Episode 754: Upstream Color (2013)

The Projection Booth Podcast

The Projection Booth

Film Reviews, Film Interviews, Film History, Tv & Film

4.8 • 686 Ratings

🗓️ 23 July 2025

⏱️ 97 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sci-Fi July dives deep into the sublime with Upstream Color (2013), Shane Carruth’s mesmerizing meditation on identity, connection, and control. Co-hosts Ben Buckingham and Jim Laczkowski join Mike to untangle the film’s elliptical narrative, which follows a woman who is drugged, robbed, and psychically linked to a pig as part of a surreal cycle of manipulation and rebirth. A bold, enigmatic follow-up to Primer, Carruth’s film is an audiovisual trance, blurring the line between organism and environment, memory and self. We explore the film’s layered metaphors, sound design, and experimental structure — and maybe, just maybe, crack its code.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hold your ears, folks. It's showtime.
0:08.6	People pay good money to see this movie.
0:10.9	When they go out to a theater, they want cold sodas, hot popcorn, and no monsters in the projection booth.
0:17.3	Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.
0:20.2	Shut it off.
0:21.6	Turn it off.
0:23.6	Turn it off.
0:27.6	Do you know this place?
0:42.6	I want to say yes.
0:44.3	Call in there, just call in there.
0:45.7	For you. I want to.
0:47.8	I even slept at all.
0:49.1	Is there a direction that you feel drawn?
0:52.4	I'm going to go wherever you go.
0:56.0	You know that.
0:58.0	You're scaring me a little bit.
1:01.0	I feel like you know.
1:06.0	Won't let anyone near them.
1:09.0	There's a crowd back in the corner.
1:11.6	Violin?
1:14.6	I've never seen the parents' behavior, so they can get very protective.
1:19.6	They can get very protective. The water before you is somehow special.
	...

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