Theodore Collatos on Class, America, and How We Weaponize Language

Tormenting the Hen, Theodore Collatos (2017)

I shot Tormenting the Hen in the innocent hot summer days of 2015 when it seemed as if the progressive wave would be realized for a new generation. I had recently moved from rural Massachusetts to New York City, where I was experiencing something of a progressive culture shock. The vastness of New York City is both liberating and smothering, open-minded and unforgiving, all of which gave rise to this new film.

There are in-groups, out-groups, progressives, conservatives, absentees, and every cultural nuance this world can imagine overlapping superficially everyday. I wanted to make something that spoke to where I'd been—rural USA—where I'd made a film about that experience (Dipso), and where I was now. I wanted to make a film about what I'd universally seen as a massive decline of optimism, and the rise of a culture without humor or tolerance, addicted instead to multilayered toxic misunderstandings.

An elderly neighbor who was experiencing a mental break ignited all these feelings into clarity and sparked conflicting ideas in me, exposing a defensive weakness in my human condition. That being, to hate someone without knowing them at all. You see, day after day, year after year, this neighbor would be up at 4am screaming religious quotations to passersby on the street while banging on our building's foundation. Every morning at 4am the building would be awakened to this disturbance. At first we were all very concerned, but after a couple years without regular sleep I found myself, we found ourselves, resenting this individual to a point bordering on hate. I'm not proud of it, it's very shameful actually. Someone else's pain made us as a building angry. A terrible thing to feel, a terrible thing to be, and yet I believe this feeling is a universally, almost biologically human experience.

Tormenting the Hen, Theodore Collatos (2017)

I had an echo of this kind of experience years earlier while living rurally. An intrusive neighbor, who by all means meant well, was far too involved with our comings and goings and would often just show up at our doorstep. To live in relative isolation and suddenly have a man at your door looking though your window can be frightening, to be frank. He'd shoot pointed personal questions at us like, "When are you getting married?" "Are you going to work there forever?" Sometimes it was welcome banter, other times I didn't have the emotional strength to deflect, but it got me thinking deeply. Can words alone be a form of violation?

When you cross a person's emotional boundary, of which you were not aware, is it a form of disrespect? Aggression? Psychological violence? Or an innocent mishap? Was I just being thin-skinned, not open towards a fellow human from a vastly different background, with vastly different experiences, with good intentions? Or was that person purposely being an asshole? These questions gave rise to Mutty, my unwitting antagonist in Tormenting the Hen.

Everybody has an identity. How does identity map onto your life? So often we assume the worst—a behavior I believe is partly biologically driven. We instinctually focus on the negative because as hunter-gatherers the negative might have meant we're lunch. But in today's society of cultural vastness, housed within in-group bubbles, how do we negotiate common understanding? Is it even possible given our current state of mind?

Tormenting the Hen, Theodore Collatos (2017)

In today's political climate best intentions hold no water for clumsy communication. That's a fact. If you have nothing nice to say, say nothing at all, were my grandmother's words of wisdom and perhaps that was as wise as her other saying, sticks and stones may break your bones...  I'd add, but micro-aggressions will always harm you. If you're a joke teller, there's no use for you in academia.  Have we lost our humor? Is it possible to disagree without dehumanizing others? As our politics and policies have become geographically and ideologically extreme, will we ever be able to give each other the benefit of the doubt, in service of a greater good, again? Or will we destroy our ability to function as a country and sink, together? My fear is we've been wound so tight and the stakes are so high that violence is inevitable for change—linguistic violence, physical violence, or economic violence.

The stakes of disagreement rise and the scope of disagreement deepens. Identity police, economic impoverishment. Zero-sum games. It's difficult not to find irony in almost every situation that involves human communication, because we communicate with the perspective of being the good guy in the room and unwittingly perhaps we are not. Often times the difference is how the reaction towards us is leveled. Diversity of thought, openness to others, and self-actualization, as opposed to forceful determination of words, thoughts, and lifestyles is not a zero-sum game, but rather a journey.

I wanted to point out that despite the American bubble of interpersonal, interracial, interclass relationships, these dynamics differ greatly in the world at large. Often linguistic confusions become impossible to overcome. Perhaps we may learn to take a more common sense approach to our wonderful differences, as Americans, and be better off. You will find none of these answers in Tormenting the Hen, but hopefully you'll enjoy the confusion.

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Written by Theodore Collatos
Screenwriter, Producer, Cinematographer,
Editor & Director of Tormenting the Hen