Lessons Learned: HIGH MAINTENANCE (“Heidi”)

Instead of a straight review, this series of posts looks at what can be learned from watching with a critical, writing-focused perspective. First up, the fantastic web series, HIGH MAINTENANCE, created by Ben Sinclair and Katja Blichfeld. It also happens to be one of the Top Five Things I Watched in 2013.

Two things that stand out in “Heidi” are montage and brief detail shots:

Montage: In this, the second episode of Cycle One, the filmmakers are already creeping toward a more ambitious execution. Whereas the first episode mostly just aimed the camera at the characters talking, this second episode experiments with overlapping dialogue and a panning dollying tracking camera.

It’s smart. And efficient.

The first two minutes of the episode are a montage that establishes a budding hipster romance. Is using the long-maligned montage a necessary evil to bring the viewer up to speed in a 7-minute episode? I dunno. But it works here BECAUSE of the restlessness of the camera and overlapping dialogue. The filmmakers are just as itchy to get into the story as we (the laptop/smartphone gazers) are. So they make that montage active and packed with character-building minutiae. My favorite of which is…

Brief Detail Shot: …a brief shot of a stack of hipster/college books. They are:

The Omnivore’s Dilemma
Fight Club
Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs
The Art of War
The Complete Home Bartender’s Guide
The Complete Manual of Woodworking

Wanna try to be a worldly-ish 20 year-old? Throw these titles on your bookshelf. These are your cultural touchstones.

I LOVE this detail, these artfully stacked books. Because in a single shot, it pegs who this guy is. And he is the upper-middle class white kid with a bachelor’s degree from a private liberal arts school. Probably in English or History. Basically everyone I went to college with. I remember those years, living with those kids, BEING one of them. Reading those books and thinking, “HEY! I know how shit works now!” But really just staying pretty much as naive and dumb as before.

(Because wisdom comes from experience, right, not reading pop-lit and pop-psych best-sellers in your dorm room? That just gives you a veneer of wisdom, a faint scent of knockoff wisdom perfume. And more painfully “enlightened” drunk/stoned conversations. Those were the worst.)

I probably would’ve been duped by a cute, high-fashion homeless girl too. That’s why HIGH MAINTENANCE resonates with me. Because I’m the ideal audience, probably. It’s about me. Or enough facets of “me” that I connect with it. That specificity is amazing. Because while network or cable shows kinda have to aim for a large swath or the population and often hit no one, a web series can aim for a smaller specific audience. And nail it.

If you missed the review of episode one (“Stevie”), catch up here.