Movie still from Crimes Against Humanity. (Courtesy Jerzy Rose)
Crimes against solemnity
Jerzy Rose’s latest film is an irreverent romp through the University’s campus.
The party line—courtesy of University architect Steve Wiesenthal—is that UChicago’s campus conveys a “sense of history, seriousness, and intellectual fortitude,” mixed with its “expanse of intellectual possibility,” and inspiration to boot. But for administrators—and sometimes even for students—campus is just another workplace. Jerzy Rose’s new feature Crimes Against Humanity, filmed on campus and screened at Doc in late August as the finale to its series on local filmmakers, puts a sinister twist on Wiesenthal’s beloved buildings. In an interview with the Chicago Reader, Rose said that he filmed on UChicago’s campus in part because some of the buildings looked “like watchtowers.” “It’s pretty, too,” he acknowledged. “The Gothic architecture and all those twisty trees.” His movie centers on the dysfunctional relationship between workaholic jerk Lewis (Mike Lopez) and bleeding-heart Brownie (Lyra Hill). Lewis is an assistant to the dean—the movie never specifies a university—who investigates two professors suspected of using the occult to seduce students, and he constantly berates Brownie for being unemployed. While Lewis is preoccupied, Brownie has to deal with the death of her pet rabbit, as well as not one but two freak accidents, hallucination, and a seemingly kind-hearted young man who vanishes after Brownie sleeps with him. Rose—a graduate and employee of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago—was in attendance to answer audience questions after Doc’s showing. Right off the bat, the audience drilled him about Crimes Against Humanity’s bizarro plot. He called it a “shaggy dog” story, where “you end up basically where you started.” Rose says that he originally wanted to focus on Lewis’s detective storyline, but Lewis being impossibly mean to Brownie ended up being “a lot more fun to write.” The audience nodded in agreement; during the movie they’d laughed out loud and even clapped at Rose’s best gags. An experimental filmmaker, Rose generates a good deal of humor and strangeness from what he calls “ugly, obtrusive, game playing.” These games all grapple with what it means to know another person, from the “memory castle” technique for remembering lists to allegories told in bed between lovers. Different characters feel differently about game playing. Lewis screams at Brownie for telling a children’s story “wrong.” “It’s a story, it can mean anything I want,” she shouts back, crying. The movie’s most characteristic scene, according to Rose, is an interaction between two minor characters, a private detective and a cop. The cop pulls the dazed detective over for drunk driving, on Ellis Avenue behind Cobb Hall. Instead of ticketing the detective, though, the cop forces him into a role-play where the two pretend to be long-lost friends, with the cop providing the detective his lines as he complains about his marriage and reminisces about working at a lumber mill. Rose calls Crimes Against Humanity a college movie, but it sheds more insight on what happens after college. Lewis’s investigation goes nowhere and leaves him writing apology letters for unethical behavior, and Brownie ends up going back to Lewis even after he neglects to visit her in the hospital. The movie leaves off with Brownie at a job interview, talking about how “spring is a time of renewal” as she gets a spontaneous nose bleed.

Video

Crimes Against Humanity trailer.

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