The meaning of being watched

From director Andrea Longacre-White comes a story about stalkers, artists, attention, and how we find validation in our everyday.

The first scene of The Song Is You is familiar, a pair of artists on a panel at a university, talking about art, the role of the artist, and how people interact with art in context. There is no time for questions. It feels a little typical, but it sets up the rest of the film. The two artists return home, but they don’t realize they have a straggler, a young woman who just wanted to ask a question, but becomes obsessed with the couple inside of their beautiful country home. 

She stays there, just outside their line of sight, just watching. When she’s discovered she immediately leaves, no questions asked, the bubble of her experiment burst. The couple devolves. What happens now that they’re not being watched? Does it matter, how do they find meaning when others don’t ascribe meaning to meaningless actions, to an existence dedicated to comfort and practice?

Full of wide-eyed optimism, a pleasant hum of strangeness, The Song Is You creates a strange and bizarre fiction that is beautifully colored by Kaitlyn Battistelli from Ethos. The entire piece is moody and dark without being overwhelming or pretentious. The effect is a piece that creates a sense of effortless irony, a satire of the art world and its own assumptions, which is really just perfect for an outlet like The New Yorker.