Off Brand Video #7: Wayne Koestenbaum’s “Folie à Trois”

YouTube heads are my oracles. Like Dante, I type “How to…” into the search bar, asking a bodiless Virgil to take the lead. A bro-y Dutch twenty-something teaches me Photoshop. I condition my hair more effectively thanks to a middle-schooler’s pro tips. These floating faces guide me through hell, to technological mastery, to a life sans frizz. We connect, but how deeply? How do I reciprocate? What if I want to aid my mentors in achieving their longings, to turn our single color transaction into full spectrum intimacy? What if I want to love?

Wayne Koestenbaum feels in color. He not only smears it on canvas, but types poems on construction paper. The Pink Trance Notebooks and Camp Marmalade, parts one and two of his hue-centric trilogy, place pink and orange centerstage. And in his latest video, “Folie à Trois,” he dunks his head in abstract paint to consider what it means to merge: oil paint with other oil paint, man with man, YouTuber with viewer, person with pigment, all the while knowing that a single marriage is never enough. “Folie à trois” translates to a psychosis shared amongst three, a hallucination split three ways. Pink, orange, and blue walk into a bar. Can they crack open each other’s solipsism?  

“I’m tired of dissembling,” Koestenbaum says in the opening gambit, of containing his personal longings in “a clutch purse” all to himself. He wants to merge with others, be plural, embarking upon possibly the world’s most circuitous YouTube tutorial, “How to… Desire.” In a decidedly anti-talking head move, Koestenbaum employs Henrique Romoff and Pat Abatiell as lovers and co-articulators, who repeat his poem in their own vocal styles, leading to “a revelation” that “lands with a thud:” maybe desire is the hallucination that unites us.

“Folie à Trois” stems from Koestenbaum’s Instagram presence. He began his talking head career last year in videos integrating poetry and piano, notes with words, a marriage of two. In “Summer of Love,” he plinks at his keyboard’s vibraphone preset while wishing, in half speech half song, that we “stop separating the world into what we like and don’t like.” In “Gender Consultant for the Stars,” he lists the contents of his magically fluid carry-on while his paintings sit normally on the back wall. Koestenbaum’s musings are ever-charming, but it wasn’t until his words married music and painting, encasing his oracular head within flickering rectangles of color, that his essay film triple threat reached consummation.

Color connoisseur Josef Albers would say that if I add a blue to the right of orange and a pink...