I Pass For Human

I Pass For Human (2004)
Written and Directed by Chris D.
Starring Eleanor Whitledge, Joshua Cox, Eva Scott, Jennifer Ciesar, Mary Woronov, Bryan Small

Includes the short film Le Ciel de Sang (1972)

Sometimes a film catches your eye because the person responsible is a cultural mainstay. Chris D. has been a major creative force operating under the radar as a staff writer and label worker for Slash Magazine and Records in the late 70’s, frontman for the Flesh Eaters and Divine Horsemen through the 80’s and as a film essayist and worker at Los Angeles’ American Cinematheque through the 90’s and beyond. His style has always been submerged in the violent grittiness of American pulp and the twisted shadows of foreign horror films; I Pass For Human certainly strives to bring these worlds together in a coherent package.

It becomes immediately apparent that to make it through feature you’re going to have to care enough about Chris D. to watch. The person who loaned this to me (after I saw it had been released and suggested he check it out) told me that when it started he immediately knew to just turn the commentary on and let it rip, but I felt obliged to watch the movie unadulterated the first time through. So I swallowed the shaky hand-held cheap digital video and poor sound and watched.

This is the seedier side of Hollywood crawling with wannabes and has beens struggling to keep their hand in the pot as they disintegrate. Jane (Eleanor Whitledge) is a helpless nervous wreck who has tired of watching her boyfriend Dax (Bryan Small) slip further into heroin addiction. Lucky for her she doesn’t have to wait long before he overdoses, and Jane finds herself lost and alone with only Dax’s circle of crumbling junkies to turn to for support, including his half-sister Mila (Jennifer Ciesar) who politely clears out all of Dax’s remaining dope after his passing.

Mila may not be the nicest or most giving person in the world but she does have the presence of mind to leave a line of smack on the mirror and promises to arrange a meeting between Jane and a friend who recently lost his girlfriend to an overdose. On her own sadness prevails and Jane experiments with her first desperate taste of heroin and with her first bad drug experience. She discovers a room in the basement she had never noticed before and catches a man painting a portrait, but when she tries to speak with him he explodes from his seat and she hits the ground, losing consciousness. The man is gone, she’s running back to her apartment, and the only thing that seems wrong is the blood smeared across the back of her neck.

When she comes to the next morning there’s a strange man standing above her bed. How the fuck did he get in here? The door was open, the TV blasting, which doesn’t mesh well with Jane’s memory but when he introduces himself as Rick (Joshua Cox), Mila’s friend, she shrugs off the unexplained and they go out for coffee to talk about their dearly departed. While Jane seems to have spent years watching Dex succumb to the rocknroll lifestyle Rick’s story is a rapid ride into mania. He met his girlfriend Azami (Eva Scott) at a party and they shoot off like bottle rockets. The sex is great but her habit of unexplained disappearances start to grate until Rick follows her on the rounds one day, watching Azami cop downtown before taking the junk to a hillside house. Through the window he watches as Azami shoots up an older man in a stripped and decaying home, but his confrontation later that evening only reveals his weak will. It’s her ex-husband, and she can do what she wants. And eventually Rick begins to do what she wants, sharing her habit, up to the very night she dies while they’re visiting her parents.

The depressing conversation and Jean’s own weakness soon leads to her asking for a little smack, and Rick becomes the first person to shoot her up. It hits hard and she staggers out of the house hallucinating that Dax is leading her into a crackpark, then hallucinating that hands are reaching up from the ground to grab her. Trying to get home Rick and Mila find her on their way to score at the neighborhood drug bar and Jean finds herself along for the ride, shaking her head but unable to bring herself to leave. Somewhere between the sudden loneliness and the numbing of the heroin she’s rapidly following her boyfriend’s footsteps.

Jean’s only confidant outside of this circle of losers is Dax’s former rehab councilor, Dr. Larraz (Mary Woronov), who tries her best to keep Jane from developing an addiction. The doctor, a former addict herself, reacts to Jane’s tales of hallucinations and the fact that, towards the end, Dax was beginning to see ghosts of the recently departed junkies he called friends. She had developed a theory long ago that dead addicts feed off the living ones, clinging to a half-life between the living and the dead where habituals spend so much of their time.

But there’s no room in a rehab center and Jane’s mother is traveling Europe while her sister’s locked in a mental ward. She keeps hanging out with Mila and Rick despite complaining constantly that she needs to get away from them. She keeps getting high and she’s starting to see more dead people, ghosts she never knew alive. But the worst thing is Mila and Rick see them too, and they seem resigned to the fact that their lives are no longer their own.