Bat City Marquee: FLIPPING OUT

Bat City Marquee is a column where the Hyperreal Film Club editors check in on the wide world of new Austin-made videos and films. To submit a video for consideration, drop us a line at hq@hyperrealfilm.club 📼

Once upon a time, there was an era called — let me see if I’m pronouncing this right — February of 2020 [wind whistles through trees, montage people having grand lightbulb moments, human spectacle and tragedy zoom {lower-case “z”} unabated through space and time, love and disappointment and growth persist]. For us here at Hyperreal Film Club, that meant the eighth and what would have been the final issue of our treasured VHS zine under the direction of beautiful humans and friends Ben Lee and Andreina Byrne. Dust to dust, though, and annals of time — that final issue, fittingly centered around a prescient (if we do say so) CONSPIRACY theme, was consigned to the scrap heap of viral history. But HARK! Some sparks yet remain! We’ve got one of them here today, the absolutely charming, energized, and stylish Flipping Out from podcaster, artist, writer, all-around wonderful human Bailey Moore and co. Take a look and then check out our thoughts and some context below!

One of our favorite things here at Hyperreal has always been proof that you can make a damn fine film with minimal equipment (in this case, just an iPhone!), a great idea, some good friends, and pure moxie. Y’all, let me present Exhibit A! Flipping Out takes a deceptively simple premise — a man wakes up one day to find that every quarter he encounters continuously flips, falls, or sits heads up — and weaves it into a tale of Lovecraft-level cosmic madness by way of Minnie the Moocher-style vibes and mood accentuated by first-time film scorer Cullen Moore’s excellent soundtrack. Filmmaker Bailey Moore gives some great context around the conspiracy explorations that led to the creation of the film:

“A popular conspiracy theory is the Mandela Effect where groups of people remember an event happening differently than how it actually occurred, and the alternate memory is referenced as proof of alternate realities. What if the universe began to gaslight one person by dropping him into an alternate reality where the rules of probability no longer applied to coin flipping? No amount of data would ever convince him that a quarter shouldn't land tails up half of the time.”

In addition to the fascinating and tightly constructed in-world Twilight Zone-esque vignette, this film also presents us with one of those very specific out-world snapshots: a pre- and post-shutdown time capsule. Bailey and co. shot this film the week before the first lockdown started up and post occurred during the first weeks of what ended up to be a year-plus of full-on quarantine. It’s a testament both to how we change and how we stay the same; conspiracy theories have taken on a new weight and timbre over the past year, but bias and echo chambers and mistrust and, occasionally, prophetic thought have been with us forever. Sometimes all it takes is the flip of a coin to pull that last thread and unravel the fabric of a tenuous reality.