I’ve written enough about Kate Lyn Sheil’s projects I figured she’s due her own post. It’s her birthday today. Sheil is ubiquitous in the American indie scene – and there is still an indie scene, although distribution has changed. If Sheil came up in the ’90s, she’d be way more well-known. People probably know her from House of Cards but … You have to seek out her film catalog, you have to know it’s there and go find it. You won’t be sorry. Many of the films are low budget or micro-budget, and early on, the mid2000s, she was sometimes making 10 films a year. If she were more mainstream, she’d make 1 or 2 movies a year. She “came up” in the New York mumblecore scene, with other artists – all of whom she worked with – many of whom were her classmates at NYU. Like Alex Ross Perry. Perry and Sheil both worked as clerks at the legendary Kim’s Video. In an interview, Sheil talked about the closing of Kim’s Video:
I worry for New York City without that place existing. I would have been completely lost without it, and it changed my life very clearly. I would not have a career if Kim’s Video didn’t exist, ’cause all of my earliest projects were with people I knew from Kim’s. It means more to me than I can even really explain.
This crowd is based in New York. They all come from elsewhere, but New York is where it happened. The people in this scene all collaborate with one another: appearing in each others’ films, writing, directing … the brilliant cinematographer Sean Price Williams lives and works in this scene (he shot one of my favorite movies in the last ten-ish years, Christmas, Again. Other names: Joe Swanberg, Sophia Takal, Lawrence Michael Levine, Kentucker Audley, Dustin Guy Defa, Adam Wingard … (Greta Gerwig is probably the scene’s most famous “graduate”, and … well … I think she might have been the Eve Harrington of the mumblecore scene.) These people have been doing interesting challenging work – in all genres – for 20+ years at this point. Shiel has also worked multiple times with Amy Seimetz and Ti West.
Listen Up Philip, with Jason Schwarzman
Alex Ross Perry has reached indie-darling status, and Shiel is in Listen Up Philip and Queen of Earth … the Kim’s Video connection has served them well. (Perry and I were both interviewed for the documentary about Peter Bogdanovich’s They All Laughed.) Sheil was in the found-footage horror anthology, V/H/S, with different “chapters” directed by this whole crowd – Adam Wingard, David Bruckner, Glenn McQuaid, Joe Swanberg … Shiel starred in the “chapter” directed by Ti West, who has gone to blow my mind in particular with his horror trilogy known as “the X trilogy” starring Mia Goth. Because those films are horror I thought maybe they weren’t getting the kudos they should have gotten: of course, they were hits but each one had its own style and look, steeped in Hollywood history … And the trilogy films came out one after the other … just amazing. Sheil and Ti West worked again in Sacrament.
Kate Lyn Sheil in Green
Sheil has collaborated a number of times with Sophia Takal, whom I wrote about for Film Comment. Takal hasn’t directed much, unfortunately. Her Always Shine knocked me out! Takal works with her husband Lawrence Michael Levine, including the indie hit Gabi on the Roof in July – a mumblecore mystery caper written and directed my Levine, which Takal starred in, along with Amy Seimetz and Sheil. Well worth seeking out. The gem, for me, is Green, written and directed by Takal, starring Takal and Sheil, primarily, with Levine playing the third character. Green haunts me, and Sheil plays a woman with dangerously porous boundaries, who is seemingly “taken over” by Takal’s character, a chatty-Cathy local girl who becomes a little obsessed with Sheil’s more worldly cosmopolitan character. The two women even look alike, and are indistinguishable from behind. It’s a beautiful film, and a precursor of Always Shine.
Sophia Takal and Kate Lyn Sheil in Green
Speaking of Amy Seimetz: she’s a wonderful actor and also a director and writer (I served on a jury with her at Indie Memphis). Her Sun Don’t Shine, starring Sheil and Kentucker Audley (whom I’ve written about ad nauseum: he’s a fave). Seimetz made headlines a while back for being “let go” from that horrible series The Idol, because The Weeknd thought she brought too female a perspective. Don’t get me started. You don’t DESERVE Amy Seimetz. So sick of this shit. Sun Don’t Shine takes place in sun-blasted strip-mall-littered Florida, with an aimless “couple” – played by Audley and Sheil – on the run after she murders her husband. The film has this languid flat-affect eeriness, these people seem incapable of strong feeling, both exude a scary passivity … like attracts like?
Kate Lyn Sheil and Kentucker Audley Sun Don’t Shine
The film may “borrow” from every couple-on-the-run movie ever made but Seimetz’s approach destabilizes the expected tropes. It’s like the characters are circling the drain, their interiority is barred from us. Maybe because there’s no “there there”, which is an even scarier proposition. Because the characters seem opaque even to themselves, the whole thing feels like a fever dream, with characters running from a threat, but not even fully realizing what’s actually happening. These two seem capable of literally anything. The final shot, Sheil swimming in a backyard pool, and then confronted by the owner, stays with me. Terrific film.
Both from Sun Don’t Shine
Sheil worked again with Seimetz in the quietly terrifying She Dies Tomorrow, which I reviewed for Ebert. Sheil is the lead here, and she starts out in a frightening state of deterioration, completely shattered, until she sees …. it. And when she sees it, she has these moments when she looks into the camera, dazzled – but frozen – Is what she sees beautiful? Is it a gaping black abyss? We eventually know what this … swirling light … does, but before then and even after … She is caught in its glow, and the look on her face is truly mad in an ecstatic way. (Sheil would make a great nun, one of those ecstatic people who see the Virgin Mary weeping in a cave somewhere in Albania, and people flock to her for healing.) We never see what she sees. We don’t need to. Sheil works from a liminal space, much is unspoken – we see this in Green, in Sun Don’t Shine … but we are never unclear. Some of the mumblecore acting style was almost non-acting and often it lacked focus, nothing cohered – which can be valid, but sometimes it just felt like actors flailing through an improv in a small apartment. Sheil works from a deep, real, and even existential place, and the the hard-to-pin-down-ness of it makes her powerful. She knows why she’s doing everything.
Kate Lyn Sheil, She Dies Tomorrow
The nameless terror we see in her face in She Dies Tomorrow is mixed with a swoon of need … which we somehow connect with the opening sequence, pre-discovery of swirling colored lights, where she lies prostrate, outside, in a glittering green cocktail dress, beside herself with anguish. She’s already ready for the colored lights. This reminds me a little bit of the look on Jane Fonda’s face at the end of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? The ecstasy and RELIEF of knowing your end is near, the nihilistic desire to be done with it all. Not too many actresses can go there, the way Sheil does.
Kate Lyn Sheil, She Dies Tomorrow
A couple more notable excellent performances – and movies – to highlight. Like I said, Sheil’s career is extensive.
Zachary Wigon’s The Heart Machine is a harrowing film about obsession and John Gallagher Jr. captures a man’s descent into monomaniacal romantic obsession in such uncomfortable ways there are times it is almost unwatchable. But so very real. A man and a woman meet up on Tinder over Skype. When the film opens, they speak every day in a totally familiar way, it’s been going on for a while. They have never met in person because she is living in Berlin for a couple months. They can meet up when she gets home.
John Gallagher and Kate Lyn Sheil, The Heart Machine
We only see her on Skype. The story is really from Gallagher’s point of view: the subway rides, the parties, the East Village bars – it’s a great New York movie and very very familiar if you lived here at a certain time in your life, before things were settled, before you “settled down”, the challenges of finding a person to date in New York. I found it a horrible adjustment after careening through the social scene in Chicago, where the men were aggressive (in a good way), and came up to you to chat you up, intentionally, and then got your phone number at the end. Maybe it’s because it was before online dating? And so if you wanted to date someone, or go on a date, or even hook up, you had to get yourself together to do it in person. The Heart Machine takes place in the Tinder era and these two feel a connection, and immerse themselves in a relationship before they ever met. I had a couple of those once I lived in New York, and once the online thing was happening. I learned a lot of lessons, one of which was: force the in-person meeting as early as possible. Don’t get into a long back and forth online thing.
The Heart Machine shows the dangers of feeling such a connection and pinning hopes on it before it’s been tested in the real world. The film is not didactic: it’s made by a younger person who knows this world well. He’s not some older person judging “the kids” for their online shenanigans. It’s so easy to meet someone you really feel something for online … but (in my experience) that way danger lies. Gallagher’s obsession is the real deal: not exactly Rupert Pupkin or Travis Bickle level but … close.
John Gallagher, The Heart Machine
I wrote a long piece about the film. (There are some spoilers there. I’d suggest going into it semi-cold.
Here, Sheil plays a mystery woman. Seen only on a Skype screen at first. She exists (again) in a liminal space: here but not exactly here, an image but not corporeal … She exudes warmth and closeness but there’s something unreachable there, and it’s seductive. Not exactly Vertigo-level but … close. A millennial Vertigo. She’s there but not there.
Kate Lyn Sheil, The Heart Machine
A film like The Heart Machine depends solely on the power and reality of the performances. You need to enter their world and relationship, you have to be pulled down into Gallagher’s obsession: you feel how crazy he’s getting, and you feel alarmed, but you’re only with him for long stretches of the film: his headspace gets more and more claustrophobic, at the same time she’s retreating into a remote idealization and maybe even something either sinister or supernatural. Gallagher is so obsessed you start to wonder if the whole thing is a delusion, if she isn’t real at all, she exists only as a fantasy of the perfect woman. I can’t say enough good things about it.
Last, but far from least, is Kate Plays Christine, by documentary filmmaker Robert Greene. The film got a lot of press and won a lot of awards when it played the festival circuuit in 2016. In fact, Kate Plays Christine was my introduction to her and I was so intrigued I went back to watch the rest of her filmography.
Kate Lyn Sheil in Kate Plays Christine
The film is hard to explain as is a strange coincidence happened in 2016. Another film came out in 2016 called Christine, starring Rebecca Hall. I reviewed for Ebert. Christine was about Christine Chubbuck whose main claim to “fame” was shooting herself during a live news broadcast in 1974. She was a reporter reading the news. She had a gun in her purse. Except for one in-depth article back then, where the writer interviewed her friends and colleagues who spoke of her increasing desperation and mental problems, the entire event is cloaked in mystery and – naturally – the television station had no desire to set the record straight. They wanted to erase her memory and have people forget what happened at their station – traumatizing viewers. The film Christine is really good (for whatever reason I had reservations about it at first, reflected in my review. This is what happens when you write about a film a couple hours after you’ve seen it. Sometimes things are revealed on re-watch, and I’ve re-watched Christine many times. It is excellent and one of the best portrayals of unshakable depression – and the helplessness others feel when watching the descent – I’ve ever seen.)
Kate Plays Christine also came out in 2016, and while it is – essentially – a documentary, it also focuses on Christine Chubbuck, albeit taking a totally different approach. 2016 wasn’t an anniversary year or anything, and the story isn’t well-known at all, so what are the odds of two films coming out in the same year on this subject? They are interesting companion pieces, almost as though the Rebecca Hall version is an alternate version of the film we see being prepared in Kate Plays Christine. Kate Plays Christine details Sheil’s acting process in preparing to play the role (for a film that never happened). Christine Chubbuck was in the air. Strange.
Kate Lyn Sheil in Kate Plays Christine
As I’ve discussed, Sheil works from a fluid space: she’s orbiting the earth AND she’s in the dirt. Kate Plays Christine makes this explicit. Sheil and Greene and a small crew travel to Florida to research Christine Chubbuck, in preparation for a proposed and/or potential film about Chubbuck. I actually haven’t researched whether or not Greene decided to pivot into a film about process solely, to document Sheil’s process, emotional, physical, investigative … and give up on making the actual film … or whether … they actually did plan on making a film and this was meant for behind-the-scenes footage, and Greene decided to leave as is. Either way, it’s one of the great films about acting preparation. I’m in heaven watching it.
Kate Lyn Sheil in Kate Plays Christine
Greene comes from a documentary background and so Kate Plays Christine also includes footage of Greene and Sheil tracking down people who knew Chubbuck, to find out their impressions, their memories, all to be used by Sheil in her portrayal. People are hard to find. People have died. People are also hesitant to talk to them. This tragedy happened in 1974 and it covered the television station in shame and infamy (the news broadcast footage is nowhere to be found. It was only seen once, and live.)
Kate Lyn Sheil in Kate Plays Christine
Sheil also works on Christine’s physicality, studying the existing footage of Chubbuck from her various broadcasts (Chubbuck was not an anchor. She was a local reporter, frustrated with the stories she was assigned – strawberry festivals, etc. The stuff she was interested in was considered boring – re-districting, land laws, school board, etc. Not exactly money-makers for the station). Sheil studies Chubbuck’s walk, her posture, her odd intense physicality – the long mane of black hair, the slouched posture. She tries wigs. The process is not haphazard. The wig is important.
Kate Lyn Sheil in Kate Plays Christine
Disappearing into the role is the goal. Not because it will win her an Oscar but because she wants to inhabit Chubbuck, who remains a mystery. Sheil is confronted with the mystery, the gap in between what we know and what Chubbuck did ultimately. How could she have done what she did? Sheil resists the confrontation. She can’t go through with it. She can’t re-create the broadcast, she resists reaching into her purse for the gun. She confronts the gap in understanding, the abyss Chubbuck was in which allowed her to do such a heinous thing, and Sheil’s knowledge of how much she doesn’t – and can’t – know.
There’s a dream-like quality to the film. The stormy skies, the dark green gulf, Sheil in a motel room staring at footage, or wandering up to a house, wearing huge sunglasses, hoping someone will let her in and talk to her about Christine.
I haven’t written a full piece about Kate Plays Christine, although I do discuss it briefly here. I’d suggest starting with Kate Plays Christine and then watching Christine.
There aren’t too many films like Kate Plays Christine, and the film speaks to Sheil’s status in the “scene”, among her peers.
“Kate”. That’s all you need to know.
