The Shoplifters:
A Coversation with Joe Wakeman
2024 Interview Writing Project, Editorial Graphic Design
This conversation begins with a discussion on Joe Wakeman’s feature film, The Shoplifters. A video artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Somehow it evolves into a conversation between a filmmaker and a filmmaker-wanna-be, as we are both sparingly sharing our most intimate stories as (auto)fictions, as something poetic.
This conversation has no filter, embellishment, or literary technique, only with minimalistic storytelling drawing from my memories. Editing attempts only serve for a better reading experience. Intentionally, this interview is designed to be cinematic given my passion for writing a film.
Here I present a written portrait of the filmmaker Joe Wakeman in my eyes.
This conversation has no filter, embellishment, or literary technique, only with minimalistic storytelling drawing from my memories. Editing attempts only serve for a better reading experience. Intentionally, this interview is designed to be cinematic given my passion for writing a film.
Here I present a written portrait of the filmmaker Joe Wakeman in my eyes.
Lei: Hey Joe! I am so glad I have the chance to talk to you again after I left New York in a hurry this summer. As a starting point, let’s discuss your feature film The Shoplifters. Would you like to talk a bit more about the content and form in your film, as your film encompasses and crosses genres and disciplines? There is a scene where a couple is at the two adjacent dressing rooms, putting multiple layers of clothes on while having their conversation on "dialectical materialism". That really strikes me as a romantic comedy. As I understand it, it is like when the language can't acknowledge defenselessness, the meanings embedded by language are collapsing, might as well just let it crash and smash, instead, kiss and make love. Could you speak about your ideas and process behind the scenes?
Joe: The film is pretty densely referential, and some of those references include my own work and artistic journey. For instance, the music video is a "remake" of a music video a band I'd been in, Bodega Bay, produced in 2015, shot by the same person, Oliver David. Many of the smaller parts in the film are played by actors who performed in films I'd made in college or as a teenager. I had actually written a version of this film many years ago, when I was 18 or 19 years old, and attempted to film it, but the project fell apart in my naivete. I use a small amount of the footage from this original attempt in the film to nod to the reflexive/personal nature of the project as it had gestated and mutated over a decade.
The dressing room scene is one of the scenes which had existed in the original version and was re-purposed for the new version. The idea was that we'd switch into this Brechtian moment of "Theater" complete with curtains opening on the dressing room set, piling on layers of clothes as our philosophy got less and less coherent until we could barely stand. This scene doesn't actually have any particular reference, it was just something I was inspired to film when I was a young shoplifter myself.
Lei: This is an experimental film as you mentioned, somewhat by design, the film resists generic classification. It's not exactly straightforwardly a "political film" and contains various theatrical asides and flips freely from fiction to documentary. It is meant to be funny of course, definitely a comedy if nothing else. I do appreciate you putting The Educational Short Film in this one-hour feature. It looks like a story of story, a meta-film. What is special and unique for you about the busyness of the context - the heavily referencial historical footage, even of the educational purpose for the young generation? And what do you perceive is at stake when it comes to the balance of sincerity and irony. In my eyes, the sincerity outweighs the irony, as expressing one of them through the other, flips freely as a rhetorical medium so that could explain the tension of busyness in your film. Rather than just being snarky.
Joe: The Educational Short Film segment is also inspired by the work of a British documentary Filmmaker, Adam Curtis, who makes found-footage documentaries about political history, with a slightly ironic sense of humor. It was made in collaboration with a video artist friend, Preston Spurlock, who specializes in repurposing TV detritus such as commercials, christian video junk into art. The electronic music in that segment and whenever you hear electronic music in the film generally is composed by Sannety, who also plays Anne-Chi-Minh and co-wrote the film with me. She unfortunately died in 2020. The video sources in that essay range from original material shot for the film, to "The Red Detachment of Women" a Maoist Ballet film produced in China during the Cultural Revolution, a fashion book by Vivienne Tam, If Footmen Tire You What Will Horses Do? An extremely weird Christian Grindhouse scare film about Communism from the 70s, Farewell my Concubine, the Hollywood movie about the last days of pre-Mao China with later scenes set during the Culture Revolution. Other stuff too, Kanye West is in there somewhere, a capitalist if there ever was one!
In terms of flipping with the rhetorical medium, I don’t think irony and sincerity are actually opposed to one another in the way people tend to make them out to be. One can be sincerely ironic, or utilize irony to communicate sincere feelings. I think there’s no irony in the scene with Candice Fortin speaking on YouTube, but irony in the way the shoplifters respond to it, which is a sincere expression of how I feel about the way some people use “activism” to center themselves, which is brought to point of the ridiculous through irony in the words and behavior of the characters.
Can you explain more what you’re meaning by “the tension of busyness”? I love the phrase but am not certain about what aspect of the film it’s referencing.
Lei: The tension of busyness I meant when the artist’s mind is chock-full of ideas so that they have to put all of them out in some way and then it just becomes avant-garde. In your film I refer to The Educational Short Film, the glitchy effects in visuals and sound, disparate footage, loads of things going on all at once.
Joe: The tension of busyness and the editing of the "educational" segment of the film, I think that feeling of an overflow of ideas comes a little bit from the intersection of my own, Preston's, and Sanne's sensibilities mashing up against each other. Each of us in our own way is an artist who has too much to say and a desperation to squeeze it into a condensed package. In a sense that work was traded back and forth between the three of us. Preston and myself for the images, Sanne and myself for the sound in a few rounds. But part of why I enjoyed working with them is because they share this common feeling in art of an interest in putting too many disparate elements in a blender. I referenced Godard as one of the inspirations of this film, he had a quote where he said, about 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, a film should include “sports, politics, even groceries. Everything should be put in a film”. The source of the tension comes from the fact that it is nearly impossible---it takes a lot of effort to sincerely include "Everything" in a film, history, cartoons, autobiography, fashion, food, garbage, books!
Lei: I guess I interpreted irony from your film statement. “This is not a political film, but one which concerns the trappings of political activism, and the traps therein… to present, the lines which link action with idolatry, idolatry with idleness…” The tone sounds a bit pessimistic or satirical like you are insinuating the revolution is meant to be a failure as they just want to be seen not only wearing berets.
Joe: Yeah there’s some pessimism, but you’re right to identify that stuff as irony, more so than true pessimism; I think the revolution isn’t meant to fail necessarily, but their revolution is doomed to fail, since it’s not a revolution at all!
Lei: It has been six years since you finished this film, can you talk about whether you still feel influenced by that provocative/pessimistic statement in time, how you look back at it, and how you carry its ethos forward that’s been manifested in your inner world and outside world? Do you still stand for your statement, how does it progress after years?
Joe: I stand by the politics of the film certainly; though I didn’t then and don’t now consider myself a “political” filmmaker, and I had never imagined what level of LARP our political discourse in this country would truly degrade to.
In some ways the more personal aspects of the film hit differently for me now, especially after losing Sanne, additionally, Charles Lum who plays Socrates also has since passed as well. Since the film has its origins for me a solid decade before it was made it feels more than anything when I watch it like an autobiography of sorts, or a time capsule. One major theme of The Shoplifters that I find myself constantly returning to in my other work is this idea of individuals who allow external signifiers to define their identity -- the idea that if I put on a beret, carry the right books around and wear the right shabby clothes, I can tell the world I'm a communist without practicing any actual communism---my other work addresses concepts of externalized identity, and characters in my films will often sacrifice their personalities to signifiers---I play it for laughs but it's a bit of a dark idea! The characters in the Shoplifters are pretty one-dimensional for sure, but I'm dealing with the behaviors that real people engage in that reduce their dimensionality in public life--whether they do this for reasons of boredom, self-protection, professional advancement, it often appears there are cultural incentives to this kind of reductive persona-building---to me, that's the real point of the film.
Lei: The props and decor, like the flags and portrait posters at the apartment in your film seem too deliberate to me. It makes sense in your world-building somehow. As a Chinese growing up in a cultural environment where the portrait of Mao is literally everywhere. The fact that the Culture Revolution in teens’ educational history book has been redacted from an entire chapter to only one sentence. Joining the party does not make one a communist in my eyes. Individualism has taken over the place of collectivism and is ubiquitous among Chinese youth. The culture formed on domestic social media and online shopping platforms endorses fanatic consumerism, driven by people’s greediness for profit and endless market growth. I had been pondering the ideology question many many years ago when I found myself lost in between the Western and Eastern cultures. I spent most of my middle school lifetime in San Francisco, taking education between the US and China since then. Being trapped with the ideologies, the -ism(s). I found my answer from a painting by Bruegel. The Tower of Babel. To confound languages scattered all over the earth stops people from solidarizing into heaven. Ideology plays a role in shaping and influencing linguistic structures and speech forms. With the answer, I can unburden and ignore those artificial attributes that do not define who I am when I bump into some polarized political territories. However, sometimes I find myself being haunted by the same trap, and I have to stand out to fight for them, even though the effort I spent on it ended up futile. I wish I knew what I was fighting for. The answer behind may be reductive back to The Tower of Babel. I knew I put myself in a pessimistic dialogue that reinforced this conversation into nihilism. So let’s jump out from the rabbit hole! My last question would be, it could also serve as my first question, what brings you to filmmaking? Can you describe your experiences, lessons you’ve learnt of developing your external identities by collaborating with actors, musicians?
Joe: I love that you bring up the Tower of Babel by Bruegel as it relates to your own investigations into ideology; there's a degree to which systems in our world reduce lived and experienced meanings and values into so many words and symbols, signifiers which become alienated from meaning with repeated usage. Like in the film when I'm shouting words like "Proletariat" and "Masses" into a bullhorn to see which ones sound the best distorted. This is why even the most fervent devotees of a given value system can become incoherent when the articulation of these values is tested, but still we keep trying, that's why there's philosophy and it's so often dense to the point of incomprehensible. The human world is an obvious mess but we keep trying to claim order. We just can't collectively accept the messiness, it's too much to handle!
Making films for me is possibly also a way of imposing order on the chaos. I like films because they have endings; so inherently they must be more ordered than life, and films also have a point to be made, whether textually or not, coherent or not, understood or misunderstood---life not so much, so making films like having a conversation or making an argument, but through living people and places, time, images and sounds. It's a language incorporating more than words, and that appeals to me. As far as approaching performativity through film and video, I draw a lot of inspiration from the performances that individuals are giving day-to-day depending on their environment; for instance, code-switching, a person behaving like a different person in different contexts. Look at people doing this, notice it, and you'll notice a lot of opportunity for investigation, conflict, and contradiction. The new script I'm working on is about a woman who gets a job at a hotel after the pandemic, and assumes a different personality when she's wearing a mask at work. Another lesson is don't be afraid to manipulate people as an artist, and by that I mean people act best when they don't realize they're acting, so the task is to bring out the unconscious performance. I've made a lot of music videos because it's a gig that sometimes pays and I genuinely like working with musicians, because they tend to blur the line between performance and real life more than actors do, actors often will treat acting like a job, whereas with musicians you can never tell when the act stops and the real person starts---they keep performing the role well after the set is over, they define a character for themselves and really live in it.
Joe: The film is pretty densely referential, and some of those references include my own work and artistic journey. For instance, the music video is a "remake" of a music video a band I'd been in, Bodega Bay, produced in 2015, shot by the same person, Oliver David. Many of the smaller parts in the film are played by actors who performed in films I'd made in college or as a teenager. I had actually written a version of this film many years ago, when I was 18 or 19 years old, and attempted to film it, but the project fell apart in my naivete. I use a small amount of the footage from this original attempt in the film to nod to the reflexive/personal nature of the project as it had gestated and mutated over a decade.
The dressing room scene is one of the scenes which had existed in the original version and was re-purposed for the new version. The idea was that we'd switch into this Brechtian moment of "Theater" complete with curtains opening on the dressing room set, piling on layers of clothes as our philosophy got less and less coherent until we could barely stand. This scene doesn't actually have any particular reference, it was just something I was inspired to film when I was a young shoplifter myself.
Lei: This is an experimental film as you mentioned, somewhat by design, the film resists generic classification. It's not exactly straightforwardly a "political film" and contains various theatrical asides and flips freely from fiction to documentary. It is meant to be funny of course, definitely a comedy if nothing else. I do appreciate you putting The Educational Short Film in this one-hour feature. It looks like a story of story, a meta-film. What is special and unique for you about the busyness of the context - the heavily referencial historical footage, even of the educational purpose for the young generation? And what do you perceive is at stake when it comes to the balance of sincerity and irony. In my eyes, the sincerity outweighs the irony, as expressing one of them through the other, flips freely as a rhetorical medium so that could explain the tension of busyness in your film. Rather than just being snarky.
Joe: The Educational Short Film segment is also inspired by the work of a British documentary Filmmaker, Adam Curtis, who makes found-footage documentaries about political history, with a slightly ironic sense of humor. It was made in collaboration with a video artist friend, Preston Spurlock, who specializes in repurposing TV detritus such as commercials, christian video junk into art. The electronic music in that segment and whenever you hear electronic music in the film generally is composed by Sannety, who also plays Anne-Chi-Minh and co-wrote the film with me. She unfortunately died in 2020. The video sources in that essay range from original material shot for the film, to "The Red Detachment of Women" a Maoist Ballet film produced in China during the Cultural Revolution, a fashion book by Vivienne Tam, If Footmen Tire You What Will Horses Do? An extremely weird Christian Grindhouse scare film about Communism from the 70s, Farewell my Concubine, the Hollywood movie about the last days of pre-Mao China with later scenes set during the Culture Revolution. Other stuff too, Kanye West is in there somewhere, a capitalist if there ever was one!
In terms of flipping with the rhetorical medium, I don’t think irony and sincerity are actually opposed to one another in the way people tend to make them out to be. One can be sincerely ironic, or utilize irony to communicate sincere feelings. I think there’s no irony in the scene with Candice Fortin speaking on YouTube, but irony in the way the shoplifters respond to it, which is a sincere expression of how I feel about the way some people use “activism” to center themselves, which is brought to point of the ridiculous through irony in the words and behavior of the characters.
Can you explain more what you’re meaning by “the tension of busyness”? I love the phrase but am not certain about what aspect of the film it’s referencing.
Lei: The tension of busyness I meant when the artist’s mind is chock-full of ideas so that they have to put all of them out in some way and then it just becomes avant-garde. In your film I refer to The Educational Short Film, the glitchy effects in visuals and sound, disparate footage, loads of things going on all at once.
Joe: The tension of busyness and the editing of the "educational" segment of the film, I think that feeling of an overflow of ideas comes a little bit from the intersection of my own, Preston's, and Sanne's sensibilities mashing up against each other. Each of us in our own way is an artist who has too much to say and a desperation to squeeze it into a condensed package. In a sense that work was traded back and forth between the three of us. Preston and myself for the images, Sanne and myself for the sound in a few rounds. But part of why I enjoyed working with them is because they share this common feeling in art of an interest in putting too many disparate elements in a blender. I referenced Godard as one of the inspirations of this film, he had a quote where he said, about 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, a film should include “sports, politics, even groceries. Everything should be put in a film”. The source of the tension comes from the fact that it is nearly impossible---it takes a lot of effort to sincerely include "Everything" in a film, history, cartoons, autobiography, fashion, food, garbage, books!
Lei: I guess I interpreted irony from your film statement. “This is not a political film, but one which concerns the trappings of political activism, and the traps therein… to present, the lines which link action with idolatry, idolatry with idleness…” The tone sounds a bit pessimistic or satirical like you are insinuating the revolution is meant to be a failure as they just want to be seen not only wearing berets.
Joe: Yeah there’s some pessimism, but you’re right to identify that stuff as irony, more so than true pessimism; I think the revolution isn’t meant to fail necessarily, but their revolution is doomed to fail, since it’s not a revolution at all!
Lei: It has been six years since you finished this film, can you talk about whether you still feel influenced by that provocative/pessimistic statement in time, how you look back at it, and how you carry its ethos forward that’s been manifested in your inner world and outside world? Do you still stand for your statement, how does it progress after years?
Joe: I stand by the politics of the film certainly; though I didn’t then and don’t now consider myself a “political” filmmaker, and I had never imagined what level of LARP our political discourse in this country would truly degrade to.
In some ways the more personal aspects of the film hit differently for me now, especially after losing Sanne, additionally, Charles Lum who plays Socrates also has since passed as well. Since the film has its origins for me a solid decade before it was made it feels more than anything when I watch it like an autobiography of sorts, or a time capsule. One major theme of The Shoplifters that I find myself constantly returning to in my other work is this idea of individuals who allow external signifiers to define their identity -- the idea that if I put on a beret, carry the right books around and wear the right shabby clothes, I can tell the world I'm a communist without practicing any actual communism---my other work addresses concepts of externalized identity, and characters in my films will often sacrifice their personalities to signifiers---I play it for laughs but it's a bit of a dark idea! The characters in the Shoplifters are pretty one-dimensional for sure, but I'm dealing with the behaviors that real people engage in that reduce their dimensionality in public life--whether they do this for reasons of boredom, self-protection, professional advancement, it often appears there are cultural incentives to this kind of reductive persona-building---to me, that's the real point of the film.
Lei: The props and decor, like the flags and portrait posters at the apartment in your film seem too deliberate to me. It makes sense in your world-building somehow. As a Chinese growing up in a cultural environment where the portrait of Mao is literally everywhere. The fact that the Culture Revolution in teens’ educational history book has been redacted from an entire chapter to only one sentence. Joining the party does not make one a communist in my eyes. Individualism has taken over the place of collectivism and is ubiquitous among Chinese youth. The culture formed on domestic social media and online shopping platforms endorses fanatic consumerism, driven by people’s greediness for profit and endless market growth. I had been pondering the ideology question many many years ago when I found myself lost in between the Western and Eastern cultures. I spent most of my middle school lifetime in San Francisco, taking education between the US and China since then. Being trapped with the ideologies, the -ism(s). I found my answer from a painting by Bruegel. The Tower of Babel. To confound languages scattered all over the earth stops people from solidarizing into heaven. Ideology plays a role in shaping and influencing linguistic structures and speech forms. With the answer, I can unburden and ignore those artificial attributes that do not define who I am when I bump into some polarized political territories. However, sometimes I find myself being haunted by the same trap, and I have to stand out to fight for them, even though the effort I spent on it ended up futile. I wish I knew what I was fighting for. The answer behind may be reductive back to The Tower of Babel. I knew I put myself in a pessimistic dialogue that reinforced this conversation into nihilism. So let’s jump out from the rabbit hole! My last question would be, it could also serve as my first question, what brings you to filmmaking? Can you describe your experiences, lessons you’ve learnt of developing your external identities by collaborating with actors, musicians?
Joe: I love that you bring up the Tower of Babel by Bruegel as it relates to your own investigations into ideology; there's a degree to which systems in our world reduce lived and experienced meanings and values into so many words and symbols, signifiers which become alienated from meaning with repeated usage. Like in the film when I'm shouting words like "Proletariat" and "Masses" into a bullhorn to see which ones sound the best distorted. This is why even the most fervent devotees of a given value system can become incoherent when the articulation of these values is tested, but still we keep trying, that's why there's philosophy and it's so often dense to the point of incomprehensible. The human world is an obvious mess but we keep trying to claim order. We just can't collectively accept the messiness, it's too much to handle!
Making films for me is possibly also a way of imposing order on the chaos. I like films because they have endings; so inherently they must be more ordered than life, and films also have a point to be made, whether textually or not, coherent or not, understood or misunderstood---life not so much, so making films like having a conversation or making an argument, but through living people and places, time, images and sounds. It's a language incorporating more than words, and that appeals to me. As far as approaching performativity through film and video, I draw a lot of inspiration from the performances that individuals are giving day-to-day depending on their environment; for instance, code-switching, a person behaving like a different person in different contexts. Look at people doing this, notice it, and you'll notice a lot of opportunity for investigation, conflict, and contradiction. The new script I'm working on is about a woman who gets a job at a hotel after the pandemic, and assumes a different personality when she's wearing a mask at work. Another lesson is don't be afraid to manipulate people as an artist, and by that I mean people act best when they don't realize they're acting, so the task is to bring out the unconscious performance. I've made a lot of music videos because it's a gig that sometimes pays and I genuinely like working with musicians, because they tend to blur the line between performance and real life more than actors do, actors often will treat acting like a job, whereas with musicians you can never tell when the act stops and the real person starts---they keep performing the role well after the set is over, they define a character for themselves and really live in it.
