“Imagination Always Runs Retrograde”: Courtney Stephens and Callie Hernandez on INVENTION

Documentarian Courtney Stephens and actress Callie Hernandez came together to make a project inspired by their shared experiences losing larger-than-life fathers. Invention, the film that emerged, is a delicate, quasi-experimental blend of metafiction, archival TV/home movie footage of Hernandez‘ father, and making-of documentary footage on their process that takes grief as its starting point. Subtle and open-ended, the duo brings affable wry humor and feeling to their largely improvised collaboration, which blooms into an investigation of conspiracy theory as well as the bureaucracy of loss. The story follows Carrie (a fictive version of Hernandez played by Hernandez), who finds herself drifting down a rabbit hole of fringe belief when she goes to her holistic healer father’s house after his passing to sort out his affairs. Finding she’s been willed a patent to an invention, an energy healing machine (the device on screen is one Hernandez’ father actually invented), she investigates its legitimacy and delves into his world through the ragtag bunch in his orbit. 

The duo joined Film Inquiry on Zoom to discuss. 

Payton McCarty-Simas, for Film Inquiry: One thing that I personally really enjoyed about this film is the empathy with which you treat the subject of conspiracy theory. Conspiracism, New Ageism, and fringe beliefs, are often treated with a bit of condescension. I wanted to talk about how you approached balancing questions around these beliefs with an empathetic portrayal of the people who hold them. 

Courtney Stephens: On my end, I was working two films at once [Invention and John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office], and so it was interesting for me because the content did compliment each other in terms of thinking about the paradoxes of people, and how the perspective within the film would come down in terms of assessing a person. Of course the stakes were so entirely different when you’re talking about public figures [like John Lilly] versus when you’re talking about somebody who is in your life, a parent. 

Callie and I had a lot of conversations about the ways that you’re chained to your parents. Even if you’re left with a sense of ambivalence or things that you struggle with [after they’re gone], the task of finding a way to love what they love, to find a way into their belief system, has such entirely different stakes than what you would bring to normal culture, or somebody’s belief system you’re talking to in a bar. What happens when these things that have political legs to them also have an emotional connection and your sense of self and your sense of trying to love somebody? What happens to your rationality? 

Callie Hernandez: It’s also so interesting because now that the film is playing in the US–– it’s been playing overseas for months now–– the reaction has been so varied.  It’s hitting differently. The optics of metafiction in general are sort of a varied landscape, and it’s funny because certain things that I didn’t even put together that could be viewed in a certain way, I’m realizing now are viewed in a different way. 

In terms of conspiracy, there’s so much to say. It was something that Courtney and I had so many conversations about from the get go. We wanted to explore conspiracy as a vessel for grief, which really clicked. While we were making the film, it was sort of a magnet for conspiratorial people, minds, thinking, it was sort of just coming at the film in this interesting way. Something clicked when one of the actors was really genuinely watching a lot of conspiracy videos, and was genuinely intrigued. It didn’t even matter what the conspiracy was, it was sort of all over the place, and another person on set was getting sort of annoyed, and confronted them and said, “why do you keep watching those?” And their answer was so sincere. They said, “I was just really hoping that one of these is actually true.” That clicked for me, because I thought, that’s a huge nod to grief, that’s like saying, “I’m so hoping that what is actually happening is not actually happening.”

That felt so personalized, actually, for me. In your state of grief, you are just so desperate for any other narrative other than the one that is currently the reality. That’s all also to say that yes, we wanted to have a lot of compassion and entertain conspiracy as a subject. 

My dad was a doctor, you know, and turned holistic healer in the ’90s, and so he was very into this very particular niche section of medicinal technology. In a way, and that stuff goes hand in hand, because when somebody’s selling lasers, when you see them work sometimes, and sometimes they don’t… Being immersed in that kind of environment, at least for me personally as a young child, becomes even more of a convoluted landscape after the person passes. I had my own convictions of what I witnessed and what I experienced, and discomforts and comforts in being involved in that world, but it hits completely differently later, you know? So that was really a huge basis for what Courtney and I were talking about. It was very deeply important to both of us that we approached it with empathy, because it is something that should be approached with empathy. We were curious, you know? We weren’t taking a stance. My dad actually died from COVID, which we didn’t want to include in there, because it just would have given a different meaning, and that wasn’t the part that we were interested in.

That’s really beautiful. It reminds me of David Cronenberg, when he was talking about his latest film, The Shrouds, which is another film about grieving and conspiracy. He had a great line about how conspiracy can function as “a grief strategy.” It feels like there’s something there’s a lot of connective tissue between your films there. What you were saying about different receptions in different places made me curious about something else that struck me right away about Invention, and that’s that this is such a personal film, but at the same time, it’s very much a film about national identity and a place and a culture. You start the film with “The Star Spangled Banner.” What was it about this personal story that made you want to broaden it out into being a movie about America? 

CS: First of all, we were filming in New England, which is not where either of us are from. There’s this feeling of “old America,” these texts that undergird the landscape there. That literary kind of visual world is there in that place. So I think that there was a feeling that the film could contain a kind of larger critique. I think we both feel that these structures that you see in the film that are supposed to give some kind of integrity and a basic kind of logic to the country–– patent law for example–– are being dismantled as we speak. They’re still there, but also they somehow don’t create something that feels like it holds people anymore. 

I think this feeling that there is a structure that keeps coming up–– it’s cited by people in the film as both legitimate and part of how we see ourselves as a society, and yet, this is also where these projections of doubt are being foisted. There’s a feeling that, while there are these ideas of American innovation and American scientific prowess and all these things, like yes, there’s a medical system, there’s a testing system, we actually can’t trust it. We didn’t go too into this [in Invention], but people buy up all these old patents just to block progress. We went on some deep dives of how that stuff works in Silicon Valley. 

The popular doubting culture of today, which I think we would say is a grief culture, is a culture of feeling like the promise of this place, the American Dream, was designed to fall apart. This feeling is happening in this really real way. So, yeah, the echoes of all of that stuff were our big ideas, but I think we were hoping that they would be in the cracks of this film. I’m always interested in whether a film can formally hold this different a set of things, you know? Something really intimate and also echoes of things that are really large without falling apart. I guess it wasn’t our hope to be  making lofty proclamations, but to feel that what’s at stake in a lot of these conversations is real national disappointment.

CH: Disappointment is such a key word, too. It’s like that monologue that Babby, played by Lucy Kaminski, gives about a quantum banking system and all of that as we were shooting. I just felt, I just heard, like, hopefulness. There’s a hope that the promise will be fulfilled in some capacity, in some alternate reality, that there’s a river that runs underneath that is not known and is yet to be named, but that’s there. That was a big lightbulb moment, like, “Oh, wow. This is hope.” Hopefulness and hopelessness. It’s like two sides of the same coin. 

CS: But also, that idea of hope, especially in Babby’s speech, it’s always looking backwards, you know? That’s MAGA, right? “Make America Great Again.” It’s this idea that the imagination always runs retrograde, because that’s the only place where things are good, you know?

CH: Yes, retrofit. It’s all a continuum of grief,  always looking back to what you had, always looking back to what’s gone. It’s totally a culture of loss, absolutely.

That brings something else up, too–– this movie feels like a period piece until you see things that are of today. You see Frozen on the TV and it’s shocking, because the use of the archival is so excellent, and the 16mm has such a nostalgia to it. One of you used the term “toxic nostalgia” in another interview, and so I was wondering whether you were thinking about nostalgia on those terms when you were deploying that footage from the ‘90s and ‘00s, and whether you wanted the film to feel out of time in that way? How did nostalgia play into the form of this movie?

CS: Well, I think the 16mm came out for a few reasons. We knew that we were going to be using archival, so it’s something that could distinguish the world of like cinema creation and fiction from the real, which was this archive. I certainly don’t think we were consciously trying to play with, like, where are we, what year are we in? But I do think that to really be locked into this archival space from like 1996 to now is such a different archival space than we’re usually thrust into. We’re so used to being in like, mid century America, or, you know, old, old film or whatever. We were in our own lifespan, you know, dealing with the nuances of how things have shifted from the ‘90s until now, which, in the sphere of alternative medicine, has been huge, actually. Herbalism and these things are something that we used to read as more left-leaning, but now we read as right. So that’s what we were interested in. Even if we weren’t explicitly saying, “Hey, there’s this polar shift,” I think that we can feel when the internet did something, took this hostage or redirected certain ideas. 

There’s a term for that left-to-right New Age shift: “the crank realignment.” So fascinating.

CS: I feel like working on this film when the election was happening, I felt like, “I think Trump will win.” 

CH: Me too. 

And did that help your process? Did working on this movie help you think about where the nation was headed? 

CH: I think Courtney and I probably have different approaches to this, because I’m from Texas. My whole family is from Texas, including my father, and it’s probably not that far-fetched for anyone to guess who he voted for. I was always around people who I didn’t necessarily totally align with in my political views. I was not the least bit surprised, but I don’t know, Courtney, you’re from California. Totally different.

CS: I wasn’t surprised, in part because I’ve been spending a lot of time in Kansas working on this [John Lilly] project. So I felt like my days at the dive bar in Kansas informed that. But did it help…? The themes of the film are trying to explore the way that emotionality is at the core of so much decision making and so much identification and so… it doesn’t make me any happier that things are falling apart, right? But it makes me feel like this is  a cultural, emotional backlash that… I just… I’m sure now that there’s no logic. I’m sure that all of this is reactive and is about trying to overcompensate for some other deep slight. So it doesn’t help but it does make me crystal clear that we’re just in a war of that kind. 

CH: That’s why we made a film that was investigatory, you know? These feelings of humiliation or things we perceive as quote unquote “stupid” hold just as much value or power to be examined as something very beautiful. So I think that’s also what helped us look beyond the basics of politics. 

 

Check out our review of Invention here!