Harmony Korine created Baby Invasion because nothing is real

There is a thin line that separates the genius of Harmony Korine from his playing with the veneration that his fans have for him. While it may be easy to admit, almost lightly, that if he only invoked it, he could start his own cult with followers eager to join without hesitation, it is equally true that his loyal fans have often followed the career of the artist from Bolinas, California, for years. And in projects like Aggro Dr1ft and the new Baby Invasion, premiered at the 81st Venice International Film Festival, they find an inevitable evolution of his work, increasingly directed towards the hyperuranium of audiovisuals. So it’s not just about playing with their minds, pushing cognitive tests to the limit. The director's upheaval in Baby Invasion, simultaneously, also impacts the landscape of independent cinema, in which Korine has been immersed since the beginning, redefining it to the point of asking what is cinema and where is it going, questions to which the answer, according to his latest works, seems definitive: everything and nothing, everywhere and nowhere.

Baby Invasion, produced by Picture Perfect and EDGLRD - which Korine founded in Palm Beach in 2021 for technological research - is not just another cryptic form of media fusion between cinema and video game, but like Aggro Dr1ft, it is a world that exists and, above all, does not exist, and for this reason, the director wanted to create it in his own image and likeness. Or maybe not. «It's an advancement,» comments Harmony Korine. «When I discovered that nothing is real, I began to understand that everything is fake, like in Matrix. I started noticing the glitches. This drove me crazy as an artist and led me to want to build a cosmos that conveys a sense of infinity.» Baby Invasion is thus a horror work in the first-person shooter genre based on the home invasion theme, where the involved perspective is also that of security cameras. A video game stolen and spread on the dark web - this is the plot of an operation that, paradoxically, has a nearly linear storyline, which according to Korine, hides more than one level of plot and interpretation - designed to put players into an uncontrollable trance. And it has truly succeeded in its goal: hypnotizing people. However, its release on a platform impossible to control has generated a spiral of violence that has spilled over into real life with equal brutality. Now a bunch of people has decided to grab their rifles and make that ultraviolence real: who knows if this is the direct digital consequence of the ultraviolence in A Clockwork Orange.

«We chose children's faces as the characters' masks because it's beautiful to see something so adorable become terrifying,» continues Korine, accompanied by his indispensable cigar during the presentation of Baby Invasion at Venice81 - the same one that, in a subjective view, we see held by the “protagonist” of the film-video game, who is credited only as Anonymous in the end credits. «The idea came to us because the future is online, it's in streaming, and, therefore, so are its crimes. Entertainment has taken on the aspect of children to evoke the concept of beginning, of rebirth in the new media space we are entering. It's an almost spiritual element.» Baby Invasion is full of transcendent and metaphysical components, with rabbits in superimposition and in the background a sort of legend about the animal, narrated throughout the work through the use of voiceover. «Inside, there are as many cues and codes as possible that can be watched simultaneously,» like the chat on the side of the screen or the small box where a “material” player watches the game. Many different points of view brought together by the music of British artist Burial. «Below, above, inside the film.» Baby Invasion is real, it is not real, it is a game, it is not a game. It is also written in the captions over the images. And if you want to grasp a meaning, it's likely to be found in post-logic: «No one could give us what we wanted, so we made it ourselves. It's something difficult to define, but it's more vibrant than logic. It's post-logic.»

Although Korine's work has a solid base of lovers, for those who weren't at the Lido - and even for those who passed by but couldn't get tickets for the three screenings, which sold out in a heartbeat - recovering the ultra-realistic first-person multiplayer game might not be easy. At the moment, in fact, no distribution is planned («It's not certain that there needs to be one,» stated the author), but as with the previous Aggro Dr1ft, it is likely to have a destiny of clandestine, hidden screenings or simply myths to be passed down: «Besides» - admits Korine - «it's so cool to show a work in street clubs».