Nov. 7 Gyrus

Recently I purchased a large cardboard box full of VHS tapes at a flea market. There were about 50 tapes in the box and it was only four dollars for all of them, and while none of the tapes were marked I figured there had to be something interesting in there. If I’m being honest, I was hoping for some weird old home movies or something that would give me a sort of voyeuristic thrill. What I found was much, much cooler.

The VHS tapes were all movies, and almost all of them were movies I’d never heard of. Movies that no one I’ve talked to has heard of, movies that no one the internet seems to have heard of. This isn’t one of the The Peanut Butter Solution situations where everyone thinks no one else has seen the thing but everyone has, either. These might as well be movies from another dimension.

I’d like to tell you about one of them. It’s called Gyrus. There are no credits at either end of Gyrus, so I don’t have any idea who directed it, who any of the actors are, nothing. If you read this and you have information about any of that, please let me know.

Gyrus takes place in a world where everyone, for some reason, has lost the ability to recognize other people by sight. This is never explained. The film illustrates this by having every character beside the main character, Eddie, played by a different actor after every edit or cut. This is dizzying, to say the least. There’s one scene early in the movie where Eddie is talking to his girlfriend Cherry and Cherry is played by 15 different actresses in a 5 minute exchange.

To make up for this weird disability, everyone in Gyrus wears a unique costume. Some of them look a little like Superhero costumes, a couple even with capes; others are more mundane. Eddie’s costume is of the superhero variety, kind of like Superman but with a mask that covers his face from the nose up and with a lightning bolt erupting up from the forehead. No one knows anyone out of costume. Early in the movie there’s a sex scene between Eddie and Cherry and they keep their costumes on, when Cherry wants to take off her mask (Cherry wears a skintight tiger striped leotard and a purple domino mask) Eddie tells her to keep it on, that he wants to be able to look at her.

            I should say, it’s tough to tell when Gyrus was made or came out. Eddie works in a record store, and at one point a customer asks Eddie if they have White Light/White Heat by The Velvet Underground, which came out in 1968, and Eddie says it’s over in the new releases. Through the record store window behind Eddie you can clearly see the marquis for a movie theater advertising The Beastmaster, which came out in 1982. Towards the end of the film a character is shown watching David Letterman’s first episode of The Late Show on CBS, which was in 1992.

            The first half hour of Gyrus is pretty rambling. Eddie is this freewheeling guy, and we follow him around on what seems like a fairly normal day. He goes to work and sells records, bickers and banters with his co-workers, rides his bike around, meets up with Cherry, a waitress at a hookah lounge. They go back to her place and she wants to watch a DVD (which would place the movie even later than 1992, I guess) but end up having sex instead. Keep in mind, Eddie is the only character that’s consistently played by one actor, so while this sounds uneventful it’s actually really disorienting. Especially the sex scene, during which Cherry is played by 4 different women, two black and two white.

Finally Eddie heads home and meets up with his neighbor Stuart (whose costume is this skintight green and brown sort of chainmail and aviator sunglasses). They smoke a joint together at Stuart’s place, then Eddie says goodnight, goes into his own apartment, and is attacked by three thugs dressed in identical black bodysuits who are waiting for him. They tie Eddie up and two of them stay behind with him while the third dresses in Eddie’s costume and leaves.

            We cut to security camera footage from inside a coffee shop. The thug in Eddie’s costume walks in, guns down everyone inside, and walks out. Heads back to Eddie’s place, switches back into his jumpsuit, and he and his two buddies leave.

            So, at this point I’m a little disappointed watching this thing, thinking, I’ve seen this movie before, he’s going to go on the run and try to clear his name, whatever, kind of  a disappointing way to go in a movie with such a weird premise. But I guess I wasn’t considering that while I’ve seen lots of variations on that kind of plot, I’d never seen it play out in a movie about a world were people can only recognize each other by the costume they’re wearing.

            A few minutes later the thugs come back, dragging a bound and gagged Stuart with them. They throw Stuart down and the head thug caves his head in with a bicycle pump, then they force Eddie to switch costumes with the corpse before leaving.

            Cut to the police arriving. When they come in and find Eddie (dressed as Stuart) standing over Stuart (dressed as Eddie) they don’t for a second doubt that Eddie IS Stuart and that Stuart WAS Eddie, the recent mass murderer. They ask Eddie/Stuart what he’s doing in the apartment with the body and after hesitating just long enough to take in the situation, Eddie says he heard a commotion from next door and came over to check it out, found the body. My name? Oh, I’m Stuart. I live next door.

            There’s probably a million reasons this shouldn’t work out—fingerprints? Something? I guess Eddie and Stuart have pretty similar body types, so they fill out their costumes about the same. Same hair color, too. Can you really just switch identities by putting on someone else’s costume? If this is what this world is like, this must have been done before, right? There would have to be some protocol for this kind of thing. I mean, if I lived in this world I’d change identities fifteen times a day. But it never comes up. Maybe people’s costumes are so important to them that it just wouldn’t occur, like some big taboo? I have no idea. I’d say this is a plot hole but I don’t think that’s fair, everything about Gyrus seems at once really dreamy and really purposeful.

            So, Eddie begins his new life as Stuart. Putters around Stuart’s apartment, looking at Stuart’s stuff. Over the course of a few scenes he gets used to being Stuart, working Stuart’s job as a bicycle messenger (bikes come up a lot in this movie, and each time we see someone on a bike we get a real tight close up of a wheel spinning at some point).  He meets up with Stuart’s friends, who want to know all about the murder that took place in Stuart’s building. Eventually, Stuart attends Eddie’s funeral. Where he runs into Cherry, who corners him and demands to know why he hasn’t called her.

At first Eddie is confused, thinking she can somehow tell he’s really Eddie, but that’s not what’s happening at all, because as it turns out Cherry was having an affair with Stuart. As it turns out Cherry had been pregnant with Eddie’s kid and aborted the pregnancy because she was planning to leave him for Stuart. Eddie can’t hide his anger at this, which of course confuses the hell out of poor Cherry, but before they can hash things out Eddie’s mother (her costume is the strangest one in the whole movie, mummy-like bandages all around her body and a cardboard box with a drawing of Kermit the Frog over her head) shows up and delivers this wrenching eulogy about how she’s to blame for the lives her son took, that it’s all her fault. Eddie as Stuart interrupts her to ask if she really thinks her son would be capable of murdering a bunch of people in cold blood and she says she always knew there was a possibility something like this would happen!

I don’t want to give away the very end—although it would be tough to consider anything here a spoiler, since for all I know I own the only copy of this thing in existence. This kind of Phil Dick shifting identities alternate reality story is a whole genre of it’s own, but Gyrus  is probably the strangest and most ambitious example of that I’ve ever seen. Maybe because so many other movies of this type quickly descend into action capers and Gyrus insists on staying grounded, playing around with the exhilaration of taking on a new identity and the horror that comes with finding out what people really thought of your old one.

One of the craziest things to me, though, is that the number of people with speaking roles in Gyrus runs into the hundreds, due to the way each character is portrayed, but there’s no mention of it anywhere on Wikipedia, IMDB, nothing.

If you have any information about this movie, please get in touch.