I recently watched the whole movie because it is largely set and shot in Alamogordo, New Mexico. This is where our protagonist—weapons scientist/beekeeper—tends to his bees and loses his mind and dies and is reborn into God’s eye. If the film had not been set and shot in my hometown, I would have clicked away after two minutes. But Wax proves to be a fairly remarkable travelogue about Southern New Mexico. Though the protagonist (played by director David Blair) dons a beekeeping suit throughout the film and works for some fictionalized amalgamation of NASA and the military, he wanders through all the actual SNM tourist hot spots: White Sands, Carlsbad Caverns, the Museum of Space History, Trinity Site, the Sunspot Observatory, various crumbling adobes, desert, mountains, etc.
Even if you don’t know these places intimately, you understand that Blair is working in the mode of nonfiction, representing trips to actual locations, even as he fictionalizes their purposes, his yarn growing increasingly absurd. He skewers the standard SNM tour with straight-faced Monty Python-esque foolishness. As a local, this is wonderful to watch. For decades, Big City folks have done exactly this, wandered around us in alien antennae and atomic bomb t-shirts, picking up on only the shallowest details of the myths they’re chasing, the people they’re plowing through. Blair, a New Yorker turned Parisian, at least seems hip to the joke.
Blair’s matter-of-fact, first-person voice-over fuels Wax, and it sounds by turn like memoir, travelogue, ancestral narrative, cultural criticism, astrology poetics, and religious testimony, with more than a little bit of the intimate-but-sweeping historical pastiche Ken Burns put on the map with the PBS release of The Civil War in 1990. Blair relates the story of the first test of the atomic bomb using the same naïve monotone that he uses to relate the story of Mesopotamian bees harnessing television to communicate with the dead, or the story of the dead living on the moon. From a distance, in Blair’s monotone, all these things sound equally likely and unlikely. The sprinkling of truth into fictions, and vice-versa, destabilizes. The viewer becomes less concerned with tracking narrative than with keeping a foothold in reality, which is another way of saying the movie cares less about immersing you in its plot and more about making you question the narrative of your own life. After my first viewing of Wax, the only thing I could for sure peg as bullshit was the narrator’s claim that he ended up in Alamogordo because his grandparents, in search of the world’s last real cowboys, had willingly honeymooned there. I have never encountered honeymooners in Alamogordo. And, for their sake, I do not hope to.