Slater Bradley
by Claudine Isé
Walking into a Burger King, one enters a space that is, in a sense, both timeless and
placeless. Think about it: there are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Burger
King franchises across the globe, and each one looks, smells, and tastes pretty much like
all the others. Geographic location makes little difference. Burger King in fact strives
for predictability. Customers expect this sameness, even derive comfort from it, perhaps
because the world outside Burger King’s doors is changing and moving forward with
such unrelenting velocity.
At the time that Slater Bradley’s video loop Inside a Times Square Burger King
where the soundtrack is being played backwards was shot, Bradley, a recent transplant
from Los Angeles, was living in an apartment in Times Square. An avowed Disneyland-hater,
Bradley found to his chagrin that New York’s notoriously seedy neon-light district
bore a sinister resemblance to the hallucinatory phantasmagoria of the ‘Happiest
Place on Earth’ – a place that, as a child, Bradley was unwillingly dragged to
each year by his parents. In a profoundly ironic reversal, Bradley was forced to re-live
the childhood nightmare he thought he had escaped. One night Bradley wandered into a
Burger King and noticed that the restaurant’s piped-in music was inexplicably playing
backwards. Something about this bizarre technical glitch—and the fact that no one
else appeared to notice it--resonated with Bradley’s experience of Times Square, and
he decided to exploit the surreal absurdity of the moment by capturing it on tape with a
small, hand-held spy camera.
The tape opens with a shot of the ceiling speaker, whose tiny holes appear to be
expanding and contracting with a rhythmic, throbbing motion, as if it were breathing in
and out. The tape then cuts to a shot of an anonymous man (actually, Bradley himself)
eating his meal. The camera is positioned on the table across from him so that he remains
faceless with only his chest and arms visible. He reaches out for a bite of his hamburger,
wipes his mouth and fingers with a bunched-up napkin, takes a gulp of his soft drink, dips
a wan onion ring into plastic cup of ketchup, swallows, and wipes his hands, then repeats
this series of actions several times.
What gives this otherwise banal series of actions a distinctly uncanny quality are the
ghostly images that Bradley’s motions leave behind, which resemble the
"tracers" that people see after dropping acid. These hallucinatory effects are
in fact the result of some post-production hijinks on Bradley’s part. In the editing
room, he superimposed a second visual track onto the first, laying the second track three
frames behind the original so that in the final tape, bodies and objects in motion appear
to have "ghost images" trailing behind them, while static objects look normal.
Roughly mid-way through the tape, the audio and visual tracks abruptly shift gears.
Whereas previously the audio and visual tracks had run counter to one another, with the
audio playing backward and the visual track playing forward, in the second half of the
tape Bradley inverts their trajectories so that the visual track is reversed and the audio
track plays forward. At this point, we see the narrative doubling back on itself like a
Möbius strip. Time seems to be running forward and backward simultaneously, creating a
circular narrative structure that Bradley likens to a time-reversal mirror, a scientific
device that can reverse sound waves at the moment they occur. Adding yet another layer of
irony is the title of the song playing on the Burger King soundtrack: Always and
Forever, an early-80’s ballad by Heat Wave—the kind of "timeless love
song" that tends to be played over and over on the piped-in soundtracks of banks,
supermarkets and shopping malls.
The breezy casualness with which Bradley plays with time is in many ways a hallmark of
his generation, which tends to view time not as a given but rather as a mutable material
that can be stretched, squeezed, condensed or otherwise manipulated at will. Today we feel
compelled to distinguish so-called "real time" from "virtual" time
that is tape-delayed or altered in some way. Once, the desire to "turn back the
clock" was merely wishful thinking. Today’s consumer technologies have made the
possibility of time reversal commonplace, at least in the virtual realm. Twenty years ago,
the VCR put the ability to freeze, fast-forward or reverse time into the television
consumer’s hands; today, new technologies like TiVo continue to expand the
possibilities of controlling, eliding, or reversing time at our leisure. Bradley toys with
all of these possibilities at once.
In the end, however, Inside a Times Square Burger King where the soundtrack is being
played backwards is most effective in its portrayal of urban isolation and unsated
desire. It seems fittingly ironic that all this took place in Times Square, a place where,
until recently at least, a range of fantasies, predilections and perversions could be
fulfilled at any time of the day or night by anyone with a couple of bucks in his pocket.
The eloquent symmetry of Bradley’s tape ultimately returns us to the pathos of the
present, the sadness underlying the "real time" moments in which the video was
shot. At the core of Bradley’s narrative are the repetitive movements of a man eating
alone at night in a brightly lit restaurant in the middle of Times Square, alongside
dozens of other men doing the same who, for that moment at least, seem to share the same
fate as he.
