My Beautiful Broken Brain: The Netflix doco you need to see

IT’S the masterful documentary that started with a selfie video, which caught the eye of cult Hollywood director David Lynch.

Jeremy Cassar

5 min read

May 28, 2016 - 9:26PM

In 2011, Lotje Sodderland, a highly articulate, 34-year-old British film and media producer — known in her circles as the speed queen of multi-tasking — lay on a hotel room bed, tapping away at one of her many devices, before being interrupted by a haemorrhagic stroke that almost broke her brain for good.

If it wasn’t for some part of her scrambled psyche fighting her bleeding brain to let through an impulse to crawl downstairs and fall unconscious in a public bathroom, Lotje wouldn’t be alive today.

She also wouldn’t have starred in and co-directed My Beautiful Broken Brain — an intimate documentary that follows Lotje as she negotiates the changed mechanics of a mind that initially wouldn’t let her speak at all, but that eventually altered her entire way of thinking, seeing and being, in a good way.

The devastating changes to Lotje’s brain end up being celebrated in ‘My Beautiful Broken Brain’. Picture: Netflix

THE DOCUMENTARY THAT BEGAN WITH A SELFIE VIDEO

As Lotje lost the ability to be Lotje, coupled with the intermittent inability to remember the previous moment, she found a virtual shoulder and ear in her phone’s video camera, and began documenting her thoughts and feelings while alone — whether as inpatient at a neurological facility, or braving a walk down a crowded London street.

These phone videos became integral to Lotje’s rehabilitation, so she joined director Sophie Robinson to make a feature-length documentary, one that gained an eventual production partner that goes by the deceptively simple name of David Lynch. Yes, that David Lynch.

This hard-earned doco places us in Lotje’s personal space through hilarious and heartbreaking and thought-provoking video confessions. It spends time with those closest to her (mainly her committed old brother and best friend) who have no choice but to come along for the painful ride, and uses special effects to recreate her scary, confusing, and often-spectacular otherworldly sensory POV.

Much of the film is shot by Lotje herself. Picture: Netflix

We experience Lotje’s perspective from the moment she wakes from the post-stroke coma, and proceed to not just witness, but feel her highs and lows with our fists either in the air or through the nearest wall.

In the doco, Lotje implied that the self-taken footage was as torturous as it was beneficial. But how does Lotje feel when she watches the doco now?

“Working on the film was challenging at times as it felt incredibly self absorbed! It makes me feel quite unwell even thinking about that now. So I began to work on the film as though it was about someone else otherwise it would have been impossible,” she tells news.com.au

An inner ultimatum that paid off, as she goes onto clarify: “Now that the film is out in the world and so many people are finding solace in the story, it makes the process absolutely worthwhile.”

Lotje isn’t overstating the affect this doco has had on international audiences — not only on those who have suffered neurological events on any scale, but anyone who feels (or is told) that their brain isn’t normal by society’s standards.

“I was looking up the dictionary definition of ‘pathology’ today and in Ancient Greek the word means ‘experience’ or ‘suffering’. Simply being human is a challenge for everybody at times, and yet we’re led to believe that if we are not living the life depicted by Disney then we are abnormal.”

While Lotje’s cognitive functioning might not align with what’s considered “normal”, her ability to articulate complex thoughts hasn’t gone anywhere. It may be more of a struggle to get there, but even from her answers to my questions, she puts many a self-consciously wordy writer to shame.

A scene from the documentary. Picture: Netflix

THE BEAUTIFUL, BROKEN BRAIN

A heartbreaking aspect of the doco is when pressed to answer a specific question or remember a specific word, the ‘break’ in Jotje’s brain would become apparent. The cables between thought and speech were tangled and frayed. We watch a highly intelligent woman who hasn’t lost her smarts grapple with half-thoughts fighting for control of her mind, only occasionally bonding together to find a proper exit out of her mouth.

But the fascinating aspect of this dysfunction was that in moments when Lotje was on her own, pouring her fears or philosophies into the tiny camera phone, she’d suddenly grow articulate, as if never hit by a stroke. She sees this as a case of stage fright, except where the stage is life.

“I think maybe when there was no sense of anxiety about not being able to ‘perform’ my functions as a human being (such as linear thought), an immediacy and direct clarity would emerge.”

Something we can all relate to, on some level.

RECOVERING STROKE VICTIM SLASH DIRECTOR

The irony of a budding film producer suffering a stroke and then reaching a level of success from putting the aftermath on film is not lost on Lotje.

I asked whether the past five years have changed her attitude towards or taste in filmmaking and art in general.

“Initially I wasn’t able to watch films as the images and sounds were too strange, nonsensical or frightening and I couldn’t follow the stories. I wasn’t able to watch even the news because of the distressing subject matter and again inability to follow the narratives. I still limit my sensory input as my brain gets overwhelmed.”

But in keeping with the personality displayed in the doco, Lotje can find ways to revel in her new headspace.

“On the other hand because of my residual problems with reading, writing and processing information I learned how to shoot with a professional camera and am now working as a director. It’s a lot more exciting than working as a producer, which is what I did before!”

DAVID LYNCH

In My Beautiful Broken Brain, Lotje’s sensory experience is recreated as seeing things differently to us — as part of one eye exposes her to an almost metaphysical world, where colours and sounds are amplified.

To her, it was all very Lynchian (referring to legendary director, screenwriter, visual artist, musician, actor, and author David Lynch, the eventual Executive Producer of the film.)

“It was Lynchian in that it was very close to the mundane world I left behind and yet very subtly warped, the subtlety itself making the experience so enormous.”

Already a fan of David Lynch’s work prior to the incident, Lotje saw new meaning in his lesser-known work — writings on transcendental meditation and the theoretics of consciousness.

Lynch is an invisible extra character in the doco, depicted as a kind of godlike figure to which Lotje feels a deep, distant connection, and as he became the EP, it’s no secret that he makes a very brief, very typically Lynchian appearance.

David Lynch appears in the documentary. Picture: Netflix

This is a unique woman with a very unique brain with an oddly universal story to tell — one that takes us through almost every emotion possible before rewarding us at its end.

“In my view, the science of introspection is due its big moment round about now! It seems that the most painful experiences may also bring out the individual resilience we all possess as human beings,” she says.

To me, Lotje’s brain isn’t broken, it’s reshaped, and I wish her every future success, in whatever form, or from whatever perspective, that comes.