Video Descriptions #3: Waiting In Hell
Read the introduction to this set of texts and video description #1 here.
Waiting in Hell, 3 minutes 30 seconds.
As a washed out synth note fades up on the audio track, an empty waiting room appears on screen. Green leatherette chairs are lined up round the corner of a room with a tiled floor. There is a low table and a potted plant. Light filters in through closed blinds. There are fluorescent lights embedded in the false ceiling. This is the first of 12 images of mostly empty waiting rooms that serve as the backdrop to the video.
The title of the video slides up to the centre of the frame and as it does so, Tammy and Daniel appear on screen, accompanied by a percussive sound effect. They appear mid-movement, pacing around the frame. Daniel is talking to someone behind the camera, but you cannot hear his voice, nor the sound of either of their footsteps. They are badly green screened into the waiting room in the sense that their size and position and movement does not fit with the size and perspective of the image behind them. Also, as they pace about, they have a kind of blue halo around some parts of their bodies. It’s particularly noticeable when they move their arms.
Accompanied by a different percussive sound, another Daniel and Tammy appear in frame. Again, they appear mid pace. This new Daniel and Tammy are speaking with each other and with someone else off camera. The background changes to another waiting room, bigger than the last, with rows of chairs back to back and a large reception desk. The bad green screen is worse here: Daniel and Tammy occasionally appear to stand on the armrests of chairs in the foreground. It’s clear that they have not been directed to pace around the room in relation to the images that form the background of the video. The music track has faded in. It’s a slow, repetitive, minor key melody played low down on a plucked instrument.
Another Tammy and Daniel appear. The bad green screen is compounded by the weird interactions of the layers of Daniel and Tammy. For example, as one Daniel comes closer to the camera, getting larger in frame, he appears to be crossing ‘behind’ another, much smaller Daniel who is further away from the camera. The layers have been left in a hierarchy dependent on when they appear in the edit, rather than being meticulously layered back and forth so that each Daniel and Tammy weaves realistically behind and in front of their duplicates as they pace around.
An open caption appears, white text on black reading, ‘What might there be?’. In other videos, white captions denote speech by the demon character, but he doesn’t appear in this video and no voice accompanies the caption. The question is rhetorical, and doesn’t appear to be addressed to anyone in the video. It’s kind of obvious that neither Tammy or Daniel will answer it.
The image of the waiting room changes again. This time it’s a pixelated rows of chairs and a wheelchair leaned up against one of the walls. The music develops, with plucked chords that accentuate the plaintive feel of the music. Daniel and Tammy keep pacing. Another waiting room appears. This one is huge, with screens and big glass windows. It’s probably an airport. The same caption appears again, ‘What might there be?’. No one has answered the questions, and the questioner is in no rush to answer themselves.
Another waiting room. This time an extremely fuzzy image of a single rack of metal chairs against a white wall. Tammy is talking to someone off camera. It’s obvious that while filming the pacing, the performers didn’t worry about acting as if they were really in a waiting room at all. They just paced within the frame, and nothing else was asked of them. Their faces do not reflect any sense of waiting. What would that be? What do we look like when we wait? And what could be an appropriate expression to assume in the waiting room of eternal damnation?
Another caption, ‘When we get there.’ A fragment, only comprehensible in relation to the previous question of ‘What might there be?’ So the whole question could be, ‘What might there be when we get there?’. ‘There’ is presumably hell, but also whatever any of these waiting rooms is a waiting room for. Hospital, dentist, prison, doctor. Somewhere where ‘we’ wait, rather than ‘I’ wait.
Another waiting room. Six black plastic chairs up against a green wall with a clock. Another caption, ‘When we’re allowed to enter.’ The flat colour of the wall of this waiting room shows digital artefacts leftover from the bad green screen. Little shadowy areas flicker at the sides of the frame, tiny ghosts haunting the edit. Spirits from a previous world, of the studio where the pacing was filmed.
Another waiting room. TV Guide and Time magazine in a magazine rack on a table between two chairs; a coffee station over by the wall with paper cups and UHT milk in plastic pots. This one has art on the walls. Generic landscapes in shiny frames.
Another. Shiny panelled walls, tiled floor, a blank TV in a fake brick clad architectural feature that refers to the idea of a fireplace. A new caption, ‘How will we know?’ Following the previous logic, we can put these captions together: ‘When we’re allowed to enter, how will we know?’ Who is in charge of the waiting room? What signal will they give us, and will we understand it? Tammy and Daniel are waiting, and we wait with them. We are waiting for the video. It is too slow. It is taking too long to make its point; to be over. It drags. It drags us with it.
A new waiting room. It has people dotted around. We can only see the backs of their heads. They are people in winter coats, turned away from us, looking down at phones or magazines. In the foreground, one of the Daniels stops pacing and executes a lackadaisical hip stretch. This is stretching as a coded gesture made in response to waiting, boredom and the discomfort of forced inertia. The caption appears again, ‘How will we know?’
A mournful counter melody comes in on the soundtrack but does not add any musical or emotional complexity to the music. Another waiting room appears. Then another.
A final caption appears reading, ‘When it’s our time to go in.’ Is this a final fragment that finishes the previous question? ‘When we’re allowed to enter, how will we know when it’s our time to go in?’ It works, but it's a mouthful. If such a question refers to death, then the answer can only be a cliche. It will be ‘our time’, or we will go ‘before our time’. If it refers to a particular act of waiting then the answer can only be banal: 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 1 hour, who cares.
We’re back in the first waiting room. A rising whooshing sound fades in quietly on the audio track. Pairs of Tammy and Daniels disappear with click and clops, the waiting room empties. The music fades to silence, the picture fades to black.