The Animators

by Kayla Rae Whitaker

I had chosen art because I needed something to make use of the bright lights that had existed in my head for as long as I could remember, my fervent, neon wish to be someone else.

I wanted so badly to be more than what I felt. I wanted to be good.

“It’s the greatest thing you can do for something,” she said. “Giving it movement. Possibility.”

I’ve felt this for a hundred other men—the rush of the encounter, the way my stomach heats and bubbles, the adrenaline, the urge to run five miles and move my bowels and puke at the same time. It’s a frenzy for the story and what it could be. The ability to escape from my life, the chance at a grand renovation of self within another person. It’s the sense of possibility, so good it feels like it will salvage everything.

In her weird, exhibitionist’s way, Mel likes the intimacy of what we do, of placing herself at the center of what we make. I love the work for the opposite reason: for the ability it gives me to abandon myself, to escape the husk of my body and fly off into the ether. I know a day of work has been really good when I have to look up from the board and recall who I am and what I’m doing.

Brief silver glasses, dark lipstick. Hair dyed a red so rich it’s nearly purple. Exactly the way a well-read punk should grow up to look.

it was something I had made, was making—which, for our kind of people, is the truest extension of the heart.

“The longer I’m in this business,” Mel reads aloud, “the more I internalize my own process. It’s a protective mechanism. By discussing my process, I find I’m killing it.”

I mean, what good is it to do this for a living if you can’t share it with people? If it doesn’t bring people together?

The anticipation before a new project. Envisioning it in the confines of your own head, intangible, a whiff of itself, two steps from a daydream. Then, through work and love and sheer fucking will, it becomes real. If you’re lucky, what you’ve made will be better than anything your flimsy imagination could have put together.

When your day is filled with digging through all the interior shit you could never handle otherwise, your nights are going to consist of trying to get away from the day.

At day’s end, the story was Mel’s—a narrative of how she got from point A to point B, and, now that she was at B, how to get shed of A as completely as she could. The telling of the story was the furthest she would ever travel from her old self—to stepping outside that world and, from a safer distance, watching.

You know, the voiceover continues, it would be nice if we were defined, ultimately, by the people and places we loved. Good things. But at the end of the day, there’s the reality that we’re not. Does the good stuff really have the weight that the weird stuff does? What makes the deeper imprint—all the ridges and gathers—on who we are? Do we have a choice?

Inside, she has fled. The ability of anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of something violent to grasp the details that remind them of their humiliation—smells, colors, sounds—and blur these details so that they become foreign, someone else’s property. It is a cultivated skill, requiring time, experience, unspeakable mental real estate. It is, for the desperate, the only chance to leave what happened with the part of yourself that is still yours.

When girls learn it, they learn it for the rest of their lives, inventing two separate planes on which they exist—the life of the surface, presented for others, and the life forever lived on the inside, the one that owns you. They will never forget how to make themselves disappear.

There’s a lot that can bring two people together, it occurs to me. They may, unawares, have entire conversations that do not take place in words. They may never know, themselves, what is admitted, what is declared. What binds.

reclaim. I became an artist because I wanted to make a world in which I was not the pursued but the pursuer; because I needed to discorporate.

“You may not know this about yourself,” she says, “but you’ve got a serious gift for self-containment. You run a pretty tight fuckin ship, presentation-wise. Kind of freaks people out.”

It’s the kind of conversation that makes you feel an unspeakable closeness to another human being. For me, a person who has always considered herself alone, those conversations feel like a gift, someone trusting me with something private and valuable.

It’s a flipbook of someone losing something important to them, to who they are, and it is beautiful. Made with total care; total faith in the recovery of what is lost.

Later on, this will become a driving image for our movie, an encouragement of confrontation, of taking control of what haunts you, stealing its power: Open your trunk. It is an affirmation of why we made it, why we were so compelled to keep pressing forward. Repeated dozens of times in the comments sections of the clips on YouTube: Open Your Trunk.

When you take the things that happen to you, the things that make you who you are, and you use them, you own them. Things aren’t just happening to you anymore. Make this thing because you are compelled to, and because it’s yours.

“She made me believe in myself,” he says. “She believed I could do more than I actually could, which made me do more. She was a good friend.”

“She loved hard,” she continues. “If she loved you, she loved you the most. She would stick with you until the very, very end.

It’s one of the few scenes of the movie that has me in it. I’m coming into the bar to fetch her. It’s the uncut scene. “November Rain” is playing in the bar. Fuckin love this song, man, she always said. It’s sadness porn. Skanky, melodramatic sadness porn. But we both knew it meant something more. Both knew that if you were a child, and you watched TV in a room by yourself as we did, saw this video, heard this song, it struck something primal and private in you, the sense of being at your most alone in the anticipation of adult pain, a gray future memory. It was reassuring to be with someone else while you listened, so you were no longer the only one in the room, could be reassured that your adult life was not entirely the thing you had feared.

I spent years trying to outrun myself, Mel says. Trying to make enough noise to drown myself out. It makes me ashamed to admit this. But it’s okay to let yourself catch up. It’s okay if you work to catch up to the things that have happened to you. You do it for yourself. But also for the people around you. The people who deserve to experience you, undiluted, honest. Your genuine self, given to them. My cartoon self takes her by the elbow, pulls her to the door. My voice: “Come on,” I tell her. “It’s time to go to work.” We leave together. The door swings shut. Your life is the people who fill it, Mel says. And nothing’s good without them.

Finding yourself in a world someone else has made is a theft that is difficult to put into words—the magnitude of your life, smeared to their order, your voice impersonated or, worse, winked out altogether.

I know what Mel and I did with memory. We ran our endurance dry with our life stories, trying to reproduce them, translate them, make them manageable enough to coexist with. We made them smaller, disfiguring them with our surgeries.

“Of course.” He puts his arms around me. “You’re all light and noise.”

I tell her that the little things that break her down, day after day, don’t matter, because she draws like an absolute bastard and because she is in love with this thing that we do. Because it keeps her alive. Because she is the truest version of herself when she does it. The work will always be with you, will come back to you if it leaves, and you will return to it to find that you have, in fact, gotten better, gotten sharper. It happens to you while you are asleep inside. The world in which we work is a place where no one is a ghost, a world in which the potential for anything walks and breathes, alive. And this is reason enough to have faith. To keep going. I tell her, I know what I am talking about.