Tales from the Loop, - Amazon Prime Video/ Amazon Original
Tales from the loop (2020) is an intriguing drama series from digital streaming service Amazon Prime Video. It's based on the art book of the same title from 2015, from Swedish artist-author Simon Stålenhag. The book's digital paintings introduce a unique special effect as they are animated into the series in a television first: digital painting to series conversion.
An overarching visual theme allows for the foundation of a binding mise-en-scène throughout the otherwise individual short story makeup of the series. Each singular episode answers to its own distinct narrative event and independent director. Which gives notable weight to the importance of set design and mise-en-scène at large, as well as to its single screen writer for the series’ preserved continuity.
Each episode focuses on a different story based on an event in the lives of individual characters. But these are interrelated and connected through the story's overarching premise. And episodes revolve around the mysterious sci-fi events that transpire in a fictional Mercer - Ohio.
Following the discovery of “The Eclipse”, its containment has been organised underground at the “Mercer Centre for Experimental Physics”, or “The Loop”: to uncover the unknown mysteries of science and the universe. The people that remain or have relocated to Mercer, are all in some way impacted by The Loop. Either by their work there, or by encountering remnants of its experiments, since scattered throughout the town and its surrounds. The Loop’s experiments and its scattered affiliate objects possess unusual powers over time, space, perception, emotion, and memory. And these are the general cause of a plethora of ruptures and reversals of the fundamental reality of the world.
Alongside this world incongruous to the laws of physics, are a population of robots. The robots have been brought to life directly from Stålenhag’s digitally created oil paintings. Within the series they exhibit a presence of sad grandeur, they are emotional beings and affected by the actions of others. They display pathos and exist as sentient beings in ways analogous to humans. They possess what Heidegger distinguished as the humane defining ‘being toward death’ experience of existence in relation to an understanding of the finite aspect of life.
The original art works of Stålenhag are befitting to the art movement of ‘retrofuturism’. They reflect upon a previously anticipated future by their presence within a past setting, i.e., speechless yet emotional sentient robots within rural 1980s Sweden. In the same way the robots are dramatised into the narrative structures of the series.
Among the morphed laws of physics found in the series' world, the most prevalent is the disrupted perception of the linearity of time, to that of a repetitive or circular existence. This alternative temporality echoes the retrofuturistic element with its coexistence of sentient robots and vintage aesthetic set design. Freud proposed the unconscious to be atemporal, or without a sense of time, i.e., fantasy and removed from our reality of time. Considering this the loop could be considered the unconscious within Stålenhag’s world.
The beauty of Tales from the Loop is in its derived sci-fi uniqueness from that of the artwork collection of its digital painter. The template of these works of Stålenhag’s is their freedom from sternly narrativised explanations. Which allows for the unreal experiences faced by the characters within the series to be each refreshingly new and unique.
Unlike classical sci-fi in which an array of fantasised experiences are faced along the journey of a group of characters and protagonists, Tales from the Loop is able to make each experience retain a more human relatableness by exploring various novel and theoretical human experiences. The Loop remains a specified though undepicted entity within the collection of Stålenhag, allowing the experience of his artwork the goal of implying what it itself might be. And as it is often in art, the unexplained mystery, also never specifically dealt with in the series narrative, allows much more room for the narrative, the characters, and our own projection into the story.
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