Karina’s Capsule: My Heart is an Idiot

As an adjective, “emo” is often misused, mostly by people like me who are trying to accurately describe a culture that they’ve aged out of. I mean, even Hope isn’t exactly “emo” — she’s more like neo-Goth. Basically, any shred of teen culture that has anything to do with raw emotion (sincere or otherwise) is lumped together under the “emo” rubrick, because it would take too long to actually classify each strain appropriately. My Heart is an Idiot, a documentary film project-in-progress currently represented by a trailer-like short on MySpace, isn’t exactly emo, but it’s something close. Let’s call it Tweemo, to be defined from here on out as “kind of like Emo, but with less eyeliner and way more Belle and Sebastian.”

The project’s director, David Meiklejohn, could be America’s Tweemo Sweetheart. He sits, speaking directly into the camera, in front of a whimsical backdrop, looking every bit the poster child for 30-year-old men with androgynous bob haircuts. To the accompaniment of twangy guitar, Meiklejohn explains that in 2005 and 2006, he spent several months traveling the country with Davy Rothbart, one of the creators of FOUND Magazine. Whilst on the road, Meiklejohn shot a lot of footage documenting Rothbart’s various romances. The video we’re watching, says Meiklejohn, is the first in a series of “videochunks” that he plans to produce while trying to figure out how to turn his roadtrip footage into a documentary about romantic love. Then he quotes Rilke.

If you haven’t yet overdosed on preciousness, you may be thinking that My Heart Is An Idiot sounds kind of like Ross McElwee’s classic personal documentary Sherman’s March, except filtered through the welcome perspective an outsider. As it happens, Meiklejohn is thinking the same thing — one of the “possible taglines” on the film’s MySpace page is “Sherman’s March doused in Maker’s Mark.”

I wanted to hate My Heart based on style alone, but the idea of reconfiguring one of the great all-time documentary concepts for a new generation sounds promising. And, Rilke-reading notwithstanding, by the end of this first episode I was invested enough that I wished the clip was on YouTube so I could subscribe to the project’s channel.

The idea of an independent filmmaker promoting an unfinished film with videos describing the finishing process is super risky — obviously, there’s a good chance Meiklejohn could blow his wad on the “videochunks” and never actually complete the feature. But the inherent gamble of it might be enough to string an audience along long enough to get a movie together.