Thoughts on Petscop
November 1, 2024
Random thoughts dump, not particularly organized or trying to make a specific point. No spoilers for anything other than themes that get revealed in like episode 2, and the general concept of the videos containing hidden secrets.
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Finished watching Petscop (only 7 years late lol), and… hmm. Overall I enjoyed it and it had a great atmosphere, but am pretty dissatisfied.
In terms of telling a story, I think I have a lot of it figured out (including what happened to Paul in the later episodes and why he keeps playing but stops narrating) and could probably write a lot about it, but tons of stuff is completely unexplained in a frustrating way. It's far beyond the level of “leaving some things vague so your brain can fill in the rest”, because there's so little to grasp onto for the things that I was most curious about. And it feels like there's zero gradient between “basically everything about this is explained once one fits the pieces together” and “literally nothing about this is explained” which is the most frustrating part, I want some things that are partially explained. The hidden things I noticed helped in explaining a lot, but not enough unless I somehow missed a staggering amount of secrets. I especially have zero clue about the ending of 23 and the ending of the soundtrack, and there's so many throughlines just completely unresolved.
And if it's treated as an abstract thing to inspire further thought rather than telling a concrete story, it does a very poor job conveying what it actually wants you to think about other than “the general concept of child abuse and trauma”. Have no clue what to pull out of it because the concrete events don't really inspire *that* much deeper thought, and the vague events are so vague there's nothing to latch onto to begin a train of thought. I guess stuff about (metaphorical) rebirth and overcoming trauma—or the fear that trauma is so deep that it's impossible to overcome.
I dunno, I just really don't like works where I'm basically grasping at straws to get themes and interpretations out of it, and any interpretation I come up with never connects with even a small majority of the pieces. At that point I cannot in good faith credit the work itself, since it's basically just me doing normal philosophical thought independently of anything else instead of getting anything out of the media.
I generally avoided reading any theories or anything other than the videos and descriptions (although I did find all the old versions of the channel description), but I did read this interview[1]. And wow, it being inspired by David Lynch really cemented and explained my feelings. My thoughts about Petscop very much mirror my thoughts on Eraserhead: intriguing and generally very enjoyable to watch, but other than *very* vague ideas about fears of parenthood, large swaths of the film are basically just nonsense with no way to interpret them that feels satisfying. I'm not a believer in you have to follow whatever interpretation the creator intended, but I also think interpretations are generally crap and completely unsatisfying if they don't even cover ⅕ of what's actually depicted.
Although now mostly I'm irritated that, based off of that interview, there very is likely material that was recorded that would help explain the things I'm frustrated about but then he never released it to make it “more mysterious”. Just bugs me that a lot was actually fully planned out and created, but then cut from release at the last minute.
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