Benjamin Shearn is a film editor and writer. His last feature, Ladyworld, premiered at BFI London, Fantastic Fest, TIFF: Next Wave and was presented as part of the Frontieres Showcase at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. Shearn’s work in narrative and documentary films has also been exhibited at ComicCon San Diego, the Louisiana Museum of Art in Copenhagen, la Gaîté lyrique in Paris, as well as official selections of the CPH:DOX, Melbourne International, Planete+Doc, TIFF After Dark, Court Metrage du Clermont, Chicago and Boston Underground Film Festivals, amongst others. For more of his work, go to benjaminshearn.com and/or follow his absurd Instagram account @actorsupset.
I don’t have many vivid adolescent memories. One that pierces through the fog, however, is the first time I saw Scanners, aged 12, with two friends, and our overwhelmed reaction to the infamous head explosion. We exploded along with it, then stopped the tape, rewound, rewatched, then again, stepping through it, frame by wobbly VHS frame. It played then like a monument to giddy cinematic blood lust, satiating a young horror fiend’s craving for guts and goo.
Even then, I felt something beyond all that. The image, to me, provided such a glorious sense of release, it inspired euphoric little pin pricks and waves of gooseflesh. I was, undeniably, uplifted. Ever since, I’ve tried to decode my fixation on exploding heads, arriving at various silly, half-digested theories. The common denominator was always that release. A tension which exists in one state of being, suddenly and spectacularly combusting into liberating plasmatic fireworks.
This video essay is the first in a series called Driftless Significance; an attempt to articulate the embedded (at times hidden) meanings within cinema which have haunted and fascinated me throughout my life. And deciphering this quarter-century obsession with exploding heads felt as good a place to begin as any.
