Loss is a part of everyone’s life. The loss of friends, the loss of memories and items. . . the ever looming loss of one’s sacred life. I created “Him” as a way to express my grief of the past. It is a vessel for me to mourn and process past experiences. With age regression in mind, I developed “Him” to live in those memories for a second longer, but also acknowledged those moments as swallowed by the endless ticking of abyssal time. Throughout the film I utilized ticking and rhythm to create familiar rules about how time worked, then I broke them. I broke the rhythm, I broke time, I broke the rules. I decide to have the film end, darkness floods the screen right before I change my mind, rewinding to portray more memories of the past. The film ends again, and again, and again, each time rewinding crudely: sometimes too far and sometimes not far enough. I created “Him” with the intention of showing people how my mind (which many days I view as broken) operates. 

I’ve always been fascinated with how our minds work, and one common misconception is that we see our memories in videos. That’s not the case, we see snapshots, and images we give motion. I chose to fill “Him” with mostly still images and then worked through overlap, audio, and the rhythm of the film to deliver a sense of motion with those stills. At one point I found inspiration in books I remembered reading as a kid; you would flip a page quickly back and forth, creating the illusion of respiratory movement. I did this too but chose to break it with other, darker, images as a juxtaposition and another way to break the familiar, subconscious rules of what is considered allowed.

At times normal/uncut video would play before the sense of found order was abruptly broken, demonstrating the self-perceived cracks in my mind when certain triggers would toss me back into a deep panic about the loss of time. I screamed, I ran, and stumbled, conflicting with my more docile moments of acceptance. I often feel like a fish in a birdcage, locked in my body, and in an incorrect world. I screamed to release the emotions of panic and dissociation.

I chose to end “Him” with a certain section of audio that had played twice before but chose to fast forward through a part, forcing myself to say something I never once uttered while recording the love letter. I wanted to show the viewer, like most all humans, how I see the past changes, we idealize the past. We create the good old days without realizing we live in it. We even do this politically here in America especially when a group feels scared and under attack of sorts i.e. “Make America Great Again ”, that again idealizes the past. I end the film with the line “I wish I could be [fast forward] him.”, I wish I could be that past version of me. I like that better. I don’t like myself right now but I was happy when I wasn’t me, when I was him right? I made “Him” to get the audience self-reflecting. I want the viewer to look at their own past and idealized better days, and ponder the question: should I yearn and love the past, or is that older me just keeping the new me from moving on to a new world? I ask the viewer if they are allowing themselves to feel the beauty and wonder of moments, past and present.