One Great Thing is our weekly newsletter where artists tell us all about one thing they’ve been really into lately. In this edition, Jack Nugent of the LA-based band Dutch Interior tells us about being moved to tears by a 1996 French documentary about bugs, Microcosmos. Dutch Interior’s latest record, Moneyball, is out now on Fat Possum. To read about more Great Things from our favorite artists each Monday, sign up for our newsletter.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music
I’m not often moved to tears by visual media, but when I am it comes like a bout of vertigo and always catches me off guard. I watched a movie last night with my girlfriend: Microcosmos (1996) (in French: Microcosmos: Le peuple de l'herbe, or, The People of the Grass). It’s a movie about bugs, but it’s nothing like Planet Earth.
I never considered a genre so surgical and high grossing as the high-definition-nature-documentary to ever be able to veer into the realm of transcendent art, but then I watched this movie and I was proven wrong. Its subjects are far less broad and educational than the nature documentaries I’m used to. It’s about a French meadow and the small creatures that inhabit it: lives totally alienated from our own; a grand drama of absurdity, beauty, survival, symbiosis, and adaptation that completely decentered my own humanity for the movie’s runtime (maybe even forever). There is no narration — except for in the beginning, where we are told that “to observe this world, we must fall silent… and listen to its murmurs” — but in its place there there is dramatic music and perfect foley sounds that bolster the sublimity that can be found any day in the grass in your backyard if you just pause to look close enough. The meadow and its inhabitants are the main characters, and you are asked early on to abandon your own perspective and adopt theirs by giving yourself over to the film’s atmosphere and its careful, gorgeous cinematography. I’m talking cinematography for its own sake, the kind that allows the environment to tell stories with more depth than language could ever muster just by allowing the millions of years of evolution behind, say, a bee-shaped flower whose stamen reacts to the nectar-seeking bee by applying pollen to its fuzzy body to speak for itself. This was one of several scenes that brought me to unexpected tears. I was awestruck by the simplicity and ineffability of nature’s secret designs, the importance of pollinators, and, ultimately, the vast world that operates below the human spectacle.
You might have caught on to this by now: I’m a bug guy, through and through. But even if you aren’t into bugs like I am, Microcosmos will rock your world and make you move at the pace of bugs — moments as hours, days as weeks, weeks as entire lifetimes — if only for a while. I think we could all use that. Plus, bugs are super cool, and we could all also use the reminder that this world is all we have, and it has served us well enough for us to exist this long. But like the bugs in Microcosmos, we must relearn how to be its custodians, to respect its arcane knowledge, and to be as the bugs are.
