Baby Blue Benzo

By Sammi Gale

Centred throughout Sara Cwynar’s 21-minute film Baby Blue Benzo (2024), on view at The Approach, is the 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR – to date, the most expensive car sold at auction. As well as the phallic symbol, I mean, car, the title refers to ‘Benzos’ i.e. Benzodiazepines – Valium, Xanax – substances designed to soothe the central nervous system, to take the edge off the pressures of modern life. Between acquisition and anaesthesia, the film revolves around this pun (at times somewhat literally, via smooth circular dolly track shots; a round pill rolled between thumb and forefinger.) The fast car stands for consumer desire — and this in turn for rampant capitalism, it seems — while pharmacology offers a way to detach from its relentless, competing distractions; while one accelerates, the other is a chemical seat recline.

Baby Blue Benzo is a portrait of the visual cultures that shape our desire. When, in one scene, the artist herself appears in front of the Mercedes, any risk of self-portrait is immediately deflected as she lies down like One of Your French Girls, playing the girl-in-a-music-video-posing-in-front-of-an-expensive-car, refocusing the viewer’s attention on mediation itself. Underscoring the idea that it is not what is wanted but how and why, at one point Pamela Anderson is substituted for the Mercedes, as the voiceover glosses, ‘The referent is not Pam, it is just generalised desire.’ Another recurring image is a plastic, Playboy-esque, bunny-shaped money box with a vaginal coin slot in the back of its head so overdetermined that rather than, say, toys, sex, or money, it reads as, all of the above, as all the things you’re supposed to want – in theory. Dulled libido is a common side effect of benzos, after all. This is indeed ‘generalised desire’: want soup. With the work stealing the critic’s lines before she can formulate them, there is nothing left for me to do but relax and tune into its textures.

"the minimalist exuberance of the 2010s – baby blue, yes, but also millennial pink, quartz and harvest gold accents"

Nashville. Sierra. The film’s colour grading makes the names of classic filters arise unbidden. Its palette is the minimalist exuberance of the 2010s – baby blue, yes, but also millennial pink, quartz and harvest gold accents. The suspicion you may have accidentally fallen into an app is both reinforced and rebuffed by the scrolling animation and editing, which moves horizontally rather than vertically but is just as slick as Instagram’s UI. The visuals and voiceover share a kind of cut-up technique, perfect for dead-headed attention spans: granting permission to drift in and out, these non sequiturs conspire with moments of split-screen to evoke the experience of dual-screening. Some of the clips have Getty Images watermarks, as if to remind us that even our most private fantasies arrive pre-owned, licensed, and searchable. 

"our most private fantasies arrive pre-owned, licensed, and searchable."

The film’s essayistic mode is indebted as much to old school National Film Board of Canada documentaries as to the metanarrative mash-ups of Adam Curtis. At times, its politics seem overt. ‘Yes the planet got destroyed’, says the narrator at one point, ‘but for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for the shareholders and the captains of industry.’ While that sounds on the nose, the line is lifted from a Tom Toro cartoon originally published in The New Yorker. The film moves on to its next gambit too swiftly for the viewer to stop and unpack these layers of irony, brrm brrm. 

Combined with its mid-2010s aesthetic, these strategies occasionally edge towards the territory of ‘BreadTube’: the loose ecosystem of online video essayists that emerged in opposition to the alt-right and cyberlibertarian tendencies proliferating across YouTube. Beneath the conveyor belt of pin-up girls, dopamine decor and pseudo-Dada collage, however, the film carries a distinctly mournful undertow; it feels a baby bit blue. At one point, lines from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land – a modernist lament for cultural fragmentation and the collapse of shared meaning – are clipped into the voiceover almost as shorthand for the same contemporary condition. That anxiety feels as central to the work as the pharmaceutical antidote to it. As social life becomes increasingly individualised and fragmented, any coherent sense of a common reality feels like it is shrinking further and further away in the rearview mirror – with it, the collective frameworks on which democratic culture depends. In Cwynar’s telling, this fragmentation is not imposed through force or the violence of war, as in Eliot’s case, but willingly embraced through the soft seductions of the attention economy. 

"Beneath the conveyor belt of pin-up girls, dopamine decor and pseudo-Dada collage, however, the film carries a distinctly mournful undertow"

Today, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, X, etc. – they all increasingly resemble one another: whether you call them Shorts or Reels, every feed now collapses longform and short-form into the same infinitely scrollable interface. Social networks no longer feel especially social; they resemble personalised broadcast systems, closer to cable television than communal space. Yet unlike radio or television, which once provided at least the illusion of a shared cultural centre, algorithms segment audiences into niche interests and partisan viewpoints. Consensus dissolves.

Which leaves the film circling the more difficult question of what might still be worth wanting? The trouble with ‘generalised desire’ is it offers the sensation of wanting but detaches it from consequence, intimacy, or even preference. Everything gleams with equal intensity for a moment before dissolving back into the feed. Suspended between stimulation and sweet, sweet sedation, you are momentarily free from the friction of being a person who wants anything at all.