MOVIE • 1991

Involuntary Conversion

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This apocalyptic linguistic comedy meditates on the relationship between language, meaning and social decay and is scripted from "double-speak" language found in a variety of media sources. Drawing its title from the Pentagon's term for crash, Involuntary Conversion evokes the hollowness and free-floating anxiety that characterizes late 20th century culture. In a voice that could belong to a hypnotist or a government spokesman, a disembodied speaker recounts a string of events whose common thread is a sense of impending disaster. The mood is suspended somewhere between nightmare and deadpan and is propelled by a narrative as enigmatic as the language it exposes. The iconic shape of a fighter jet floating in a perfect sky has the creepy feel of a video game and the texture of television is used to make the images feel domestically ingrained.