Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , ,

“Dirt – An Audio Drama” is made in Washington State and its first “act” was released last autumn. It is largely a one-man show and Kristopher Kaiyala is the man. He has written this podcast, he produces and directs it, and Joseph Elo, the character whom he plays, is the hero of its story and our host and guide.

With such a taut authorial grip, “Dirt” sometimes feels like it might be more comfortable as a novel than as a podcast. The show’s point of departure is indeed various short stories that Kaiyala’s grandfather had written for his family about his early years in Washington State, some of which we will dip into later in the adventure. The fulsomeness of the storytelling in “Dirt” certainly makes handsome amends for what can be at times a sparse drama. Given this podcast’s whispers about buried treasure, one might put it better to say that beneath the drama’s topsoil lies a rich story.

Joseph is the golden boy. On the one hand, he is the executive of a yuppie company that is throwing big shapes in Seattle’s tech sector. At work, he has a team of high-achieving millennials all squabbling underneath him whilst, at home, he has his own six-bedroom pad with access to a private beach. On the other hand, Joseph has lately come into the possession of a mysterious letter from his long-deceased grandfather, Aimo, who appears to be beckoning him, from beyond the grave, into a fiendish treasure hunt. It is a luxurious dilemma. Should Joseph stick with his team, and clinch some billion-dollar corporate deal that they are all meant to be focused on; or should he instead escape to the dreamy farmlands of his youth, in search of some possibly more spurious windfall?  

The outlines of this problem might be familiar from countless sentimental Hollywood movies, in which the Dad is never able to scramble back from his job on the secret government science project in time to see his son score the winning run on the baseball pitch. What makes this dilemma more interesting in Joseph’s case is that it is not the usual bozo choice between work and kids but rather a minor one between two different sorts of mostly recreational labour. Since nothing particularly world-changing is at stake, the dilemma grows somehow more stimulating for us as a puzzle.

If we were to meet the airily self-assured Joseph whilst he was glad-handing his way around the aftermath of a TED Talk, then we would probably not warm to him and he would probably not be greatly interested in us either. We begrudgingly grow to like him, though, on the treasure trail. We and him are sticking together, at least for now, due to our shared consciousness of a threat that is lurking somewhere in his story.

When Joseph reencounters Salvador Flores (Jhonattan Fuentes), the kindly farmer who was his first employer, he still orders his secretary to perform a background check on him. Joseph had previously found the stolen driving licence of this farmer’s daughter (Megan Morales) on the pavement when he was limping away from a chance traffic accident. This discovery is the fluffiest of details but its eerie brilliance is that it remains too significant to be a coincidence and too slight, surely, to have been planted there conspiratorially. Such a tiny glitch in the surface of a rational narrative soon uncovers awesome depths of paranoia.

The success of Dirt is that it is always free-floating at some rare point in the space between realism and supernaturalism. Its careful, unshowy storytelling only grants the mystery more power. Kaiyala has referred online to his “ongoing” story as being about “yes, a haunted metal detector.” I imagine that most listeners will find its plot to be inexplicable rather than spooky, but it so far feels too sensitive for everything to be resolved with recourse to a humdrum deus ex machina.

Neither we nor Joseph are really interested in the gold, if gold there indeed is. We are listening purely because we want to know the mechanics of how the dead grandfather could have mailed a letter and stolen a driving licence. Joseph wants to briefly lift the weight of his own corporate authority off his shoulders. Thus liberated, he is once again under the control of distant, benevolent educators and forefathers, enjoying a delicious tremble of boyhood adventure, back on the nostalgia-perfumed farmlands of once upon a time.

So this treasure hunt is clearly raising immediate red flags for us as being a potential mid-life crisis. In addition, it might articulate something pithy about independent podcasting. Most of the listless documentary podcastmakers who are knocking about these days would view a laid-out treasure hunt as being a chest of gold all in itself. Yet Joseph is already a huge celebrity CEO, a household name in fact, and the problem for him is instead that an adventure that he does not really need right now might be going to waste. He therefore embarks on his treasure hunt under a mildly irksome sense of obligation, a privileged man whose groaning plate has been loaded with another helping and who must tuck into everything for politeness’s sake. Or a man who is, with a metal detector in one hand and a smartphone in the other, living two centuries at once, even-handedly, in a single adventure.