I have no idea what to make of this film.
And considering that this is the latest film to come from the fertile mind of performance artist and Indie director Cory McAbee, that’s a good thing. He’s been making weird and innovative films and music videos for years now, not to mention several albums of equally strange songs, and a busy schedule of live performances. His work has always been unique, unclassifiable, and can go in a lot of unexpected directions.
I suppose, considering that his two most widely seen films — The American Astronaut and Stingray Sam — both take place in a sort of a lo fi take on the Old West in Space there are a lot of people who will be surprised that he has done something so different this time around.
But then those two films weren’t as alike as they seemed, and his other work — particularly in the strange short films which appeared in “The Ketchup and Mustard Man,” or his debut animated short “Billy Nayer“, or the goofy music video “Reno” — went in their own weird directions.
And yes, I really regret the fact that he never got that Werewolf movie he wanted to make off the ground, particularly as the one song which emerged from the project, “Skinned Rabbit” is creepy and unsettling in a disturbing sort of way.
But even those who’ve followed his sui generis career will not have expected anything this far removed from everything else he has ever done.
Perhaps it would help to see Deep Astronomy and the Romantic Sciences as the passion project it truly is: Cory spent years writing songs, touring all around the world, creating an international collaborative with fellow artists to aid him in his quest, and even drawing lots of quirky bits of animation.
The plot? That’s simple.
Or rather elusive. It depends on how you look at it.
A young man notices a strange woman at a bar, and prompted by his friends, goes to ask her if she is a robot.
She corrects him and explains she is an A.I. who has learned everything she knows about the human race from social media. This is her last night on Earth. Tomorrow they are going to put her in a rocket and shoot her into space.
Although she isn’t sure she is ready.
She then insists on telling him the complex story of the conference she spoke at that evening and the many people connected with it, particularly the story of Cory McAbee, a performer who tried to come up with “Silent Radio,” an act you could enjoy while you were doing stuff on your phone. However, one of his jokes, about a polka-based contact sport called “The Norman” goes out of control and he receives a blow to the head that leaves him seeing stars…
Or, should we say, one star.
Whatever he saw, something changed, and Cory starts seeing the world in new, more metaphysical ways.
And the Romantic Sciences are born.
The next thing you know, he’s crisscrossing the country speaking wherever he can, hitching rides from city to city because he doesn’t know how to drive, and starting one wild new initiative after another, whether it is colonizing Mars (well, when we have the technology) or teaching people how to tell if they’ve stepped into another dimension without noticing (and how hard it is to get their cat back if they do).
Before long he’s inspired lots of other people around him who are now sending thumb drives full of information about us into space (after all, aliens are really smart, they’ll figure out the instructions on the case), or marketing “time management drugs” which merely cause selective amnesia, or making money off the idea of composting the dead…
If you are paying attention, by the end, Cory has revealed not only what the A.I. is doing in this bar, but what its mission is, and which of the many programs launched by the Academy of Romantic Sciences led to the alternative program that created her.
After years of making black and white films in surreal and deliberately unreal retro futuristic settings, it is strange to see Cory make a film which is in color and set in (more or less) the real world.
Only this time it is the ideas which exist in their own phantasmorgic world, where one man with a vision (or actually visions. Lots of them) can transform reality just by going out and talking to people and spouting whatever wild ideas he dreams up. It is a world where a robot can get built to represent all of mankind — and yet only know us through our posts on Facebook and Instagram.
Now if you take a moment to look at all the websites Cory created as part of this monumental effort, you will find that he made this film without any money, relying on free help from his friends (just as the fictional Cory travels from show to show with his fans) He started out by recording an album that more or less set the stage for what he wanted to do, called Small Star Seminar. It includes a number of songs which never made the cut for the movie — and there are a few other unseen songs online that he wrote along the way, with titles like “Only I Can Save the World (and You Can Too).” All his stage performances in the film were filmed live, at shows around the world. Curiously, none of the other members of The Billy Nayer Show, Cory’s long-time band, appear to have been involved, not even Bobbie Lurie who did so much behind-the-scenes work on other films.
Another seeming absence is Cory’s daughter, Willa Vy. She was one of the highpoints of Stingray Sam and the original version of his video Reno. However, even though she may not be on screen, she sings a duet with her Father in “Thunder” where she gets in the last word, as well as providing vocals on a few other songs.
It’s all very dense, and it is hard to take it all in. It is simple on the one hand, and yet there is a lot it expects us to figure out for ourselves. I suspect that the quest the onscreen “Cory McAbee” undertakes mirrors Cory’s real life struggles to make this film, particularly when we learn that when he started out, he kept discovering new things he was wrong about or didn’t know by talking to all the people he meets along the way.
Deep Astronomy and the Romantic Arts bears no resemblance to any of his previous films, which is exactly what we expected from it. I’ll confess that none of the songs grabbed my attention the way “Welcome to Mars” or “The Fredward Song” did, but “Thunder” and “Butterfly” are a standouts, as is the main theme, and the music throughout is excellent.
As I said before, I don’t know exactly what to think about this film, but it is definitely a film you think about. It walks the line between goofy and profound easily, never worrying about whether we end up laughing at its pretensions or the often wacky ideas, at the earnest bumbling of the fictional Cory, or at the absurd ways his friends try to cash in on his ideas.
Instead, it sends us off on a strange journey of the mind and hopes to entertain us along the way.
It’s a film which constantly reminds us that there are other ways to make a movie than the standard model we’ve been stuck with for so long.
But then, I guess Cory has been telling us that for a long time, with every new film he makes.
And here’s hoping that he’ll keep doing it for many more movies to come…
rivets on the poster 
Thanks for the review! I was DP on the narrative part of this film- a crew of sound and fx people came from Alabama to NYC to help Cory make this film. So very happy for this film to exist in our world.
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