S1.E16 ∙ Racing Through the SPIKES

A found footage documentary that starts of with three friends, Ryan Halasz, Lee Milby and Mark Dukes, who discovered an abandoned insane asylum in New Jersey is being demolished to build a park. Ryan and Lee decide to go take footage and picture of what remains while Lee's boyfriend Mark stays behind. When they come back strange and unexplainable things start to happen like something is following them. Ryan starts to complaining of horrible nightmares while Lee goes into a downward spiral of madness. Lee then goes missing and Ryan and Mark decide to go back into the insane asylum tunnels in search of her but what they find is far beyond what they've ever imagined.

Motion, color, light, and sound all combine to create a dynamic industrial portrait at Grand Rapids, Michigan's Padnos Iron and Metal company. The film encourages a subtle dissolving of the distinction between what we usually see as 'natural' and 'unnatural' processes. The process of sorting the scrap has a slow and patient rhythm, as if we're watching a version of how nature itself breaks things down, through decomposition, into constituent materials. We see rust, scarp, machines - all artificial and ostensibly non-green things. But these objects - and the workers - are all performing a patient and highly effective dance in the interest, after all, of recycling. So the film gives an unexpected and highly unconventional view of what it means to be 'green'.