"Utopias never work out," Amber(Louisa Krause) muses quietly to herself, perched atop a high fence that Matthew(Michael Cera), her boyfriend, just scaled down and is waiting patiently, going on and on about utopias, trespassers both, and high. Set in the late-sixties, "Cryptozoo", directed by Dash Shaw, begins in earnest, two counterculture types, both vehemently opposed to the Vietnam War, just finished making love, and as counterculture types were inclined to do, they break into what they think is a government facility. Amber fights the good fight, but is preternaturally aware that their protestations against the establishment, inevitably, won't make an iota of difference. Amber is a realist, whose idealism has strictures; she fights the machine, knowing all the while that it's about the process, not the end result. Matthew is the dream, yang to her yin, the personification of our fixed idea of the flower child, a young American in the Summer of Love, believing with ardent certainty that civil disobedience will result in change. Contravention of federal land is a statement, and an adventure. "There might be magic here, Amber." It's not the pot. Matthew actually stumbles upon an honest-to-goodness unicorn. Amber verifies the existence of the horned horse. At first, the couple thinks they discovered a top secret nature preserve, but after Amber commits unicorn murder, avenging her boyfriend's death(don't try to pet a unicorn), she sees all these strange animals locked in cages. They're cryptids, defined as "an animal whose existence is unsubstantiated." Well, cryptids exist. With her equilibrium restored, Amber remembers what she is, a hippie, and overcompensated for bashing the unicorn's head in with a rock. She lifts Pandora's Box.
This is a couplet from The Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter": "Ooh, see the fire is sweepin'/Our streets today/Burns like a red coal carpet/Mad bull lost its way." From the 1969 album "Let It Bleed", this antiwar song serves as the namesake for the David and Albert Mayles documentary about Altamont, the last stop on The Stones' American tour, a free concert, which historians point to as the end of the sixties; its coda, after the death of three festival attendees, one captured on celluloid, a fight that broke out between a gun-wielding concertgoer and a security man equipped with a hunting knife. Billed as another Woodstock, on the surface, Altamont seems to deliver as advertised. We observe the same sea of humanity, same musicians: Jefferson Starship, a Woodstock alumnus, performs "The Other Side of Life", same recreational drug use, and yet, the slapdash festival put on by Mick Jagger and his cohorts showed signs of tribulation in the works well before the fatal showdown between vigilante law and wayward law-abiding citizen. This time around, the drugs are harder; it's a different high, a buzz not accordant with the communal spirit. Crowd surfers were kept aloft at Woodstock. Ironically, nobody seems too concerned when they crash to the ground, since Altamont Speedway, located in Tracy, California, was less than an hour from the beach. Meanwhile, appropriately enough, Grace Slick never got to sing "Somebody to Love", the band's signature song, because a security guard knocked out Marty Balin, Jefferson Starship's lead guitarist, unconscious. Woodstock was a fluke. Lightning never strikes twice.
Cryptids, just like their real-life counterparts, belong in the wild, not locked-up in cages. Lauren Grey(Lake Bell) collects these singular animals, previously thought to have been mythical, for a sanctuary run by its founder, Joan(Grace Zabriskie), an heiress, who used her own inheritance to finance Cryptozoo. Both Lauren and her benefactor have blind spots. Neither woman can see that they're the lesser of two evils. Lauren's rival, Nicholas(Jay Ryan), pursues the cryptids for commercial gain; he sells them to the military, whose intentions, of course, are nefarious. The military is going to weaponize their magic powers. The filmmaker transposes the maxim that there are no bad dogs, only bad owners. The military will be bad owners. As a child, Lauren, an army brat growing up in Okinawa, was visited by the baku, a blue and orange elephant-like creature with the ability to eat dreams. Nightmares, in Lauren's case. Under governmental lock and key, the baku is scheduled to be reprogrammed, taught to eat good dreams. On this point, Joan echoes Matthew, with her idealistic talk about the potentiality of the counterculture movement ending Vietnam. Military brass could pervert the baku to suck out the dream that Matthew, and other romanticists in Matthew's vein, had about installing a utopian regime within the halls of power. Joan, however, differs slightly, because despite having this same benevolent wish, she wants a return on her investment; she wants to profit from exhibiting cryptids. Phoebe(Angeliki Papouli), Lauren's partner, a Medusa-like cryptid, who hides her bouffant comprised of snakes under a headscarf, is posited as a stand-in for the audience. The gorgon recognizes all the blind spots, both Lauren's and especially, Joan's. Touring Cryptozoo for the first time, Phoebe is taken aback by the homemade contraption Lauren utilizes to snare her assignments; a long pole with an adjustable loop at the end to tighten the cryptid's neck. "You use that?" Phoebe asks. So self-assured about the righteous design of Joan's vision, Lauren completely misses the shock in her partner's voice. The veterinarian doesn't realize that this instrument makes her look indistinguishable from a hunter, and the cryptid, her prey. Nevertheless, Phoebe likes her; she likes Joan less, one intuits. For all of the old lady's good intentions, her wealth begets privilege, and Phoebe, is made to feel like "the other". The gorgon feels this gap as the two women chat on the airplane, en route to Cryptozoo(read: theme park) in California. Noticing her engagement ring, the gorgon is made to feel like a freak, on par with an animal, when Joan rhapsodizes over the prospect of Phoebe birthing crypt-an babies with her human partner. Joan comes across sounding like a dog breeder.
Joan is something of a modern-day P. T. Barnum; her Cryptozoo resembles nothing more than a freak show masquerading as a sanctuary. The cryptids are locked in cages. The cryptids should be allowed to roam free on a large tract of land. Zoo employees shoot cryptids down with a water hose; these mythical creatures are treated no differently from common animals. From a distance, it's hard to tell if the keepers, young men and women, are playing with or teasing their charges. During Phoebe's guided tour, Joan appears to be more interested in the marketing side of her operation; the merchandise, little plastic replicas of all the cryptids on display, rather than the nuts-and-bolts of day-to-day maintenance. The cryptids, are foremost, commodities. The gorgon's questions test Lauren, forcing the true believer in the unprecedented position of defending Cryptozoo. Up to this point, she never doubted her benefactor's vision, until a fresh set of eyes suggests that the empress has no clothes. The filmmaker literalizes this metaphor, cutting to the tower, an ivory tower, so to speak, where Joan conducts an interspecies love affair with Von, a cryptid. In an interview with "Art Forum", Dash Shaw tells film critic Amy Taubin that Todd Haynes' "Poison" made an impression on him while attending the School of Visual Arts. Joan's lavish domicile recalls Haynes' next film, "Safe", starring Julianne Moore, in which Carol White's guru, Peter Dunning(Peter Friedman), who runs Wrenwood, a facility for chemically-sensitive people, similarly lives in a palatial home, suggestive of a socioeconomic hierarchy, so antithetical to the utopian ideal. Wrenwood is for profit. Peter Dunning comes across as a former bohemian, the same generation that provides "Cryptozoo" its milieu. He exemplifies the cliche of the hippie who sold out; a hippie who coarsened over the years, transforming himself into a yuppie, while still retaining vestiges of his former persona. It's the same new-agey gobbledygook Peter espoused as a young man, but now he makes a living off it. Joan, near death, about the cryptids, tells Lauren: "I love them so," which may be true, but we suspect she loved the power of cornering the cryptid market, more.
On 'wild planet", no Tragg can harm an Om. This is their dream, a utopia. Anywhere is better than Ygam, in Rene Laloux's "Fantastic Planet", where these kidnapped humans are subjected to routine exterminations by giant blue aliens, who themselves are living in a utopia, until the Oms fight back and kill a Tragg. Some Oms are kept as pets, like Terr(Eric Baugin), whose Tragg owner, Tiwa(Jennifer Drake), has a father, Master Sinh(Jean Topart), who taught her compassion. Terr isn't subjected to the same casual cruelty inflicted upon other Oms, made to fight like gladiators by their child masters. A successful runaway, at long last, Terr meets the wild Oms. In his possession, Tiwa's bracelet, a proto-computer that dispenses lessons directly to the brain, gives him leverage. Incorporating Draag technology and Om know-how, the wild ones build a rocket. Wild planet, alas, is uninhabitable; it's not the foundation for the planned utopia they were banking on. Draag remains the Om's home planet. All living descendants, it appears, of Oms who remember earth have passed on. And for sure, were they alive, they would impart this wisdom to the younger ones, echoing Amber's sentiments in "Cryptozoo". "Utopias never work out."
"It's just a shot away," Mick Jagger sings. Joan giveth the cryptids shelter and Amber taketh away. When she frees the cryptids from their cages, they become fair game for hunters. It's tragic. Many cryptids die. But Amber understood that Cryptozoo was more prison than utopia.
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