Dolls have been one method used in the past to talk about personal trauma when the victim has trouble finding the words. Tim Odonnell and Sam Oldmeadow’s touching documentary “The Last Yztari” shows how AI can be used as a tool for good by its trauma victim central subject.
Until 2007, film subject Mary Dague served as part of the U.S. Army’s Explosive Ordinance Disposal Corps. In other words, she was with the Army Bomb Squad in Iraq. The attempted disposal of a particularly large IED ended with the device going off. Dague lost both her arms in the resulting explosion. That injury made her somewhat fortunate. The explosion’s force killed every soldier standing behind her.
Physical therapy, raising a dog, and having a supportive husband named James (who’s also in the U.S. Army) did their part in helping Dague deal with the physical aspects of her traumatic experience. But what they couldn’t do is provide a good outlet for venting such emotions as the way things stay the same yet feel totally different or the little daily irritations.
Yet the film subject’s previous attempts at writing a book about her experiences have been fruitless. The task is not impossible, as seen in a moment later in the film when the doctor who treated Dague’s injuries reads his unapologetically unpolished account of the explosion that took the film subject’s arms. But Dague felt she lacked the right words to express her feelings and experiences. The solution would utilize two of Dague’s passions: science fiction and fantasy…and video gaming.
Dague, with the help of a friend named Bryce and the use of AI, translates her traumatic experiences into the apparently titular story. One of the weaknesses of Odonnell and Oldmeadow’s film is its apparent vagueness on how Dague and Bryce came to work with AI. How was the decision arrived at? Why do they not need to worry about token burn in experimenting with constructing their fictional world? At least a shot of a color-coded chart and a character design discussion suggests the two are doing more than going with whatever the AI builds from scratch in this fictional world.
Dague’s story may use the trope of the last of a race of warrior protectors coming into their power. But given that the ultimate aim of this project is not originality but artistic therapy for Dague, it works for the ex-EOD specialist’s purposes. For example, facets of a personal trauma from Iraq could be spread out among several characters to make facing the trauma manageable. One particular line in the work goes “You were never meant to carry this alone.”
The warrior-protectors in Dague’s fictional universe are known as the Yztari. Each Yztari is mentally connected in a gestalt known as the Digital Artificial Neural Intelligence, or DANI for short. With protagonist Zia possibly being the last of her kind, DANI is in fragments. Zia doesn’t appear to be conscious of DANI’s presence, but this AI offers the warrior such subliminal morale building mantras as “Remember, you survived this. That was you.” Those words come in handy in a scene where Zia’s fallen off a cliff face to her apparent death.
Odonnell and Oldmeadow’s film presents some snippets from Dague’s work. One involves the start of Zia’s final test: returning home barefoot through a dense forest. Another is a race to save the lives of a comrade’s relatives. But the film never specifies whether this work will ultimately become a book or a game.
On the other hand, the emotional heart of “The Last Yztari” isn’t the AI project but seeing how Dague lives a satisfying life. She still plays video games by using her toes to operate a controller. A sequence where Dague explains where she got her “nubs” (her nickname for the remains of her arms) to a younger niece is age-appropriate and warm-hearted. Even though Dague knows what James will be facing during an Iraq deployment, she still has the military wife’s worries about her soldier spouse coming back in one piece.
The openness of the gaming community also plays its part. When Dague appears at a gamers’ convention, the other attendees don’t pity her for lacking the right limbs to play a video game. They see her as someone who has shown her bodily losses don’t prevent her from becoming a skilled player. In fact, several con-goers see Dague as an inspirational figure.
Most importantly, James’ support and shared passion for video games and fantastic fiction has helped the film’s subject stay happily married to him for over a decade. Footage of their Super Mario Brothers-themed wedding will make a few viewers smile. What a refreshing change for Dague from the former boyfriend who put down her playing video games as weird.
To this viewer, it ultimately doesn’t matter if Dague’s project ultimately gets professionally published. She has a creative outlet that helps her find her emotional truths from her wartime experiences.
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Giovanni Troilo’s observational documentary “Life Beyond The Pine Curtain – America The Invisible” might be an antidote to prior nuance-free media depictions of lower-class American life. It’s a film more interested in illuminating these previously unshown lives in detail and letting viewers make their own judgments on the images shown.
Among the white East Texas denizens whose lives are peered into by Troilo’s camera, a viewer will see such figures as an oil rig worker, a civic booster, and a snow cone businessman. Writer Joe R. Lansdale’s voice can often be heard on the soundtrack. This East Texas-based writer uses the region as a regular setting for his novels, from which he reads excerpts from several of them in the film. For the curious, the Lansdale books heard from include the Hap and Leonard novel “Bad Chili,” “The Thicket,” and “Sunset & Sawdust.”
The time period covered by the film appears to be the year 2024, as there is an extended scene involving one of the Orange Dementia Patient’s hate rallies. Such holidays as Independence Day, Halloween, and Christmas aren’t necessarily touched on in chronological order.
Interestingly, the small town Texans don’t treat Troilo and his crew with the semi-expected hostility usually afforded non-right wing media in this country. This writer’s suspicion is that the film crew were treated as a curiosity given how far they had come. It’s a small puzzle how Troilo and his people kept it together when one guy is caught on camera knowing that a country called Italy exists but not where in the world it’s located.
Yes, the East Texans seen in this film live down in some respects to old canards about red state types loving their guns and their Bibles. There’s a jaw-dropping shot of one subject’s assault rifle casually parked in a hallway near some children’s shoes. In another scene, a couple is reading the Bible in their bedroom. There’s even a scene at a small shooting range where a conversation about Psalm 144 is had before shots are fired.
Oil derricks seem to be the Texas version of windmills. Not only are there shots of lines of derricks as well as a derrick decorated with a Christmas message, but there’s even a lone derrick pumping away in a forest.
Also predictably, Troilo’s film shows the viewer at least one supporter of the Orange Dementia Patient. It’s the snow cone businessman, who’s so glued to a broadcast of an Orange Tyrant rally that he sings along to a bathetic “patriotic” song.
Yet beyond the expected sights, Troilo’s camera captures some small unexpected moments of beauty and even joy. An uprooted tree has toppled into a river. A girl’s violin practice turns into an improvised duet with her guitar-playing brother. The ground of the aforementioned shooting range seems carpeted with shell casings. An aerial shot of a road running through a forest resembles a river running between walls of high green cliffs.
The last word should probably go to the devastating Lansdale quote in the film that begins “None of us was happy in East Texas.” There are thoughts of getting out of the area. However, such unhappy folks were stuck to the land like trees because they couldn’t conceive of anything in the world beyond wetlands and woods.
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Neither Diamond Reynolds nor Darnella Frazier expected to have historical greatness thrust upon them. Reynolds noticed her phone lacked sufficient storage capacity for filming a video. Frazier was just using her smartphone’s video to bear witness to yet another case of white police officers brutalizing a Black man. But because both women’s subjects died violently at the hands of the cops, Philando Castile and George Floyd became household names. Yet the moments that put these two women in the right place at the right time ultimately did nothing to better their lives.
Another bitter irony from those life-changing moments was that both women had their hopes in cops heeding the better angels of their nature brutally dashed. Reynolds thought that the sights of her smart phone out and on as well as the presence of a 4-year-old child would suffice to de-escalate the situation. Frazier initially didn’t want to believe she had just recorded a man being murdered by police officers in front of Cup Foods.
The general overlooking of Reynolds’ and Fraser’s lives after their videos gained worldwide fame turns out to be one of the subjects of Jennifer Holness and Sidney Fussell’s disturbing Centerpiece film “#WhileBlack.” Other subjects covered in the film include social media profiting off public tragedies, Black community mutual aid, and the possibilities of restorative journalism.
Nobody is arguing that the videos weren’t effective in drawing attention to these racist crimes. Reynolds’ use of the then unknown Facebook Live feature to broadcast Castile’s murder as it was happening made this Meta product a household name. In the roughly two weeks after Frazier posted the video on YouTube showing the killing of Floyd, her video garnered 1.4 billion views. Yet from another angle, the film argues that this success in attracting eyeballs comes at the cost of continually reminding the dead person’s survivors of the worst day of their lives.
Social media companies certainly profited handsomely from those videos. For example, Meta made $57 million off ads which used images from the video depicting Floyd’s killing. One problem is that this figure includes revenue from ads which promoted a diametrically opposed message to Frazier’s original point that “cops killing civilians is a really bad thing.” The other, bigger problem is that neither Reynolds nor Frazier ever received a dime of compensation…even though they were the creators of the wildly popular videos. It’s yet another case of white people financially making out like bandits on the backs of Black people’s work.
Then again, even money would not have sufficed to repair the personal harms visited on both women in the wake of Castile’s and Floyd’s deaths. Reynolds’ grief at Castile’s death wasn’t publicly acknowledged because she wasn’t formally married to him at the time of his demise. Yet Reynolds’ daughter still smells the gunpowder from the gun that took Castile’s life. The girl is also heavily into any social media…except Facebook. Frazier, on the other hand, was publicly scapegoated for the occurrences of the #BlackLivesMatter street protests and the rioting. All the special journalism prizes she received couldn’t compensate her for the reality that her old life in Minneapolis was destroyed when she was only 17. Even as recently as last year, the sight of a George Floyd mural still triggers dark thoughts in Frazier.
That Frazer and her family avoided suffering physical harm during this time could not be credited to local cops attempting to restore their good name. Those honors go to Jamil Jackson and his Minnesota Freedom Fighters. Not only did these Black community uncles protect the Fraziers, but they also wound up protecting people who had been receiving threats for complaining about police brutality. On top of that, during the day the group supplied food and other necessities to people left homebound by store closures and street protests.
What the Minnesota Freedom Fighters unfortunately can’t do for their community is protect the videos that sparked the Black Lives Matter protests. These videos may be important historical documents, but they’re unfortunately the IP of the social media platforms used to broadcast them to the world. That reality raises the uncomfortable thought that Mark Zuckerberg’s people now have the uncontrolled power to erase a historical record they don’t like.
So where do the survivors of police killing victims go to move forward from the worst day of their lives? A promising step might be reclaiming the life lost to police brutality. The Second Draft project, a joint venture of USC Annenberg and USC Digital Repository, uses interactive interviews to acquaint viewers with details about the life of a person whose life was cut short by violent cops. One can only hope for its success.
(“The Last Yztari,” “Life Beyond The Pine Curtain – America The Invisible,” and “#WhileBlack” are still available to stream online until June 7, 2026.)
