Recommendation | Sweeping Under the Rug

There are quite a few books that attempt to decipher what goes on in the mind of someone who is losing their sanity and connection to reality. It doesn’t always work. But in the film Linoleum (2023), written and directed by Colin West, an attempt is made not only to simulate what happens in such a mind, but also to show how, in some ways, it contains elements that affect us all and to give a beautiful and touching representation of the parts of our consciousness to which we no longer have access.

At the center of the plot of Linoleum we find Cameron (played by American comedian Jim Gaffigan) – a failed host of a children’s science TV show who is trying to fulfill his old childhood dream: to be an astronaut. So he tries to build a spaceship. Where? In the private garage of his suburban home. Only then, some strange events take place, which cause him to question his perception of reality: while he is busy fulfilling his dreams, his wife divorces him and his daughter experiences her first crush and the changes of adolescence. Moreover, his father’s dementia worsens, requiring him to take care of him and devote more attention to him.

On paper, the film seems to be handling an overload of crises, but watching it proves otherwise: all the crises—those of the daughter, of the father vis-a-vis his childhood dreams, of the wife vis-a-vis her husband, of a person vis-a-vis his father—are interrelated and echo one another. Because more than discussing a series of crises, the film deals with the link and similarity between all the crises, the link of these crises to the passing of time and to the expectations and disappointments of life itself.

But this is only one layer of the film. Against the backdrop of these earthly crises, the film also deals, all throughout it, with ideas of journeys through space and time, with the plot causing us, the viewers, to wonder – what is really going on here?

Then, at the height of the drama, it turns out that what I thought the film was trying to tell me is not it. I won’t go into any more detail, so that you can experience the whole range of emotions I experienced in front of the screen as well. I’ll just say that it almost caused me to have a minor crisis of faith, disappointment, and even frustration at the film’s creative almost-ruse. “Almost” because, unlike other films I’ve seen where I felt cheated because of too-big a plot twist, a revelation that changed everything I thought about the film up to that point, here something different takes place. So it’s only an almost-ruse. Instead of shattering illusions, the revelation helped to bring order to the chaos, answer the questions that arose during the viewing, and reinforce the foundations of the illusion in a way that creates heartbreaking perfection: All the lines, all the crises, a person’s entire life is presented as a single plot in which he plays all the roles, and converge in a single moment that is shattered into infinite pieces.

Then, one clear insight emerges: we don’t really need a spaceship to travel through space and time. All we need to do is dive into our consciousness.