Treasure, also known as Treasure: The Search For The Golden Horse, is not a filmographeme in the usual sense, but a 1984 "puzzle by Dr Crypton".
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| I imagine Dr Crypton rubbing his hands together gleefully before exclaiming "fools! They shall never solve my devious puzzle!" |
I guess in the 80s there was no way to Stayvunpoast on /tv/ so the people entertained themselves trying to solve the location of a buried golden horse by watching Treasure and attempting to decipher any clues it might have contained. After literal minutes of research on Infogalactic I found that the solution to the problem remains contested and several people tried to sue the masterminds for their unclear or ambiguous clues.
However, who cares? For I suspect that Dr Crypton grasped what David Lunch did when he made Twin Peaks. The solution to the mystery can never be as satisfying as the mystery itself. In fact Treasure anticipates Twin Peaks in much of its bizarre-ass imagery including the cryptic Masonic references and creepy owls so characteristic of that early 90s puzzle. There is even a creepily masked party that seems like a foreshadow of Eyes Wide Shut.
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| This fuck with the umbrella must have been pored over so hard for clues. |
If any of this means anything though it will likely never be fully elucidated. Treasure, on the surface, is a fantasy of childlike wonderment about a young woman's search for her childhood horsey. The plot is unimportant and redundantly narrated by, I think, one of those classic trailer VO actors, but while most filmmakists might have seen this exercise as simply a gimmick to phone in as lazily as possible, for no reason at all the team behind Treasure created a striking work of montage cinema like a classic silent film, with ostentatious helicopter shots and an unreasonably good score in that synthy mid-80s vein. A VHS rip is uploaded on YT complete with those video scratches that complete that sense that you have stumbled on a lost artifact. The kinography is spoiled (or enhanced) only by what may at the time have been cutting-edge transitions that now look like the shit my generation used to put in Powerpoint presentations to pad them out in school:
I like to imagine this had the effect on 80s viewers that the train pulling into the station is said to have had in 1895.
Hilariously dated video effects aside, the overkill of audiovisual quality brought to bear for this production makes it worth the hour or so it will take you to watch it, and the subtle wholesome-as-a-mask-for-sinister vibes make it a compelling subject for the /x/-inclined and Lunch enthusiast alike.
