I can’t remember a time when I felt that uncomfortable for that long. These two pieces were truly unsettling, and I’m not really looking forward to where my dreams go…but, things can’t be unseen.

For the first two pages of “Autopsy Report,” Lia Purpura describes, with life-like imagery, dead bodies. She juxtaposes the animate with the lifeless when she says things like: “[a]nd where the bullets passed neatly through, the pattern when his shirt’s uncrumpled: four or five holes like ragged stars, or a child’s cut-out snowflake,” and “the blue earring, a swirled lapis ball in the old man’s yellowed ear, his underwear yellowed, his sunken face taut” (1-2;2). Death is talked about with such nonchalance. In the end of her essay, the real meat of it, humans’ fragility is so expertly, and delicately outlined; it terrified me. She basically says that, looking at all the living people in the rain, walking to their cars in the supermarket parking lot, she got the same feeling she did when looking at the bodies being autopsied.

“Dust Off.” (Just to be clear, I know that I’m supposed to cite specific examples with timecode, but there’s no way in hell I’m opening that video again. It made me feel awful in a way that I just can’t get back into; watching it once was bad enough. I’ll do my best to approximate.) I don’t know quite what it is about this video essay that made it so gut-wrenchingly disturbing. I guess maybe it’s the fact that it’s six-and-a-half minutes of the stuff nobody wants to think about. Ever. Made especially harrowing being set to that music–the punchy, aimless piano, the staccato, forlorn acoustic guitar–the image of the three, snow-covered children’s swings, abandoned for the winter set a grim tone for the essay. The images sort of tell a story, clue the viewer in on a theme for each section. For “One,” we’re shown whipping, bitter cold winds, and a lifeless tree stretching its branches up against a bleak, gray sky. The narration tells us about a boy whose lungs “froze” after inhaling a substance, made for cleaning camera parts, in a dark room, the tree symbolizing his ruined bronchioles; the near-changeless time lapse forces the viewer to feel, to really think about how long that kid died for. In “Two,” we lapse from night to day, and watch the lights of airplane after airplane file in line, speeding along through the air as we hear about the second boy from high school who raced to his death in the dark. Just like the airplanes, he fell in line. Being primed as we were by the images, I dreaded the third story. The water lead me to believe that this was going to be a tale of a drowning. It wasn’t the water that Bresland was going for, though, but the calm fluidity of this third boy’s death; how he must have slipped out of this world without even knowing he did.

Purpura could paint us pictures of the dead, keeping us at a distance, until she finally closed the gap by then applying the same colors and textures of the dead to living people. Bliss, Bresland, Shapiro, Dieterich, and McDonas worked in concert to get right into the minds of the viewer and prime his thoughts toward a specific idea, feeling, or realm. Both were done so well I should talk to a therapist.