Forum.RttP{Wax - Or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees}

come on this is an awesome watch it

David Blair's "Wax, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees" is so obsessed with looking and sounding like nothing that has come before that it defies the conventional wisdom that movies should be clear and well focused. Set in the vicinity of Alamogordo, N.M., with some of its more striking scenes filmed in the Carlsbad Caverns, the movie reimagines the world as it might be perceived through the blurred eyesight of a bee.

That world is a surreal video dreamscape in which visual phenomena are continually metamorphosing in ways that used to be described as psychedelic. In scenes shot in the New Mexico desert, the landscape unfolds like a shivering mirage, with the images of faces and mountains furling and dissolving like pictures on a flag in the wind. A bomb-sight grid becomes a honeycomb that becomes a map of the brain. The letters of a riddle float in the air and rearrange themselves into another slogan that seems to answer the first riddle. "Wax" goes so far as to imagine an alternative alphabet used to communicate by the spirits of the dead.

The story of "Wax," which opens today at the Papp Public Theater, is almost impossible to describe. It is narrated by a character named Jacob Maker (Mr. Blair), who designs gunsight displays at a flight-simulation factory in New Mexico. Jacob also keeps a hive of very unusual bees that were taken to Europe from Mesopotamia by his grandfather between the wars. Through the film maker's witty use of archival material, Jacob's family history in the 20th century is told as a sort of pseudo-documentary on the development of photography and its relation to the occult.

Maintaining a dispassionate, scientific tone, Jacob methodically expands this family history into a fantastic story of time travel, reincarnation and communion with the dead that conflates science fiction, biblical myth and entomology into a convoluted fable. The tale, among other things, is a multi-generational family saga as it might be imagined by a cyberpunk novelist. It flashes all the way back to the story of Cain and Abel and the Tower of Babel and forward to the narrator's own death, birth and rebirth in an act violence.

It all begins when Jacob starts experiencing an eerie communication with his bees. Before long, he begins suffering mysterious blackouts. During one, the bees drill a hole in the side of his head and insert a television whose supernatural images begin controlling his movements.

Propelled on a journey into the desert, he visits the site where the first nuclear bomb was tested, and eventually he ventures below the earth into a radiant underworld where the bees are preparing new bodies for the dead. Ultimately he is instructed to commit a murder in Iraq.

The character of Jacob involves a visual double-entendre. As he wanders about the desert in a beekeeping outfit that looks virtually indistinguishable from a space suit, he suggests a refugee from "2001: A Space Odyssey." That film is one of many to which "Wax" pays homage, although it looks a lot more like a movie by Jim Jarmusch than one by Stanley Kubrick. With its shifting, alternative realities, "Wax" might also be described as an electronic video answer to "Total Recall" with the weirdness multiplied exponentially.

What should help make the film a cult favorite is the intricate design of Mr. Blair's story. Eccentric as it is, the fable has a rigorous interior logic that puzzle aficionados should enjoy deciphering. Beyond that, "Wax" reverberates with implications about the relationship between video and the modern world.

There is a sense in which we have all had televisions implanted in our heads. And those sets broadcast television's version of reality. Who really knows what those endless reruns are doing to us?