Remember the year 2000? Wasn’t it strange when we were all fully grown? And so on and so forth. I spoke about this a bit in the post about Last Night (1998), a Canadian film about the apocalypse that was part of a series of films on the subject of the impending turn of the millennium. While that film didn’t really tie itself into it, there was amongst particular crackpots this whole idea of the Millennium Bug bringing forth the end of civilisation and that. Obviously that didn’t happen; there was enough of a campaign that the vast majority of any problems were averted. While I know computers can react oddly to unexpected blips, quite honestly, I was never really sure how computers thinking it’s 1900, inconvenient though it may be, would cause quite the level of world-ending carnage to the very fabric of society that some people were making out it would, but then again I’m not in computer science… of course, nor were a lot of the people making such claims. I think I assumed that they thought that if the computer thought it was 1900, it would therefore conclude it couldn’t possibly exist and thus go insane or implode or something like that.

I’d say now we can look back fondly on those simpler times when we thought that computers getting confused about the date would result in Brave Little Toaster Goes Psycho (the controversial and highly fictional fourth instalment in the series), but, eh, given the ludicrousness of recent times… remember the 5G thing? You should, it was less than a year ago at time of writing. …Am I going anywhere with this?

Relaxer tells the story of Abbie (Joshua Burge). ‘Tis the summer of 1999. Abbie is squatting on his brother’s settee, having failed at home, work and life in general. As some sort of man-child, he’s bullied by his brother, disregarded by his ostensible friends, and pitied by his peers. That said, he seems quite unwell, mentally, spiritually, physically, but apparently next to no one cares that much to notice. Also, he might have ESP. Anyway, his conspiracy obsessed brother Cam (David Dastmalchian) spends much of his free time coming up with ‘challenges’ that essentially function as ways to abuse and degrade Abbie, because, I don’t know, he’s not earning or something and also their relationship doesn’t seem to have really progressed past the age of, like, eight, and Abbie follows along largely unquestioningly. As a break from trying to make him vomit and then yell at him for having the temerity to vomit, Cam finds a magazine article wherein famed not-yet-disgraced alleged video game cheat and hot sauce magnate Billy Mitchell offers $100,000 to whoever beats the infamous 256th level of Pac-Man (with video evidence, natch), and sets about making Abbie do it while he goes out, with the bonus condition that he never get up off the couch. To make it extra-spicy, he gives him until the New Year, upon which, he claims, Abbie’s beloved N64 will obviously stop working, what with the end of the world and all. A generous enough timeframe, if it weren’t for time’s increasing meaninglessness.

In case you were wondering, ‘Abbie’ is given as short for ‘Abner’. The perceived girliness of the diminutive is brought up as a point.

So, yes… this is in essence one big showcase for Joshua Burge, the recurring star of Joel Potrykus’ films, having been the lead in all but one of the things. Here he has little in the way of actors or blocking or costume design to distract while he’s onscreen for more-or-less the full ninety-odd minutes of the film in a single set becoming gradually more pathetic and unhinged with people occasionally coming in to interact with him. Still, fortunately he’s weird looking enough to be interesting to watch sit around largely unmoving while confined to a single set. The plot, such as it is, plays out entirely within the studio flat and even then is focussed pretty squarely on the settee and coffee table. The film drifts back and forth between Abbie attempting to survive without actually invalidating the rules (even though no one would actually see him break them) with often unpleasant results, and pieces wherein another character enters and obliquely reveals details about the whats, whos and whys of our non-hero as well as the inherently unhealthy nature of his relationships. It ends up a rather fascinating mix of gross-out humour and a melancholy character study.

The whole thing is apparently inspired by The Exterminating Angel (1962), the key ‘people trapped in a room deteriorate’ comedy, though the mundane and fantastical elements of the premise play out quite differently. The reason for Abbie’s illogical imprisonment is laid out from the outset for one thing; it makes a plausible real-world sense while also having a certain real-world stupidity to it, rather than the mysterious event of Buñuel’s film. Of course though, Buñuel’s film is also themed around the façade of respectability as the dinner guests devolve into savagery and thus turn on each other. As there aren’t any guests here, that can’t happen, and it’s not as if these characters enjoy much in the way of respectability anyway (well, Arin perhaps to some extent, though she seems to have her own issues), nor indeed pleasantness as pointless cruelty is very much the currency of the day (again, with probable exception of Arin, who I guess we’ll get to shortly). While Abbie suffers at the hands of other people when they’re there, when left to his own devices he apparently finds ways to continue inflicting suffering on himself for no particular reason other than, perhaps, a warped view of honour. The challenges that Abbie is presented with are linked with a sense of toxic masculinity; the dumb wagers that his brother and friends come up with are based around an idea of one’s worth as a man, and his inability to actually complete such a challenge, stupid and detrimental as they are, are a source of shame. Although should he come close to succeeding, it’s clear that his brother will move the goalpost to ensure he doesn’t. Real men can after all chug a full four litres of milk without vomiting. There’s some irony in that it’s suggested the one person whom Abbie’s afraid of is his erstwhile co-worker Arin (Adina Howard), one of the few women in the film (and really the only one with a significant appearance), who is in fact the only character who is at all concerned with his wellbeing, trying unsuccessfully to save him from himself, when the male characters whose approval he seeks are the ones who mean, or at least cause, him harm.

That's the end of that, now for nerdy (or 'nerdier') shit! Skip this bit, why not?

I should maybe mention Billy Mitchell’s open challenge (and cash reward) regarding Pac-Man was an actual thing that happened incidentally, though according to the press release it wasn’t actually issued until the 24th of November. Also, I doubt they’d have accepted a tape of the N64 port. It’s implied in the release that you’d have to do it in person on the original PCB. But for those not in the know, level 256 is the original Pac-Man’s kill screen due to integer overflow. I’ve a link to a technical explanation of how and why it happens written by someone who seems to know what they’re talking about. If you want something more just the gist however, let’s see if I can explain it without getting something wrong and spouting gibberish. In 8-bit computing, there are 256 different possible values for an integer (zero (0) included, so the standard maximum is 255); Pac-Man determines the level number (indicated by the bar of up to seven fruits in the lower right corner) by adding one (1) to the internal 0-255 counter; at levels prior to the seventh, it counts back to zero to see when to stop drawing fruit in the bar and fill the remaining gaps in the bar with black space. On the 256th level, it’s trying to add 1 to 255 and getting 0 as a result, leading it to think that it’s a level prior to the seventh. It adds the new fruit, and starts counting back down to zero to determine how many black spaces it needs on the display. Except it’s already on zero, so by subtracting like it expects, it goes to 255 again, and so it carries on until it hits zero, causing the screen to fill up with garbage data as it tries to figure out where to put all this fruit it's expecting to draw. I probably got that completely wrong. Regardless, as a result, part of the maze is corrupted, becoming difficult to navigate, and it’s moot as not enough dots spawn on the corrupted side of the screen to clear the level (the game determines if a level is cleared by how many dots have been eaten). Of course, Mitchell knew this and it was just really a PR stunt. The film points it out, and, hell, so does the press release to an extent (though for what seems obfuscated).