Within the first three minutes or so of FAILED STATE the subject, a charismatic, impoverished New York City messenger named Dale, walks past a massive street level billboard. It’s bursting with color, bright hues of blue and purple and reads “Science Will Win.” Beneath the bold statement sits a company name, Pfizer. This happens nearly concurrently with Dale walking past another delivery messenger walking in the opposite direction with a delivery of black and gold balloons.
Immediately the film starts creating a portrait of people barely subsisting at street level in New York. The cinematography reads the streets as canyons with a measure of security found in lofty floors of skyscrapers. The Pfizer billboard tells a story of a government that has ceded its responsibility in both care and communication to citizenry that installed it. Dale isn’t holding on. In the early going in the film we see his landlord pressing him for overdue rent. There after we see Dale tallying monthly expenses, trying to figure out where to cut corners to get by. He makes a call to cancel an account which doesn’t result in the cancellation but instead accrues a new $35 monthly fee. I can’t stop thinking about the Pfizer billboard.
Days bleed into each other and FAILED STATE reinforces the reality that we are closer to homelessness than wealth without being didactic about it. Dale’s ratty oversized messenger bag causes him to be mistaken more than once for homeless. Each time he’s polite but deeply defensive. “People think I’m homeless because of the messenger bag but I’m not homeless.” An early with a condescending dude at a bus station helps underline how Dale sees himself and his place in society. The man asks Dale, “how much do you make?” Dale, embarrassed, flounders and tells the man about the “two or three times” he made $400 in a day. The man keeps pressing and gets from Dale that his income is usually $1600-1800 a month. With a delighted smile the stranger says “that puts you beneath the poverty line.” Dale refuses to accept that he lives in poverty. In another scene Dale is caught by surprise by a woman mentioning that she’s cat sitting for extra money. It’s a world made up of John Steinbeck’s “temporarily embarrassed capitalists.”
As time grinds by in the film one of the things the movie makes clear is that despite living in the most populous city in the United States that Dale is functionally alone. His interactions with others are small, fleeting as his messenger work eats up all his time to not even get by. The individual we see Dale interact with most is his supervisor/dispatcher for the messenger service but unlike all of the brief, non recurring relationships we see in the film we never actually see the supervisor. He comes only as a disembodied voice through the phone directing Dale to his next drop or offering no support when Dale encounters a problem. We see Dale adrift in a cemetery trying to deliver flowers and anxious and activated over a dropped bottle of wine he’s supposed to be delivering. In each instance the supervisor is at best cool and indifferent but is usually lacing his direction with enough menace that Dale doesn’t feel he can ask for help.
The film depicts Dale’s declining health in the same way it’s experienced under capitalism. Dale can’t afford to be sick so initially we only catch glimpses or suggestions at the edge of frame. It eventually grows inescapable, unavoidable and because Dale doesn’t have access to proper healthcare it’s also unknowable. Something’s wrong; that’s all that he and we get to know as the film plunges into surrealist nightmare.
In the waning moments of FAILED STATE we hear an ad for diapers as a disabled, nonverbal Dale sits on a toilet. The ad for the diapers are a spiral. Are these diapers for those already chewed up by the system or those being onboarded as the next generation of victims? Coming back to that inescapable Pfizer billboard from the opening that promises science’s victory I think of everything and everyone who will lose. Science and capital wins but those scurrying in Manhattan’s glass canyons lose. A man lost in a cemetery loses.Dale’s sickness and collapsing health are a feature. They’re the fuel that allows a disembodied voice over a phone to treat this human as no more than a tool and logistical annoyance.
A certified banger and probably the best film about COVID in urban spaces.