To be colonized is to become a stranger in your own land

Walking home from the coffee shop balancing my old roommate's handmade dishware in my arms, I tried to channel what I imagined being a waiter would feel like to balance opening doors and holding my coffee while also making it up two flights of stairs with out dropping these precious gifts she left behind for me on her way out to LA to start a new life. A memory bubbled up, as memories often do, and I struggled with my conflicting emotions as I navigated doors and years of doing hard labor and ironwork along my path.

My freshman year of college, I was moving back to Sarasota. I had been born there, and some part of me knew I would be going back. One of the top art schools in the U.S. sprawled along the beaches there, and I had been accepted - it was the only school I had bothered to apply to. I have vague pictures of a house with a window between my older brother's room and mine, where we would signal to each other after everyone went to sleep. My mother took me to dinner at The Columbia in St Armand's Circle, where she had been a waiter during my infancy, and eventually met and fell in love with the father of my younger siblings. She had worn a bow tie and slacks like the men and refused to be called a waitress, and told me later that they had to leave in part because they couldn't avoid run ins with the Cuban Mafia for much longer, possibly because of my step father's drug trafficking and addiction.

My mother recognized some of the waitstaff during this precollege visit, exclaimed excitedly the name of the latino woman who brought us water. As my mom described who she was, I saw a pained recognition crystalize across the other woman's face, and my mother gestured to me, bragging about bringing her daughter here for college, asking about the other woman's daughter. She barely glanced at me, with my blond hair and blue eyes and fair skin, choked out a few words in broken English and walked off as soon as her task was completed. As my mother giggled and crooned about how they used to do coke together when I was a baby, I watched that woman signal a different waiter to attend to our table, and I sat in contemplative horror at the strange innocence that so defines my mother. How was it not obvious that this other woman was embarrassed, possibly for still being in the same work environment, or her own relationship with her children and college, or maybe her memories of that time are darker than my mother's, who was able to walk away and not have to face starkly different fears about surviving, how could none of that flit through her mind, somewhere behind her somewhat vacant eyes?

On the way out my mother had an extended conversation with the Maitre D', while I stood on the sidewalk and watched from a distance, trying to figure out what felt familiar and what was fabricated in my sense memories of this place. As she collected me and we left she told me he had offered me a job if I ever needed one, and she threw her head back and laughed good and hard at the thought of me being a waitress, like I was too soft to be able to handle something like that.

I have thought about that moment a lot over the years of being on and eventually running construction crews, almost every time I get on a forklift, so many strange moments where I have exceeded the limitations in my mother's view of what I could be capable of.

She obsessively hoards all of the awful student work I tried to throw away, bad ideas or overworked and with tiny arms and such, the beginnings of all artists. My siblings tell me about the paintings lining the walls of my childhood home that I hope to never step into again. My little brother even stole one of those paintings once, to my glee - and he received the strangest, quietest phone call from my mother who claimed it was worth some obscene amount of money ($15,000 I think?). I don't know what picture of who or what I am lives its rich life in my mother's eyes, all I know is that anything that undermines it is a threat to whatever narrative she has crafted, and it amazes me that someone could move through their lives or look at their children with such an overwhelming blindness.

I think it makes some parts of my natural expression harder to lean into, picking up a pencil to draw carries with it the weight of potentially fulfilling my mother's blind desire for me, like it is not truly mine somehow. And I fight to be noticed for other kinds of physical prowess with a ferocity that is somehow related to needing her ideas of me to change, to recalibrate around something real - battles I bring in every day to work but are being fought for a ghost, an idea of what a Mother should be, for a child I buried in my body a long time ago.

I can't even do simple tasks without thinking about the box she thinks I live in.

Set from MFA Film Thesis I did Production Design for.

Whatever gets you through the rituals

XV.
City of barnacles
passing a half burnt house
falling apart, fleas
inside the crumbling building
doors lead to musty rooms
with collapsed ceilings
crumbling paint on old opera sets
containing the history of my craft
mastery in every whorl and cloud 
and shadowed transition
coming apart in my hands
flakes of vibrant colors
becoming grey dust
like Dorothy returning
to her washed out, thirsty home
after the technicolor of Oz.


XVI.
tasting things activates the process
of taking things in
maybe hearing is just the beginning
of listening


XVII.
My little brother
taller than all of us now
affectionately mentioned
during a holiday
the house full
of our family's particular
dominating cackle
a joyful witch's laughter
that we are all known by
but becomes a devastating
force when we all
come together.


XVIII.
Shame keeps them shuttered inside of themselves, unknowable
like a clam bed in muddy low lying water
they propagate a denial that removes them from their own history
ready to slice open the feet of any of us that try to escape
from the bog of my clan


XIX.
'Disarming' he called me
when I asked for an evaluation
what a strange word

'half cocked' my mother
always said I was
like a gun
An old boss friend referred to me
as a 'tank' on numerous occasions
expressed disbelief
when I mentioned crying
and even before that
a 'caged tiger'
from the lips of an earlier employer
as she mimicked the pent up rage
that moved my body as we spoke

Disarming.

I can't stop thinking about that word.

unreroute the rivers

Seeing footage of the Aids epidemic and ensuing homophobia around the time I was born gives such a deep context to my mother's response to me dating someone of the same gender. "I really fucked up, didn't I?" she said to me with haunted eyes. Since so many of our friends and coworkers at the time were LGBTQ, I was shocked to see something so dark and hypocritical rise up in her. Who is she really, how much of her day to day was just pretend? Maybe the more I know about history, the more I can understand about the human that made me, the more I can unravel about her intentions and her fears.

During my figure modeling career, I ended up in a classroom taught by an intense older Russian man, who was so exacting and specific that his students rarely spoke, so intent on giving him something he considered acceptable. He would tell stories of his previous life in his homeland, about subsisting on the network of the black market, a thick spider web of tricks and tools to circumvent rations and rules. Once he described being in an American grocery store for the first time, the utter shock of choices suddenly available, of shelves overflowing with products, something completely foreign in his younger, 40 year old self. That same person I was dating still, the one that had caused such an unexpected revelation about my mother to manifest. One of those days, headed to his class, my partner dropped me off at the curb outside. The entire car ride there she had been screaming at me that I was a slut for taking my clothes off in front of people, that she was disgusted by me for how I was making my living after graduating from college. For the next three hours, I was the perfect model, still as a statue, but could not stop the tears rolling down my face. Even the teacher was silent, until a break, when he came to ask me if I was alright. There was nowhere I would have wanted to be but there, all of me exposed. In those classrooms, though I am merely an object for learning, the ability to see the truth of what lies before us, free for a moment from its prison of contexts, devoid of sexuality, is the ultimate goal and one of few places where I felt the closest to myself. They were there to draw a human being, and that is something I could give them.

When I was a freshman in college I started dating a man twice my age that I had met in class, a fellow student. He said to me once, with a hint of derision in his voice 'Oh YOU are always going to need a man to take care of you.' I think about that moment often, like when I'm sitting on a forklift, or when I've stepped back to watch an ocean of men I'm supervising on a build. I can hear that same undertone when I'm in bed and a man has positioned himself over me and I've already sunk so far inside of myself, he couldn't make me feel him no matter how hard he might try. That same man told me it hurt his feelings that I didn't refer to him as my boyfriend while we were together. He was the first person I had engaged with sexually on more than one occasion, and months into our relationship when I mentioned something about an orgasm, he reacted suddenly, surprised. 'You have orgasms?' he asked. I was too young and inexperienced to know how to respond.

It takes so little to make someone feel invisible. Especially when they grew up feeling that way. It is amazing to me how a lifetime of careless comments can stack up inside of a person, how moments these people may have instantly forgotten might rattle around in another human being for the rest of their lives.

On the subway awhile ago, I watched a large unkempt man greedily eyeing me. He started at my legs and I watched his eyes travel up my body almost as tangible as a touch - until he got to my face. I don't remember why I was upset, but tears rolled down my cheeks in a constant stream, and he could tell that I had seen his path of attention. His face changed, his whole demeanor shifted. I felt myself transform from sexual object to human being in his gaze as he turned his face respectfully away, and glanced with thoughtful worry at my face a few times before we arrived at my stop and I stepped out of his awareness.

In a developmental movement class a few weeks ago, it was just me and an instructor. As I came upfrom my side to my belly with the support of my arms wrapping towards each other, there was an intense moment of sweetness in the lack of muscular involvement between my shoulder blades. A freedom, a sense of spaciousness, that felt so good I was surprised and almost immediately ashamed of feeling in the presence of another person. I thought about that yesterday while cleaning my room, surrounded by a bunch of figure drawings I was sorting through, choosing which ones to keep. It suddenly hit me that some people draw for the pleasure of it, something that I had never quite felt, or maybe let myself feel. Art for me was almost always a product of intense pain, or someone else's desires as a constraint for me to work around, probably a deeply rooted way of engaging with the world that goes back farther than I can quite understand. Both my mother and my therapist have tried to make points to me about my inability to receive, whether in the medium of gifts or sexually, but I think it is both deeper and subtler than that. My therapist also clearly found that my mother treated me like an object, so my mother's anger at my unwillingness to receive anything from her is intimately tied up in her way of engaging with me. It feels like I intercept and absorb a constant flood of information from the world around me, like sometimes I have no ability to shut out the amount of things being recieved.

Moments of places I've lived have been flooding my senses the past few days. The smell of salt and the piercing blue sky of Sarasota, except I can't tell if its an image from my earliest years, growing up on the beach, or from when I went back decades later for college. The smell of musty coolness in my Grandmother's kitchen, full of Rooster and Apple paraphernalia from her days as a school teacher. We spent our summers there, all of the cousins, wild and free with almost no supervision. Her collections seemed related to us back then, the room full of Care Bears, her Jacuzzi bathtub, unused in decades was filled with beanie babies, and recently I've heard she sleeps amidst stacks of romance novels and kewpie dolls, that angels sit on every surface. My little sister also possesses this fierce desire to collect things, something that manifested pretty early in her life. Last night I had a kind of night-terror, something that happened to me a lot as a child, but only has happened a few times since moving away from my childhood home. Lying awake, it will look as if the shadows are shifting, and gaping dark shapes will seem filled with the potential for something to step out of them. I distracted myself from the flickering shadows and managed to find sleep, unlike anxiety ridden nights of my youth.

Now that I have remembered my emotional attachment to that bear, I understand how the ball they hand us in the developmental movement classes can represent something we desire, it had been such a foreign concept prior to today. I have thought about that ball and that bear overlapping in my physical responsiveness, and every time it crosses my mind I suddenly can't see through my tears and I am filled with almost debilitating intense feelings in the center of my body. With a developmental workshop coming up this next weekend, I am terrified that I will be unable to participate because I am drowning in an ocean of my own tears, helplessly regurgitating the offhand and careless comments, the bricks in my being formed in a thousand careless moments.

The only way out is through.

I’m building a body
From balsam and ash
I’m building a body with
No god attached
I’m building a body
From blueprints in Braille
I’m building a body
Where our design has failed

There’s a book full of plans
At the feet of poor Atlas
Titled ‘For Man’
But the architects Only drew blanks
Now there’s nowhere to go
But go back, go back, Go back, go back

Your horse teaches you to drink the ghost of its water

From the booth I sat in at the Columbus Circle Holiday Market, I watched the eddies and flows of the bodies moving past. Eyes flicked and scanned, individuals glossed over the variety of potential gifts with something or someone in mind. Often the gaze stopped on the wares displayed in my particular booth, a weird double vision, where it was clear that they were looking at objects for sale, but saw someone very specific while taking that object in. This time I was selling someone else's handcrafted items, instead of my own, and in the lack of fear about my own value as an artist, I was able to participate in the gift buying business in a completely different way. All of the emotional space I might have held for things I gave birth to was instead available to hold the customers needs and desire as they considered their loved one's needs and desires. It was no less intimate than having my own things handled, but I was invited into their sense of love or care for an individual, I was a way to express that in the future ritual of gift giving. I felt like a Sphinx, like my job was to ask the kinds of questions that gave me clues to this invisible person, to guide me as I offered different items to my audience. Oracular in my booth, the days I worked ended up being big money days for my friend who had hired me, as I took in mirrored gestures and matching laugh lines suggesting the similarity of structure gifted genetically, as I witnessed mothers and daughters confer, the unsure and the confident gift givers, as I silently showed children the inner structures of the hand built Book Clocks, while their parents perused the selection surrounding me.

In the booths around me were mostly mass produced home goods and jewelry, much farther along in their transition from handmade art-thing to full fledged capitalist venture. My friend's process by necessity gets more streamlined, when faced with the kind of volume that the market's proximity to Times Square had to offer, but his particular product still lived in the space of being novel and somehow familiar, being crafted from books that so many grandmas paused to consider because they recognized titles from their youth. I've come across Craigslist ads during slow season that are explicitly asking for skilled fabricators to work in shops that create the things that famous artists are known for. People like Jeff Koons send their specs in and teams of highly skilled, underpaid craftsmen build the things that sell for so much money, with that man's name on it, that 'artist'. There are entire towns in Italy filled with mold makers and bronze masters that spend their whole lives reproducing other people's work, but it is Rodin's name that is spoken in hushed tones in the antique show booth I just finished constructing, for a tiny copy of a copy of a copy that will sell for $45,000.

What is the difference between being an artist and a slave? Between being a Subject and an Object? What does Ownership really mean? When you buy a reproduction, or something fabricated by individuals being paid to produce someone else's ideas, what now belongs to you? The sweat and sensitivities of those unknown hands? The shape of an experience born out of a context of which you may know nothing? A feeling you had when you first looked at that thing? Part of me wonders if antique shows aren't a product of age trying to prove it still has value.

I watched an ancient man spew unkind words and an attitude of such superiority towards me as I sat in a scissor lift waiting for my crew to get back from their union specified break. 'You are going to move this 'contraption'.' he informed me. I explained that we needed to finish building the wall it was parked under, to which he replied 'Not right now, you are not.' He was an appraiser of antiques, there were about 50 of them let in before the build was complete. I finally stopped working for Fashion Week events, the divide between 'worker' and the Production team is so clearly delineated by those who touch things and those who don't, and Designers won't even respond to you if they have seen you lay hands on something. The last Alexander Wang gig that I worked I received excited comments from someone I went to grade school with, who still lives in my home town. I didn't mean to dump my darkness on her romantic associations of the fashion world, but this divide between people with ideas and money, and those who actually have the skills to craft it but are paid to make someone else's art are held in the kind of regard we might associate servants and slaves with. I have found this attitude to be pervasive. And no one seems to know that we treat the builders of our physical and cultural reality this way. There is only so much of ourselves that we can give away in obscurity before we are merely selling the effort of our bodies for money, and they too become simply objects to be filled with other people's desires, and we in turn become numb to our own cravings and creative impulses.

When I had the pleasure of working on a massive project with Marina Abramovich, we all were participants in the creation of what was essentially a piece of art. When I asked her how she felt about the way the director had translated her life, she responded with 'I don't know, I give him my story and he make slapstick.' Its impossible to describe the herculean effort of constructing the space for this performance, and I worked on almost every crew that installed and then ran the show, I was backstage surrounded by performance artists from all over the world who have devoted their lives and physical bodies to becoming an object of expression to be consumed by an audience. And when I rode the train home every night, I was surrounded by that audience, most of them the older wealthy patrons of the Armory. All I heard was one vicious dismissal after another. They didn't care how hard any of us worked to give that experience to them.

In a circle of conversation the other day, there arose a distinction between heart and intellect that someone was seeing as important, but something about it really rubbed me wrong. I tried to explain how my crews and I communicate in and around a spatial plane that involves a bodily understanding that supersedes that distinction, and she quickly blew me off  'that's an object. I'm talking about an idea.' she said, flipping her hand vaguely in my direction without making eye contact. I thought about one of my best friends, from the first shop I worked in. He had almost a superstitious reaction to drawings, and had really intense fears of feeling stupid, something that was beat into him in the public education system. He wouldn't even come near the drawings at first, it took me months to make him feel comfortable enough to be confused or unsure in my presence to finally talk him through the symbols we use to indicate shapes in space and relate that to the time of building a thing and the organization of what comes first and how abstract numbers relate to physical markings in the room. And in the midst of this conversation with these educated women, I suddenly felt, for the first time like I shouldn't be there. There was no space for my reality in her dismissive gesture, in the words she was trying to find to describe some specific internal feeling about having an Idea. Like objects aren't inherently a manifestation of ideas, like material and immaterial aren't deeply intertwined expressions of each other. Like these men aren't having ideas while they discuss how to build something.

Objects are often things that we fill, with memories, with symbolic weight, with fear or desire, but not as much with their own sense of history, of being born, of being filled with something before or outside of our interactions with it. I wonder how a baby experiences an object, as they grapple with organizing and coordinating their own seemingly disparate parts. Do they feel that object possessing its own selfness the way they themselves do? Is having that little bit of dominion in an alien landscape that they are initially helpless in an important piece in distinguishing themselves from other things? Is it something to wrap the sense of experiencing around, a container of sorts for their growing awareness? How does the way we handle objects when engaging with a baby help define the way in which they will handle objects or other people later?

I wonder if I lost my mother in a sense, when she met my stepfather. I was 3 and suddenly she was pregnant and in love, when they eventually married she asked him to dress in the same white tux with a red rose in the pocket, like her favorite potential option from the board game Mystery Date. I'm sure in some fractured vacuum in myself, there was a desire for some animal affection that I saw in the face and the soft triangular body of a stuffed bear I found at a garage sale with my Grandmother. Digging through other people's things was a regular weekend event, whether it was driving around looking for handwritten poster board signs with arrows, or riding from one thrift store to another to another. My Grandmother was born in the middle of the great depression, and grew up during a war time era, a rationed society, so store bought gifts and school clothes were a once or twice a year kind of event for us when I was growing up. I don't know anything about that bear's previous name or life, but I cried so many tears into Brownie's fake fur over the years. When I was 11, I knew it was time, that I was too old for stuffed animals and tucked him away in a box in my closet. In the 7th grade our Labrador puppy dug him out and chewed off his nose, so I moved him to a high shelf in the closet. When I came home from college every once in awhile, I would apologize, not with words, but the feelings in my body when I saw his dark eyes up there in a forgotten cardboard box.

Once when I was a tarot reader for an event, I asked that payment be some form of exchange, whatever the receiver of the reading chose to give in return for my energetic focus on their question. People laughed and cried, there were intense pauses, and furtive glances towards partners who were out of earshot, and I was an anonymous vessel, to be filled with their burning questions about a looming decision, about something they were second guessing, things they didn't even want to admit they hoped for, things they admitted to me but wouldn't even admit to their spouse. I took it all, wrapping them in my steady presence, listening without judgement, paying attention to what rose to the surface in them during our session. Things that went into my cup included a lock of hair, a poem written in lipstick on a piece of trash, two small silver rings that the girl told me later had been made with someone who had died, the person who ended up being a major part of her reading.

Out of respect, I wore those rings on my pinky finger, every day for an entire year. I still have them. It seems strange to me now, that I would treat someone else's memory filled objects with such reverence, when I have vehemently refused to keep pieces of my own history.




"Movements are born in the moments when abstract principles become concrete concerns."

When death is coming- the mockingbird doesn't sing, but speaks with his true voice.

I was reading a potential client's manuscript on a Zombie novella to be turned into a graphic novel, and I was stricken by the similarities of all zombie subject matter I have come across... and even more deeply stricken at the inner discussion I had with myself whilst trying to find value and meaning in the idea of undead cannibalism. Lots of undead creatures and their storylines carry romantic notions and deep seated stereotypes based on human/animal tendancies, just as comic book super heroes are born out of a social outcry for superhuman profoundness hidden in the everyday life we all drag ourselves through. But who has given a Zombie depth? Being defined by emptiness, they are silly and horrifying and utterly disconnected from everything we know to be true about human and animal nature, and the subhuman dysfuntions that twist the two planes of existence together to enfold the genre of horror... and here are some of the interesting visual + philosophical conclusions I came to in my line of questioning:

So the basic framework of any story is based on 3 variations of conflict: Man versus God, Man versus Nature, and Man versus Himself.

Prior to reading the manuscript, after having perused the descriptions, I find the director/writer is focusing, or actually assuming that his conflict is Man versus Himself, as both the fighting with the ranks of unaffected humans and previously human attacking the remaining human. To me, the conflict is highlighted/triggered by Man versus Himself... but is really a profound discussion of Man versus Nature. What defines us as different from the rest of the animal world as a race of mammals is a certain level of conscious thought. We draw the line between cro-magnon humanoids that shared the planet with us, and our actual ancestors/earliest civilization by the first primitive death rites - the act of burial and marking the resting place of former loved ones (as well as ancestor worship). Pretty much everything that was considered "magical" throughout our developmental history has through science and medicine been defined, ie. pregnancy and birth, disease, weather, fire, domestication and agriculture as a way of always having food, and we have ceased to have magical illusions and associations with these things. We don't pray for a successful hunt and honor mother nature for the gift of fresh meat, we walk to the store and buy it. So the one clear mystery that persists, along with very specific culturally defined rites that follow it, is the concept of death. Why am I telling you stuff you already know?

1. I passed by a ghost bike the other day (you know, the white spray painted bikes that are chained to places where someone was killed in an accident?) and it struck me for a couple of reasons: by marking the spot where the life/soul/whatever animates us left the body, it shows a modern evolution of rites relating specifically to the loss of consiousness rather than the physical body. If we were suddenly placed in a reality where the person died but their body remained suspended in animation - how do we mourn? would we not feel compelled then to mark the place where their individual conciousness ceased to be? This ghost bike phenomenon is interesting also in the fact that we all see it and instantly reckognize what it symbolizes - and businesses, police, hobos do not touch them, either out of respect, cultural acceptance of the act, or superstition. I feel like a society suddenly focused solely on dead/undead trauma as a constant reality would manifest symbols and markers and become a common phenomenon in a decaying landscape. So in a modern society, I think we should consider what kind of symbol could be used to illustrate that, and how it could be visually effective in representing loss in the number of deaths as being overwhelming, and potential danger.

2. So if what separates us from animals is our consiousness, what then is left behind in a body when that is no longer there? I have two answers for that:

First I would say is the animal insticts, particularly smell. But when considering how perfect a machine the human body is, I would also argue that there would still be lingering muscle and mental memories that begin to fade as the body eats away at itself. And smell has an amazing ability to trigger emotional responses. If young animals separated from their mothers can follow the intimate knowledge of their mother's scent, why wouldn't a baby zombie be able to follow its (living) mother's scent? And it is situations like that which really shake us to the core in a supremely deep way. In a similar manner, I could absolutely believe that an old, old man who took an early dawn walk every day for 55 years down the same path, would still feel the muscle compulsion to continue certain habits that the body has repeated for years and years. Like a scratched record, like a footprint left in space and time.

And second, I would say, like wearing a wedding band for years and years and removing it for some reason - death or loss of some sort, I'm sure there is a very profound sense of having a physical hole where it used to be, where you'd feel the empty bed like a bitter and lonely void, that maybe you yearn to fill with what used to be there, but nothing will ever fill that exact shaped hole in your life, heart, space or time... imagine how a body would feel if it suddenly lost all consiousness. We never see zombies eat a body down to the bones. They never do more than take a bite and move on to the next thing. I feel like the act of consumption could represent a hunger/yearning for something else, something that living people have that they no longer do. Something that disappears the minute they bite into the living, so they are no longer interested and move on to what still possesses it. If it was a matter of blood and muscle and flesh, there is plenty of stuff out there for "dumb" creatures to consume. I think the idea of the zombie started as something very different and has been blown out into something that makes no sense. The closer we bring it back to something that we could almost believe, the more poignant and devestating the effect will be on the audience.


Here were some of my extraneous thoughts on treatment of the story and characters/wordplay:

I like the metaphorical play on consuming - we as a consumerist society buy the next big thing, take a bite, and once the newest/better version of it comes out, we toss the original and move on, never satisfied, always hungry for whatever is next. I'd love to suggest that by littering the environments with ads we reckognize universally, like Haddon Sundbloom's Santa Clause that Coca Cola used to define what Santa looked like to the rest of the world, particularly the US. Utilizing ads from older time periods is both ironic (suggesting how it lead to a land of zombies) and helps us to obscure the time period.

When breaking down the action of the story, and what needs to be shown, I would root out sequences that can be suspended in time, imitating slow motion for anticipation purposes. The movie '300' was not a perfect one, but I still watch it for one reason: the fight sequences. In that particular movie, the fight scenes move from body parts flying to an abruptly intense pulsing slow motion, and the movement of body and fabric ripples and flows across the screen. The underwater oracle dance is equally mesmerizing to me. Also consider Muybridge's animated horse sequence, broken down frame by frame. By isolating action (while subtley shifting composition for dramatic effect/reveal of dangerous situation or character) we can control the pacing so it doesn't lack moments to breath or focus. We'll basically be mimicing camera moves, slow pans, slow zoom outs and such while breaking up the flow of the story to agitate the viewer.

Throughout history we have used many different ways of marking a distinct separation between "us" and "them", like the nazi symbol, and the yellow stars for the jews. I would consider developing a symbolic marking that separates the military, doctors and civilians. That offers other ways of insinuating disloyalty or making unspoken allusions.

Just some thoughts I had.