Tight Lines (1999)

By now I had done a soap opera, a sit-com and a news magazine and I thought I was basically done with my media investigation when I stumbled upon a fishing format that BBC broadcasted. It was astonishing.

The playful tension between the two men was easily eroticised and I thought this format should be tried out as well. At the same time I had, like everybody else, read some Lacan that was hugely popular at the time. The idea of using the three stages of the infant and primal separation would be an interesting dramaturgical model to use. Lacan state, me simplifying grossly here of course, that there is three levels of separation for the infant starting from birth with the symbiotic period that usually stops around 6 month when the separation from the mother occur and the baby find itself in the "real".

Neither symbiotically attached to the mother nor participating in any symbolic order, this real period is short and painful. However already by 7-8 month approximately the language takes from and this is when the symbolic order - or patriarchal order - start. It was easy for the actors to work with this as task. Most of the scenes are improvised but the settings are carefully chosen in a symbolic manner. Paul Monday and Anders Mossling interpret the two figures one literality mediating the other. Everything was filmed outside of Gothenburg in Sweden in and around Paul Monday's father in laws house. The father, artist Gunnar Thoren appears himself as the (not so) symbolic father in the last film.