Laura Parnes: County Down

County Down is a multi-platform project, combining web-based elements, a video installation, and a 70-minute feature film component. County Down explores an epidemic of psychosis among the adults in a gated community, brought on by a teenage girl’s invention of a designer drug. Mirroring rave culture and the unbridled optimism around technology during the 1990s, County Down presents a society so obsessed with novelty and consumerism that it euphorically embraces its own destruction. The film uses the structure of youth-culture media products, such as horror and science fiction movies, video games, and coming-of-age films as a barometer of cultural depression. In this live-action animation, reality and illusion intermingle, creating a highly stylized world of visual excess.

The multi-generational cast of downtown performers and artists includes: Chloe Bass, Becca Blackwell, Ellen Cantor, Patty Chang, Marti Domination, Nicole Eisenman, Jim Fletcher (New York City Players), Gibson Frazier, Daniel Graff, Andy Haynes, Stephane Mangloire, William Powhida, Emily Roysdon, Kate Valk (Wooster Group), Stephanie Vella, and Sacha Yanow. The soundtrack and musical arrangements are by Johanna Fateman (Le Tigre); and also include music by JD Samson (Men, Le Tigre), Wynne Greenwood (Tracy and the Plastics), Long Hind Legs, and Lesbians On Ecstasy. Costumes and styling are by GGrippo. 

The installation version includes eleven life-size cut out photographs (shot by Alice O’Malley). The cast of characters face visitors at the entrance of the space. In full makeup and costume, the cast creates a maze through which visitors must pass. A display case features early scripts and product development sketches, production materials such as green-screen stills and costume elements, providing a glimpse into the process of making County Down (initially titled Angel’s Appetite).

County Down is the story of Angel, a teenage resident of a gated community. She develops a designer drug with potentially apocalyptic side effects. The drug, called Quix, is the ultimate consumer product, highly addictive and cheap to produce. This substance is a relative of ergot, a rye contaminate responsible for St. Anthony’s Fire, inducing symptoms that include hallucinations and gangrene. It is also the fungus from which LSD is derived. Those that ingest the drug develop immunity but become unwitting carriers. Angel holds the key to the outbreak and its prevention – but her own debilitating addiction to both the drug and her self-made success clouds her judgment. Angel is intoxicated with power and enraptured by the disaster she set in motion. As Angel’s friends band together to fight the infected adults, their social order becomes more and more distorted. Consumption becomes addiction, which, in turn, hastens the spread of disease. As the authorities close in, Angel clings to her delusions ferociously.