Wax, Or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees

Harder to describe than it is to understand, this new cult favorite combines elements of science fiction, cyberpunk aesthetics, post-industrial moral metaphors, Burroughsian cut-ups technique and post-modern narrative repetition to create a computer-manipulated meditation on war and peace. Blair calls Wax “electronic cinema” since it employs camera footage (both newly shot, archival and still photography) and computer imagery and sound which have been synthesized and reconstituted via video manipulation to create this other-worldly tale. More or less, Wax tells the story of Jacob Maker, a beekeeper who also designs gunsight targeting systems for the U.S. military in Alamagordo, New Mexico. His Mesopotamian bees are an inheritance from his grandfather (briefly glimpsed as William Burroughs) who, at the beginning of the century, went to Antarctica to capture dead souls on film. The bees start to communicate with Jacob and as he enters their society, he begins to move through the past and future. With bee television now implanted in his brain, he journeys back and forth between his birth home in Garden of Eden, Kansas; the bomb site of the first nuclear explosion, which occurred on his birthday, July 16, 1945 (coincidentally the movie opens in Austin on July 16); the cavernous Land of the Dead where he learns that he is Fat Boy, the first A-bomb who has been instructed by the bees to seek vengeance for the dead; and modern Iraq in the midst of the U.S. air strikes of a couple years back. Anyway, that's a mere smattering of the storyline, which is all narrated in Blair's synthesized first-person voiceover. Blair himself is always seen in his protective suit and headgear which could be the attire of a beekeeper or an astronaut or a clean room laboratory worker. Wax is alternately weird, tedious, inventive, inscrutable, fluid and unremarkable. Where you stand on the film may ultimately say more about you than about Wax itself. It is a favorite of the Mondo 2000 readers and was recently transmitted -- in a first for a feature-length movie -- over Internet, the global computer network. Technically, it seems there is a degradation of video resolution when transmitting wither through computer wires or via celluloid theatrical transfers. And the resemblances between Wax and Chris Marker's half-hour science fiction classic from 30 years ago, La Jetee, are more than just slight. Ultimately, Bee TV's frequency may be heard with a buzz.