Reel Bay: A Cinematic Essay
Jana Larson
Reviewed by Lucy Shapiro
Filmmaker and writer Jana Larson’s book-length essay Reel Bay is a captivating blend of memoir, true-crime, meditation on women in film, and fantasy played out through the pages of screenplays that will never be completed.
The story follows Jana, a grad student struggling to finish her MFA in filmmaking, as she tries to piece together the life of Takako Konishi, a young Japanese woman found dead in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota. Jana travels first to the Midwest to interview witnesses—where she finds she’s trailing just behind a BBC film crew researching the same case—and ultimately to Japan, where the once-clear image of Takako seems irreparably obscured.
What begins as a cataloguing of a ravenous, journalistic hunt becomes a mesmerizing exercise in projection and subjectivity, as Jana’s obsession with the case becomes less and less rational. A search for answers moves far afield while painfully circling the same set of circumstances: a dead girl in the woods, two champagne bottles, a hand-drawn map, and a letter prophesying her death. But Jana is a centrifuge that fails to separate truth from speculation, reality from fantasy, and her search collapses spectacularly into questions that are increasingly unanswerable.
With this essay, Larson captures both the fanaticism of creative fixation and the listlessness of artistic existential dread with clarity and empathy. “How did she become so lost?” she asks, not only about herself, or even Takako. As we are told from the beginning of the book, “you are the woman in this scene,” and indeed this is a story about any woman who, as Larson puts it, “doesn’t have the equipment to make her life work.” There is something inherently defiant in Larson’s exploration of those who are lost and deluded, and something freeing in bearing witness as she becomes the true subject of her art.