Here are a few key details about this week’s recommendation.

Director: Julio Torres
Writer: Julio Torres
Cast: Julio Torres, Tilda Swinton, RZA
Synopsis: An immigrant’s only hope to stay in the country is earning the sponsorship of an erratic art critic.
Genre: Comedy, whimsical
Resources: IMDb, Where to stream

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An immigrant’s only hope to stay in the country is earning the sponsorship of an erratic art critic.

→ Whimsical stuff. If you aren’t familiar with Julio Torres’ work (Los Espookys is a fan favorite), this is important. His filmmaking is overwhelmingly whimsical, surreal, offbeat.

→ Bleak bureaucracy, through the lens of a sketch comedian. Julio Torres does for immigration what The Apartment did for corporate life in the 1950s. He makes the experience legible through comedy. However, the method with which Torres gets there is far less conventional than most.

→ Design. There’s something similar about Boots Riley pictures, like I Love Boosters, and Julio Torres’ work. The surreal comedic tone, their eye for peculiar design, and tendency to use practical effects to emphasize the weird.

We’ve all heard the story of the man in a race against the clock to succeed as a toymaker before the immigration system literally erases him, who therefore is forced to work at an artist cryogenics facility in order to secure the sponsorship of Tilda Swinton. It’s like. Can the TV and film industry put out anything original anymore? Enough with the remakes and rehashes and reimagining.

Just kidding. Obviously.

That he managed to cast Tilda Swinton as a most horrid character, hopelessly obsessed with and clinging to a dated piece of fictional software called FileMaker Pro. That he managed to use a broken immigration system as a canvas for one of the most colorful, inventive, and weird films of the last decade. That he pulled these things off is probably about what you’d expect, if you’re at all familiar with Torres’ previous work.

Most of all, Julio Torres’ feature length debut, Problemista, feels deeply like an extension of the writer-director’s personality and worldview shaped by his own experiences as an immigrant. Your author submits that the way this film feels, this is exactly what makes the filmmaking medium so very special.

A fact or two about the production that makes you say “oh, neat.”

FISH.

Kill as many goldfish as you want. 

Just don’t flush them down the toilet. Not if you know what’s good for your wallet. Not if you’ve heard of PetRight’s 30-day guarantee.

Keep the dead fish in a Zip-Loc baggy. Plastic swallowing them whole for all to see. Bring them back to the store you bought them from. PetRight will collect the carcasses and, in their place, dispense new fish for you to kill. In that gas chamber you call an aquarium. Water toxic and green with algae and nitrates and nitrites and ammonia in startling concentrations. Slowly strangling whatever fish was unlucky enough to end up in the net of the stoned PetRight clerk working that afternoon.

Take the dead fish back to the PetRight they came from, and you’ll get your five dollars back. Walk into the store once a week with a bag of carcasses and the clerk will take them, no questions asked. They’ll vanish to the back and return empty handed. You can ask them what they do with all these dead fish. And they’ll explain it, that PetRight freezes deceased animals (fish, birds, hamsters, guinea pigs, lizards, snakes). They’ll freeze them right in the back of the store.

Once a month, a driver in an unmarked, refrigerated van pulls around the back of the store. A thankless job. A job that pays just enough for employees to survive and suffer. No more, no less. Less pay would be a blessing, because we could just fucking die already. More pay would be a blessing, because we could actually live. This just-right wage is a form of torture. The same way a toxic aquarium so slowly snuffs out fish, forcing them to live through the misery with fits and bursts of breathable air occurring between ammonia spikes.

At least the job is easy. 

Drive to a store. Slide open the side door of the van. Wait until the store manager shows up with a blue apron and an over-starched button down underneath. Take the flimsy Bill of Lading stuck on a peeling clipboard. Review the death counts of each species. Wait for the glassy-eyed fish clerk to load them into the vehicle. Their transitional lenses darkened from the sunlight. Their pony tail, tangled wires greasy and glistening. Make sure all this happens quickly enough to maintain frost in the back of the van. To keep the dead animals from thawing and stinking up the van. Keys, ignition, drive off to the crematorium for drop-off. Rinse, repeat. 

It’s an easy job.

I spend the evenings at the pub down the street from my house. The house I can barely afford, if not for splitting the rent with a few other odd-jobbed friends. The house that was falling apart like a dog toy, chewed up, spit out, colors fading and frayed at the edges.

At the bar, people often ask me what I do. If I want to make a friend, I just tell them I’m a delivery driver and talk about the Mets game. If I want to be alone, I tell them the truth.

Well, not the whole truth. The whole truth is that I’m something of an entrepreneur. A self-made man. But the whole truth is a recent development. The whole truth is something I’m not sure how to talk about yet.

My brother went to business school. Moved to Silicon Valley after he graduated. One of those guys whose AirPods live rent-free in his ears. He’s always going on and on about the value of competitive advantage. Core competencies. Differentiation.

James, he says. You’re never gonna succeed if you don’t start focusing on what makes you stand out in the marketplace. What can you do that no one else can?

I’m a fucking delivery driver. My skills are comically replaceable by anyone over the age of sixteen and nine months in the state of New York. Everyone knows how to drive. With self-driving cars and all that, I’m not sure I’ll be a driver for much longer anyways.

My brother always says that the squirrels that adapt are the squirrels that get the nut.

So, at the end of my shift a few months ago, I locked up the van and snuck into the dispatcher’s office. I walked right up to the beige filing cabinet in the corner of his dusty office. I gave it a kick and the bottom drawer slid right open. Screeching to a halt at the end of its track like a deer dying on the side of the road.

I knelt to the floor. My knees awoke with sharp pain. My primary care doc says that driving for a living takes its toll. No pun intended, he jokes. Hilarious. 

I paged through the folders. The stench of paper from the drawer married warehouse body odor just before wafting upwards, tickling my nostrils. I pulled two folders: Human Resources and Procurement. 

My brother started dating an Asian girl called Beatris. She was a true professional. Always dressed to the nines. Tight, neutrally-colored outfits. A small diamond nose stud to let you know she was more approachable than some straight edge business woman. Her lips thin and face dimpled, practically modeled from Play-Doh. Last time my brother visited, Beatris came along and joined us for dinner. 

“James,” she stuck a pink piece of chewing gum behind her ear. “Sorry if I’m overstepping. But how much networking have you done? Who do you have access to that no one else does?”

It was a good question. Drivers don’t do a lot of networking. We mostly only ever interact with dispatchers. Almost never with other drivers. The dispatchers don’t have much to say, other than to ask us about the time of arrival and confirm each drop goes off without a hitch.

I paged through each folder from the drawer until I had what I needed. Every driver’s home address, and all the crematoriums we partner with across the state of New York.

I handwrote invitations to my first ever networking event and dropped them in the mailbox of every driver and cremator on the list. In black ink, centered on a blank sheet of 8x11 paper: MORE PAY FOR PetRight DRIVERS ᐧᐧᐧ MIDNIGHT MEETING, SUNDAY, OCTOBER 11 ᐧᐧᐧ BEHIND THE WAREHOUSE.

My brother said it’d be easy to get everyone’s attention. He told me to follow the golden rule: nobody gives a shit about anything except for gold. Focus on the money. Right again, brother. Turnout for the meeting was near 100 percent. Every driver across the district came out.

I handed out the Non-Disclosure-Agreements my brother’s girlfriend drafted and asked each driver to sign. A few did without question. Anyone who didn’t was asked to leave. In the end, I had six drivers and three cremators.

They begged me to reveal the opportunity. How would we get PetRight to pay us more money?

I told them that PetRight wouldn’t be paying us more money. And then I paused. A driver in the back row tapped his feet incessantly and I waited through it, counting to ten in my head. My brother said storytelling is part of the key to a good business presentation. Too many people go too quickly, he said. Pace yourself. Slow down. Breath. Hold steady.

Then, I took a breath. I told them about my brother and his girlfriend. That they’d offered to be angel investors in a new business venture. That they’d quadruple our salaries in exchange for our services.

“Two conditions,” I continued. “One: you must remain in good standing with PetRight for the duration of your tenure with us. Two: you can’t ask any questions.”

“No questions?” A driver asked, face blackened with oil stains and cratered with acne scars, limp cigarette barely hanging from his lips.

I confirmed no questions, and he went along. Times were tough. Quadrupled salaries would make the times less tough. Follow the golden rule.

I’d heard of the dark web before, but I didn’t exactly grasp what it meant. My brother and his girlfriend did. Before baseball season ended, Beatris had already collected ten or twelve clients for whom we’d render our services. All from the dark web, she said.

Most of the time, the job was as easy as working for PetRight. 

Our new clients also needed to dispose of dead bodies. But their options for disposal were more limited. 

Dumping bodies in the Hudson was trite. Moreover, river bodies had a way of bloating and warping and ending up ashore, an unforgettable moment for a group of misfit teenagers hiking along the shorelines, but not the desired outcome for our clients.

I worked dispatch, assigning each body to a PetRight driver. A promotion. And I’d been around dispatchers long enough that I already knew what I was doing. Plus, I knew the city like the back of my hand from driving. Planning routes was as natural for me as pulling from a lit cigarette.

My brother worked logistics and planning. He instructed the clients to bag the bodies in cuts no heavier than forty pounds each. PetRight assisted with the disposal of mammals up to this weight, and so keeping things under forty pounds ensured we wouldn’t raise any red flags.

Our drivers started their mornings an hour or two earlier than usual. They’d stop by our clients first, then make their rounds to the PetRight locations to round up all the dead pets. Store managers never entered the delivery vehicles (maybe it was too gross for them), and whichever clerk got death duty was usually too high to notice an extra bag or two (or three or four) already in the storage cab. Worst case, if a manager inquired about a weight overage, we’d say we were assigned an extra pickup that didn’t make it into the system in time.

The drivers, they’d say, that damned West driver called in sick again. Stupid bastard. 

Then, they’d drive their trunkloads of fish and birds and hamsters and now people off to the crematory. Evidence of previous life charred and dusted in dancing flames. All behind a narrow windowed, cast crematory enclosure, latched closed. It didn’t matter if you overfed your fish or stabbed your ex thirty times through the torso or ran over your new cat or poisoned your parents.

If you had the money, we’d take care of it. Higher profile clients needed more extensive services. Disappearing carcasses was one thing. Covering up crimes was another. Beatris handled the paperwork side of things. Erased people from ever having existed, end-to-end. Licenses, residencies, marriage and dental records. All of it, gone, with the click of a mouse. Beatris’ jaw machining down stick after stick of gum into an unrecognizable, cavernous piece of mush as she erased any trace of the dead bodies’ former lives.

Drivers were getting paid. And I could finally afford my own place. The life I’d wanted for so long.

But we couldn’t keep operating like this. We were dispatching more than we could handle. Drivers were getting tired. Most of all, cremators couldn’t keep up with our rate of delivery. The human body takes a long time to turn to ash, especially in a pet crematorium. These crematoriums specialized in alkaline hydrolysis — aquamation. Chemical cremation in a steel tank. Filled with a mixture of 300°F water and alkali. In these tanks, we needed between 4 and 8 hours per body.

My brother said we couldn’t scale this. He’d just taken a great course on product engineering, a recent module covering horizontal expansion. If we wanted to grow, my brother said, we needed to move horizontally. Disposing of the bodies right away, he said, was a waste of precious assets. Even dead pets could be monetized more effectively.

A few weeks later, we adjusted the schedule to give our cremators some breathing room. Bodies would remain in the delivery vans for up to a week. They held up just fine for the most part, if not for a little more stiffness. But that’s what the new clients wanted anyhow.

We reduced strain on our old clients by eliminating the forty-pound rule. It was a risk, but the old clients were thrilled. In our first survey that went out, one thing was made clear by our customer base: sawing a body down into forty-pound pieces was a real drag. 

Attracting customers was ten times as valuable if we kept them happy. If they were happy, returning business flourished. Acquisition costs stayed low.

Plus, whole bodies were far more valuable assets in the marketplace than if they were in pieces. 

Work harder, not smarter. This is what Beatris kept saying. We’re building a two-sided marketplace, she explained.

Beatris is a whiz, really. She sourced a new kind of client and I established a new late shift for willing drivers. Overtime pay made it well worth it. Once the sun stopped burning off the fog, drivers on the late shift were responsible for meeting these clients in remote locations. Underfunded, abandoned public-good projects. Crumbling parks. A half-finished elementary school. A condemned, boarded-up warehouse. 

Here, every client was given thirty minutes to do whatever they wanted within the confines of the van. A few niche clients even sprung for the Furry Package. They’d spend a few minutes arranging a stiff audience of house pets to watch or even participate.

We had a few regulars. There was Hamster Tony, who was partial to using dozens of the little frozen, dead critters for whatever-the-fuck he did in the back of the van. I’ll tell you this: on more than one occasion after Hamster Tony finished, there were less hamsters onboard than when he started. 

There was also Serpent Celia, who arranged an audience of snakes around her and the body onboard.

Our clients were a lot of things. And one of those things was imaginative. 

We scaled the operation across statelines, and soon enough, I was managing a team of dispatchers. I bought a red convertible and stacked so much cash money in my house that I didn’t know what to do with it. The cash pile grew but the red convertible gathered dust.

Managing a team was hard work. We had meetings and I reviewed schedules and made adjustments to maximize our output. I didn’t have the time to spend my riches.

My eyes were near-perpetually shot with burst blood vessels and networks of reddening veins. The stress was getting worse and worse and I was struggling to keep up until Beatris called a virtual meeting. My brother conferenced in.

My brother said often that no employee should ever be surprised when they’re terminated. Feedback should be constant, otherwise how could anyone do better?

Turns out the guy was full of shit.

“James,” she started, fiddling with her jetblack hair, jawbone protruding and working on a fresh stick of gum.

A long silence thickened around me. I stared at the screen and they stared back from their little boxes.

“We’re sorry to inform you,” my brother’s AirPods transmitted. “The business is not operating as efficiently as we need it to right now.”

“In order to meet the demands of the business and its clients,” Beatris interjected. “We are going to need to downsize. We’re reducing headcount across middle management to get lean and encourage our team to move faster. Operate with autonomy.”

“But,” I said. “I’m the only middle manager. You’re firing me?”

They confirmed that, yes, I was being let go. Terminated. Fired. No pun intended.

I asked them to reconsider, and they refused. I had no recourse. I asked them about a severance package, and Beatris laughed. I was never sure she ever liked me much. Now, I was certain of it.

“I wanted to thank you again, by the way,” she grinned through a lump of pink chewing gum. “Your work building out the two-sided marketplace strategy was invaluable. We’ve designed a severance package for you that uniquely honors your service to the business. Best of luck, James.”

Not a moment later, my door frame crumbled under the pressure of a swift kick from a large black suit. I thought about fighting it. Clawing at the walls like a dog with separation anxiety, desperately clinging to my life. But my brother always said, you can’t fight the marketplace. The marketplace will change no matter what you have to say about it.

So, I sat in front of my silver metal laptop and stared blankly at my former business partners.

The black suit pulled a thick black bag over my head. Coarse like cheap burlap purchased from an arts and crafts store. He walked me out to the parking pad and I recognized the hum of a PetRight engine beside me.

I heard a latch disengage. I heard the doorframe grind along its track, opening up to the refrigeration bed. He nudged me into the bed. Then, the sharp sting of a jagged blade through my heart. Hurts going out more than it does going in, if you’re wondering. The silver sang, piercingly loud as the blade was pulled from my torso.

The suit pulled the black bag off of my head and slammed the van door closed.

I fell to the cold, metal floor, sticky gobs of blood coagulating quickly around me on the frosted floor. I faded away, realizing the likely reason Beatris thanked me one more time for developing the two-sided marketplace.

What I would give right now to be one of those fish, swirling around a toilet bowl, limp and covered in microscopic shit particles.

But as my brother always said, getting close to the customer journey is the only way to grow your business. You can’t succeed without it: know your customer. Becoming the product was about as close as I’d ever get, I suppose.

I mustered all the strength I had left and got on all fours. The same position I found most bodies after visiting the second side of the marketplace. My knees ached in pain, but hey. I’m a company man. Reducing friction in the customer journey is always great for business.