Where I’m from the summers are hot and humid and getting longer every year, a run of breezeless green months full of screeching crickets and biting flies and birds that wake to sing through the evenings. I spent my childhood sweaty and sunburned, sticking to furniture and swatting mosquitos and lying in front of box fans while I tweezered ticks out from damp places. Calling them up now, those years seem shapeless and indistinct, they blur into a sweltering haze of being stuck at home, miles from my friends down in town, watching bad TV and playing video games and bored and bored with myself for being so bored. Yet I remember too the wind that whipped through car windows, the thunderstorms that broke the heat, the way we would sit out in the evenings and watch the bats and feel the day dissolve—all temporary, all reversible, but relief all the same. I’ve always preferred the Fall.
For an American child like myself, summer is strange: you wait desperately for it to come, and then do everything in your power to speed it along. Strange, then, the place it holds in my memory. If you asked me to describe in any sense the idea of summer, my mind would return to the seasons spent in New York’s Hudson Valley, despite no longer living there. Even now, after years away, I step off the train in Poughkeepsie, and no matter how hot the asphalt, how heavy the air, I feel relieved. A return to what cannot really return. A homecoming, if not quite mine anymore.
I felt just such a vertiginous return while watching Janet Planet, the first film from playwright Annie Baker. Set across the summer of 1991, in the months before I was born, the film depicts middle-aged Janet (Julianne Nicholson) as seen by her just-pre-adolescent daughter Lacy (Zoe Ziegler), a beaky, bookish girl with red hair and round glasses and no friends. Lacy’s shy, private nature, usually directed towards her piano lessons and the stage full of little porcelain figurines she attends to her in her room, has a provocative streak: when she wants her mom to take her home from camp early, she announces that she’s going to kill herself. Later on, when mother and daughter are in bed together, she deadpans: “Do you want to know what’s funny? Every moment of my life is hell.” Her single mother, just out of another relationship, says that Lacy seems quite happy. “Nope, it’s hell,” Janet impishly replies. “I don’t think it’ll last, though.”
Lacy, however, doesn’t seem in any rush to leave any part of her life behind. She clings to her mother, emotionally and physically, demanding that Janet sleep in her bed, hold onto her hand, pay attention to her keyboard performances. When it comes time to go to the 6th grade, the anxiety gives Lacy a headache, and then a fever. Using her words, then her imagination, she tries to drive away the men whom Janet, to her competing desire and dismay, cannot help but make fall in love with her. “I’ve always had this power,” says mother to daughter. “I think it’s ruined my life.” A single mother with a small business and an airy house in the woods of central Massachusetts, Janet has worked hard to build a life for herself and her daughter, yet the comfortable stability of their life together is not enough. Janet’s desire to be loved surpasses the ability of friends and men and even Lacy to fulfill it, a hunger and a sadness which the daughter perceives, but cannot dispel. In the film’s signature move, we see her as Lacy does: in an oblique close-up, a freckled face turned partially away, so that we make out the down on her cheeks, not the look in her eye.
Baker attends to the fine textures of their small world, the TV shows and cassette tapes that soundtrack warm afternoons, the family’s boxy Toyota Camry with its roll-up windows and frayed cloth seats, the great quantities of plastic — bags, wrappers, bike helmets, rotating fans — that clutters the day-to-day. Along with sound designer Paul Hsu, she recorded hundreds of hours of ambient audio from around the house, jays and woodpeckers and crickets and frogs, and then composed them into a kind of score, a gentle fog of croaks, calls, and creaks which enfolds the characters, fills the dead air of their conversations, places them in continuity with the wider natural world.
The human, too. A licensed acupuncturist, Janet is adjacent to a crunchy, New Agey strata of society, a largely (but not entirely) white group of spiritual seekers in flip flops and Earth Day t-shirts who run communal farms and put on spacey theatrical productions and paste Free Tibet stickers onto their Volkswagen vans. These people give Janet their business, and they introduce the already performative Lacy to the possibilities of theater — of the sense, as an old friend of Janet (Sophie Okonedo) says during a musical performance, that something is always about to happen, if only we open ourselves to the world around us. Their play, written by a commune and/or cult leader named Avi (Elias Koteas), is searching, earnest, ridiculous; it left a recent BAM crowd cackling. But it begins to provide the tools through which Lacy will be able to mold her reality into a form that might include her — and eventually to imagine a means of bridging the gap between daughter and mother, of reaching back out once she can no longer cling tight.
As in all coming-of-age stories, this liberation contains a premonition of loss. Art provides the means of capturing the world of childhood, but only once the artist has left it; Lacy can only understand her mother when she has taken Janet’s place. To see a place, to understand it, requires perspective. There can be great pleasure in looking back, but the past cannot be relived, only reenacted. All else is magic, a trick we choose to believe.
Baker makes it easy. She embeds the mother-daughter relationship in closely-felt details, the intimate knowledge of how a particular place felt at a particular time in history and life. She shot Janet Planet on location in Amherst and Northampton, and filled out the crowd scenes with local extras. The product of deep familiarity, it feels vital, alive to the concerns of the people who surrounded Baker at the same age. Like Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s 2024 Evil Does Not Exist, the film emerges from the place where it is set, and is alive to the concerns of the people who live there, now or in the past. Hamaguchi came to the story of his film, about a rural farming community threatened by thoughtless development, while visiting the composer Eiko Ishibashi at her home outside Tokyo. Rather than applying a predetermined story to an interchangeable place, he allowed the landscape and its inhabitants to suggest one to him, resulting in a jagged, allusive film, a discontinuous narrative directly inspired by his experience of environmental rupture. The film simply could not exist without the place which inspired it, a symbiosis of story and setting that creates what John Berger has called a “context of experience” that directs the viewer out into the world, rather than linearly to the end of a narrative.
All art comes from someone, after all, and thus from somewhere. Though not purely autobiographical, Janet Planet is clearly informed by Baker’s own childhood in the Amherst area, and the bohemian company her intellectual parents kept. It is rooted in a time and a place with which its writer-director maintains a visceral intimacy. Though set 33 years in the past, the film’s deliberate placedness gives it a vitality which most other productions, including many made in the same area during the same year, definitively lack.
Like much of upstate New York, Massachusetts provides generous tax credits for film and television productions, incentivizing studios and filmmakers to hire local filmworkers and shoot on locations and soundstages scattered across both states. Very few of these productions are actually set in post-industrial towns like Springfield, Worcester, Poughkeepsie, and Newburgh, of course, nor are they about the people who live there. Instead, they generate a generic landscape of leafy streets and old barns, small houses which are never entered, fields never tended. I’ve seen the Hudson Valley subbed in for East Texas, Gilded Age Manhattan, the battlefields of World War I. This year’s Madame Webb unconvincingly subs the Boston suburbs in for Queens, a cheapness that pervades every aspect of the film’s catastrophically generic presentation. Even more generous programs have created a booming film industry in the Atlanta area, the preferred homebase of the Marvel content-generation machine. Surely real life happens in the greater Atlanta area, but you would never guess it from how the city and its suburbs have been deployed in the blockbusters of this last decade, a blank landscape of tinted office windows and empty highway interchanges, a no-place without any distinguishing characteristics, the visual counterpart to the no-logo baseball caps favored by its fictional residents.
This is hardly new. Over the past decades, budget-minded producers have dressed mountainous Vancouver up as New York City dozens and dozens of times, and you can always tell. Budget genres like horror and direct-to-video action are increasingly being filmed in the former Eastern Bloc, where, as the director Alex Ross Perry said last year on a podcast, below-the-line staff work for slave wages. And as streamers and studios have become concerned with their stalling revenues, those costs get passed on to filmmakers, and these tax credit systems allow them to make up what they’ve lost. Even independent filmmaking is expensive before you’re being nickel and dimed.
Sometimes these films are retooled to accommodate their locations, as when Todd Haynes moved May December from coastal Maine to the islands outside Savannah. Others, like Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, deploy their placelessness with purpose, creating a psychic landscape of dark houses and nameless streets, where all real experience is displaced by and mediated through pop culture. Yet far too many are comfortable remaining a reference, a stand-in, a substitution. Their stories do not take place anywhere in particular, and so they do not happen to anyone specifically. Rather than a landscape pocked with experience, they present us with a frictionless aesthetic of bland interiors and generic exteriors, a vision of life that arrives with motion-smoothing already turned on.
In 1977, Susan Sontag was already warning about the effect which this proliferation of images was having on our conceptions of art and reality. “Photography does not simply reproduce the real,” she writes in On Photography, “it recycles it — a key procedure of modern society.” Any number of peoples, places, events, experiences are defused once reduced to the level of the image, transforming “the injuries of class, race, and sex” into mere subjects to be consumed, even by those who themselves suffered the injury. She foresaw a recursive, self-regenerating whirlpool of repetitive, defused images, “cliches, recycled, [which] become meta-cliches. The photographic recycling makes cliches out of unique objects, distinctive and vivid artifacts out of cliches. Images of real things are interlayered with images of images,” resulting in a blurring “between images and things, between copies and originals,” and a society of confusion, indifferent to the nature of that confusion.
This is the future promoted by AI boosters. Using programs like Sora and Midjourney, these evangels propose a vision of filmmaking in which everything is a mere approximation of something else. Speaking at a recent event with the CEO of Google, actor and AI-investor Ashton Kutscher extolled the labor-eliminating potential of AI. “Why would you go out and shoot an establishing shot of a house in a television show when you could just create the establishing shot for $100?” he asked. “Action scenes of me jumping off of this building, you don’t have to have a stunt person go do it, you could just go do it.” (Conveniently, you also wouldn’t have to pay the cameraperson or stuntman.)
Now, Kutscher is no one’s idea of an artist; his portrayal of Steve Jobs was best described as “an idiot playing a genius.” But his comments underline the imaginative death which has gripped so many in the arts world. There is no room for specificity in this worldview, only the most bland, cliched visions of reality. Not a specific house, but a generic exterior. Not the excitement of a body falling through space, but the simulation of one. Not even a script written by one person, and acted out by others. It is a vision of reality without texture, creation without socialization, art without humanity. Visual art ceases to be a depiction, or even a representation, only mere approximation, a disposable object that expresses nothing, and exists only to be consumed.
Much like air-conditioning, AI sucks up grotesque quantities of energy, and delivers something airless and closed-off. Quite simply, it isn’t life. However generic and seamless our lives have become, we still live in a physical world, decrypted and defined by our minds and bodies. Artmaking should be like a window: open to the world, allowing in scents, sights, and sounds, however sticky, scratchy, and unpleasant they might be.
Which is not to say mundane. All fiction filmmaking involves the presentation of one place and time as another, of a cast as a set of real people. No matter how believable the reproduction, how deep the verisimilitude, we are always watching a performance, never the real thing. But there still must be something there. An artist approaches life as a collection of material, presented for manipulation — as a thing which can only be understood once the artist has interpreted it as a thing fit for presentation, for performance. Late in Janet Planet, a feverish Lacy sits at home in the dark while her mother and Avi go on a date. Cutting back and forth between the two events, Baker lays a reading of Rilke’s fourth Duino elegy over a shot of Lacy’s face as she prostrates herself before her collection of figurines and dolls, a private stage which she decorates and directs. Rilke speaks of the unfulfilled love between parent and child, a love the child must first experience without understanding, and only to understand once the source of that love has gone on:
You who loved me
for that small beginning of my love for you
from which I always shyly turned away, because
the distance in your features grew, changed,
even while I loved it, into cosmic space
where you no longer were…
For Rilke, this is achieved through the act of imagination, a longing which transforms the beloved parent into a puppet, manipulated by the child’s memory into acting out some form of explanation, a gap bridged only in the performance, never in reality. Lacy is trying to fuse Janet’s mantras with her own discovery of theater, and in the process to form an image of her mother which she can herself manipulate, and keep close at hand.
Everything here is so specifically, keenly, personally felt, the product of youthful imagination and adult experience. Now Janet’s age, Baker attempts to fulfill Lacy’s compulsive controlling desire through the medium of the film itself, transforming mother into actor, and imbuing her imagination with near-magical force. It is a reenactment of life, a fantastic enhancement of it. But because it comes out of a particular life, lived in a particular milieu, the scene bristles with truth. Had it been filmed in the Hudson Valley, in Georgia, on a backlot, it would not have nearly the same power. Even the most powerful computer could not begin to approximate it.
These scenes are pocked with what Roland Barthes called “puncta,” the details which reach out from a photograph and “prick” the viewer with unexpected feeling. Looking over his collection of photographs, Barthes feels himself drawn, “lightning-like,” to surprising details: strapped pumps, a boy’s jagged teeth, the crossed arms of a posing sailor. These details transform the act of looking, imbuing it with an expansive quality that allows him to feel things about these people he has met only as images, as if they were as close as his own beloved mother. His own emotional response attests to the photograph’s indisputable past; because if it had not happened, there would be nothing for him to respond to. Yet the picture itself is also a document of what is already over: of a kind of death. “Every photograph,” he writes, “is a certificate of presence,” “a new being, really: a reality one can no longer touch.” Yet these details touch us, because they are really there.
While Barthes rejected the application of his theory to cinema, I feel it all the time in Janet Planet, where even a cackling birdcall brings some other memory to mind. It depicts a time when I was not yet born, and conjures up a part of my life which is already long past. Childhood is a land like any other: in order to understand it, you have to move on. In order to understand Janet, Lacy must let go, and become her. I understand where I’m from much better than I used to, when it was still my home.
But then, it is no longer the same. The old farms are full of new houses, ash borers thinned out the woods, an ice storm cracked the fruit trees, white nose nearly eliminated the bats who used to swoop low across the yard at night. My sisters live across the country, and my old friends too. This summer I have visited as often as I can; when the time comes to go back to the city, I don’t always want to leave. Not that it matters, of course. I already have.