Short Stop: Tennis, Oranges made me contemplate life, death

Time is a flat circle. Particularly in the Chinatown setting of Tennis, Oranges, a strange and affecting stop-motion short from Sean Pecknold. Inspired by the time he spent on Chung King Road in Los Angeles's Chinatown, Pecknold's film explores loneliness, aging, and the search for connection from a unique angle, and with so much heart.

The film's protagonist is a robot vacuum who works in a hospital, but is getting fed up with its repetitive routine. It also doesn't seem to get on particularly well with some of the other objects in the hallway where we meet it -- both the plant and the garbage can are pretty short with it. (If you liked the rock scenes in Everything Everywhere All at Once, these interactions will tickle you, too.) So the vacuum quits, and sets out into the neighborhood, looking for meaning, connection, something. Maybe just the source of the music it could hear as it went about its workday, which leads it to a community center, and another lonely soul.

That soul is an elderly rabbit who sits alone, watching tennis, longing for the days when he was a dancer. Now, he isn't very mobile on his own. He has a pair of canes to help him. And now, a mechanical vacuum he can stand on, giving him a sense memory of when his body was more limber, when his movement was his own.

I've probably written about it here before (I definitely have on Letterboxd), but I have a deep fear of aging. It's hard to pinpoint what exactly it is that I fear. Part of it is certainly that there are so many things I want to do, so many places I want to go, and I know that I won't be able to. Hell, I'll never even watch all the movies I want to watch. But I also fear losing the ones I love. And losing myself. Losing my mobility, my mind, my memories. Watching people you love age and wither and die is so horrible, so inevitable. 

Just a few weeks ago, my grandfather passed away, but in some ways, it had felt like he was already gone. For the past few years, the man who had always been a huge personality -- brash, a jokester, gruff -- had started to wither, lost his mobility, moved into an assisted care facility. He was still there in body, and sometimes in mind, but in so many ways (maybe in so many more ways), he wasn't. It's hard to say what defines a person, what makes them them, but in a lot of cases, I think a big part of it is autonomy, agency, independence. Obviously, not everyone has the privilege of those things, but for those who do, the loss of them is a devastating blow, a deflation of the self.

That's what was weighing on me as I watched Tennis, Oranges play out, in its gentle depiction of lonely individuals finding strange connections with each other, letting them feel more like themselves, letting them remember who they were, maybe who they still are beneath the decay and the loneliness. I felt something like the heartbreak I feel when I see an old man sitting alone at a fast food joint. Immediately, I assume his wife of fifty years is dead, and he's eating by himself and missing her. (Heteronormativity is a hell of a drug.) Pecknold pokes right at the bleeding, beating empathetic heart of that feeling, when you see someone and want to reach out. Maybe you do.

Which is a bit funny in context, because ultimately, the vacuum also is, to a point, just kind of doing its job. When it rolls into the community center, it starts sweeping up all the crumbs on the floor, but by the end of the film, it feels a little more human, doing good deeds in the ways that it can, trying to right its wrongs. It's all very sweet, and just completely gorgeous. The rabbit puppets are particularly stunning, so detailed and articulate. You feel the burdens they carry, the history.

And watching them will likely put you in a reflective state of mind, just like it did for me. Maybe it'll make you think about the past, what you used to be able to do, what you never did. Maybe it'll make you think about the future, however bright or dreary that might look. Or maybe it'll ground you in the present, and make you want to appreciate each moment you have with the ones you love, especially those in their twilight years. All outcomes that make sense, in my book.