Azazel Jacobs, 2008
Clearly, it is tough being Ken Jacobs’ son. Ken Jacobs’ son Azazel Jacobs says so himself – however obliquely – in this, his first major work. A radical departure from his father’s pioneering avant-garde work (but, like, of course), this somewhat solipsistic navel-gaze is actually far simpler and a little more universal than its narrative stasis belies: ‘Mikey’ visits his parents (actually played by Ken and Flo Jacobs, actually in the Jacobs’ family home) and decides to stay indefinitely, much to the incremental bewilderment of his wife in LA and his subsequently concerned parents.
Speaking in some ways to the listlessness of fat and aged teenage angst, its plotlessness kinda begins a melancholic though repetitious display of dullish developmental arrest – new parent Mikey gorging himself on all manner of teenage ephemera and losing himself amongst his parents’ various gadgets and materialist practices – but soon becomes a dullish portrait of nostalgia gone retarded, only subsequently lifting its head out of this mire to occasionally inject fleeting moments of dull dramatic contrivance into what could only loosely be called ‘proceedings’, capped by an hilariously literal and visually redundant Battle With The Stairs.
With Mikey’s stagnancy and its ultimate entropic denouement this work’s sole tenet, Azazel’s approach reaches its symbolic apex with Mikey ‘shaving’: the protagonist/proxy standing in front of the mirror lathering his face, only to become waylaid by the idiotic sensory pleasure found in his endless fondling of the lather’s texture; the subsequent finale – facing his child - a questionably one-dimensional summation of these themes. Sometimes ‘simple’ and ‘unresolved’ is merely a simplistic void of resolution.
