Bukowski’s voracious sexual appetite and burning eye of criticism.

Ozmen keeps the visual poem playful while using the voice over to highlight Bukowski’s bleak way of thinking about his present situation. The camera work keeps the viewer present in that it follows the eyes of the main speaker in the poem or looks intimately into the life of the girlfriend. Most shots are evenly framed, giving the illusion that the camera is the speaker. The camera and speaker take in the attractiveness of the girl on the escalator through third person omniscient plus first person action shots, zooming in on her best asset. The camera and speaker notice her boyfriend’s worrisome posture through pans that correspond to Bukowski’s knowing lines, “He looks at me / I look away / “No, you see, I’m looking away, I’m not looking at your girl’s behind”.

The speaker then reassures the man and audiences of his good nature through a list of everything he respects. Here, Ozmen makes use of ambient and natural sound, as well as b-roll to convey Bukowski’s list. The cutaway shots detail nonhuman beauty, “the flowers / the birds / the sky / the universe,” and give the air of an ultra American credo. Shortly after the speaker proves his “values” in the same gruff tone, his thoughts turn noticeably bitter. The speaker and camera sense the man’s soothed nerves, panning to his face with “He feels better, and I’m glad for him / I know his problems”. This last line sends the speaker camera duo into a diatribe on the dream-like state most Americans live under through a detailed account of the girl’s assumed life.

The girl is primarily showcased through the speaker’s thoughts. The specifics of her assumed life are catalogued by Ozmen in medium and interaction shots of her “enjoy[ing] the dumbest TV shows, and think[ing] she’s an actress” so that her hotness disintegrates in audiences’ minds. B-roll of Chanel and Gucci stores is contrasted with her sitting on the toilet, “talk[ing] on the phone for hours,” to highlight the difference between her outward appearance and internal life. The speaker and the camera move from the materialistic to the immoral when they infer that the girl’s parents are also not what they appear to be: “her mother is a sneak drunk and her father secretly hates blacks, browns, and yellows”. The series of action shots becomes a portrait of not just one girl but demographics of the U.S. population.

Ozmen cuts back to the present moment to trace Bukowski’s line of thinking and close the poem. As the camera cuts back to the boyfriend, both the audience and the speaker know more than he does about his present situation. Here, the speaker dives back into third person omniscient narration, knowing the man is “Thinking he’s lucky, thinking he’s macho / thinking nobody in the world has what he has” only to respond to him in the most cynical, bird’s eye view way: “he’s terribly, terribly, right”. After this line is finished the camera pans up to the couple, slowly zooming in on the back of the girl’s head for the climax of the poem when she turns around to wink at the speaker. She signals that she knows full well the silent exchange that passed between him and her boyfriend and the speaker returns this call with a resigned and haughty “lotsa luck”. The boyfriend and the audience are then given no relief from the situation since the short resolves with the credits and a plucky western guitar tune that seems to chuckle at our collective naiveté.