Little Spectacles: A Night of Resistance in a Crater Theater

The other night at the Clinton Street Theater, I watched my old college radio buddy Doug Dillaman achieve something genuinely subversive: he got people to drive 800+ miles to eat fake raw chicken in the dark while contemplating alien gut parasites. This is what victory looks like when you refuse to play the game.

Gut Instinct isn't just a film—it's a six-year act of creative resistance disguised as surreal sci-fi cinema. While Hollywood churns out $200 million spectacles about franchised superheroes, Doug spent those same years alone in New Zealand, hand-painting medical diagrams and assembling found footage into something that's simultaneously "informative" and "bat-shit insane" (actual audience feedback from his anonymous survey forms).

The premise sounds like a Negativland fever dream: after alien "badcrobes" invade human guts and puppeteer civilization into collapse, the fictional corporation Interself offers a purification program to free your mind and digestive tract forever. What follows is 84 minutes of psychedelic culture jamming that would make those '80s media manipulators proud—authority-spoofing British narration, real-world locations seamlessly integrated into fabricated corporate messaging, the whole falsehood sandwich served between slices of scientific truth.

With Gut Instinct, Doug didn’t just critique the system—he sidestepped it entirely.

The Beautiful Refusal

Coming from the music world, I recognize the aesthetic DNA immediately. If Doug's previous film Jake was made with a full band—calling in favors, coordinating cast and crew, navigating traditional production machinery—then Gut Instinct is pure bedroom producer territory. Six years of obsessive solo craftsmanship, layering samples and manipulating found sounds (in this case, medical footage and hygiene films), painting frame by frame in his home studio.

The budget? NZ$2,500. Which probably couldn’t buy coke spoons for a 70’s yacht rock recording session.

This isn't poverty filmmaking born from necessity—it's an intentional middle finger to an industry that demands you pitch committees, chase funding, and tailor your vision for market viability. Doug mentioned during the Q&A his casual approach to potentially pitching the New Zealand Film Commission for his next project, delivered with the kind of shrug that only comes from someone who's already proven he doesn't need their approval.

That shrug contains multitudes. It's the sound of someone who's found a way to make uncompromising art outside the machinery designed to compromise it.

Evading Recuperation

The truly brilliant thing about Gut Instinct is how it operates below the radar of cultural recuperation. The corporate machine that absorbs rebellion and spits out branded resistance can't figure out what to do with a guy who spends years painting medical diagrams for audiences that fit in a single theater. How do you franchise the experience of eating mystery candy while a trustworthy British narrator explains how alien microbes hijacked your dopamine receptors?

It's cultural steganography—hiding in plain sight by being too weird and personal to commodify. Like those hardcore punk scenes that stayed vital precisely because they resisted scaling up, Doug's work exists in that sweet spot where it's too niche to be profitable but too coherent to be dismissed.

The irony is delicious: he's made a film about parasitic alien manipulation through mass systems, but distributed it in a way that's completely immune to that same co-optation. The badcrobes in his story need scale to take over; his actual practice thrives by staying microscopic and essential, like beneficial gut bacteria maintaining the health of its cultural ecosystem.

The Constellation on Clinton Street

What made last night special wasn't just the film—it was watching this tiny constellation of connections light up the theater. Doug's Portland homecoming drew college friends, local collaborators, and dedicated film nerds who'd made a pilgrimage from Nevada. Kyle Bruckmann, another veteran of our '90s college radio cabal, provided additional music and sound design. The same experimental sensibilities we shared as DJs and musicians had evolved into this collaborative support network spanning decades and art forms.

There's something deeply satisfying about watching someone from your creative circle find their own path and stick with it, especially when that path involves rejecting every conventional wisdom about how creative work is supposed to function. Seeing Doug up there during the Q&A, fielding questions about his process while maintaining that casual "why wouldn't you spend six years making something nobody asked for?" attitude—it felt like watching the logical conclusion of everything we'd valued back in our college radio days.

The film nerds who'd driven from Nevada had that "quest objectives completed" glow, having successfully tracked down this rare cultural artifact. But for those of us with personal history, it was something else: proof that the weird kids from the music department had figured out how to stay weird in ways that actually matter.

Picnics in the Crater

The Clinton Street Theater itself felt perfect for this kind of gathering—a small venue that's survived by programming exactly the kind of content the multiplex can't or won't touch. We were having our picnic in the crater-like footprint left by the entertainment Behemoth, making something beautiful and human-scaled in the devastation.

Perhaps this is what “resistance” looks like in 2025: not grand gestures through aspirational protests, but personal acts of refusal. Choosing to spend six years on something small and perfect instead of chasing industry validation. Driving hundreds of miles for 84 minutes of experimental cinema instead of streaming whatever the Netflix algorithm serves up. Gathering in small theaters to support work that couldn't exist anywhere else.

The cumulative effect of all these small refusals might be more subversive than any recuperated performance, because it's harder to co-opt or commercialize. It creates alternative spaces where different values can actually be lived rather than just proclaimed.

As Doug's fictional narrator reminds us throughout the film: "Never trust your gut." But maybe the real message is the opposite—trust your actual gut, not the algorithmic one. Trust the instinct that says spending years assembling a film for tiny audiences is worthwhile. Trust the communities that show up to eat fake raw chicken in solidarity with a friend's vision quest.

Trust the small spectacles that evade recuperation by refusing to scale up.

Sometimes the most radical thing you can do is make something genuinely weird, keep it small, and let the right people find it. Last night, watching the constellation of connections light up that little theater, it felt like a glimpse of meaningful cultural resistance.

The Glare Zone

But I need to acknowledge something about my perspective here. Knowing Doug for decades creates what you might call a "glare zone"—the opposite of a blind spot. Where a blind spot is what you can't see from your position, a glare zone is what you see too clearly to notice anymore. I'm staring straight into the sun of creative lineage, so close to the source that I can't make out its actual contours.

What feels like "typical Doug" to me—the handcrafted distribution model, the six-year solo obsession, the casual shrug toward institutional validation—might actually represent a genuinely radical refutation of how creative work is supposed to function. The edible component of the purification kit isn't just a knowing wink but a psychosomatic anchor in a fully embodied media ritual. Kyle's synth work and Sarah's narration aren't just familiar voices but precision-cast instruments in a carefully orchestrated experiential environment.

All of that gets flattened into "yeah, that tracks" when you know the artist and their orbit.

Meanwhile, the interstate film nerds were wrestling the thing into coherence from scratch, doing epistemological triage: Is this real science? Are we supposed to eat this? Is this comedy? Is this a cult? Is the narrator joking? They were experiencing bottom-up processing—raw sensory input with no pre-existing schema. I was doing top-down analysis, interpreting through decades of accumulated context.

These convergent yet opposite approaches create a double parallax in the theater: I'm watching people experience the film as ritual participants, while also watching myself as someone related to its creative genealogy. My glare zone illuminates Doug's aesthetic consistency but might obscure just how genuinely disorienting and radical this looks to fresh eyes.

The stereoscopic view requires both perspectives: the insider who sees the creative DNA and intentionality, and the outsider who experiences the raw strangeness without the comfort of historical context. Together, they form a complete picture of what Gut Instinct actually accomplishes—a fractured mirror held up to mass systems, and also a lovingly assembled artifact of micro-scale defiance.

But there's one form of alignment that can obscure meaning even more completely than familiarity with form: total agreement with the film’s politics. Doug's critique of corporate wellness culture, his commentary on algorithmic manipulation and humanity's serotonin addiction, the whole apparatus of manufactured consent through "purification" programs—all of this maps so perfectly onto my existing understanding of how these systems work that it stopped registering as political content and just felt like... accurate documentation of reality.

Where a fresh viewer might be jarred into realization—"Oh god, we really do let unaccountable systems control our mental state, don't we?"—I guess I'm already past that moment of awakening. The alien badcrobes don't provoke alarm in me because their takeover method seems eerily reasonable given what I already know about media manipulation and biopolitical control. Doug didn't have to convince me of anything—he recognized me.

This is probably why the film works so effectively as resistance: it doesn't announce itself as activist cinema, nor waves ideological flags. Instead, it operates as a covert transmission, encoded for people already infected with the microflora of doubt. It bypasses traditional political cues in favor of parasitic plausibility, leaving first-time viewers uncertain whether they've been indoctrinated or inoculated. The badcrobes become a perfect metaphor for ideology itself—everyone's already infected with something, the question is just whether they know it.

The badcrobes want to control us through mass systems. The antidote is staying microscopic, essential, and genuinely nourishing to the communities that matter.

Gut Instinct demonstrates that success isn't measured in box office receipts—it manifests in the quality of connections made, the depth of experience shared, and the proof that another way of making and sharing art is not only possible but thriving in the craters left by the Machine.