Mack's "Yard Work is Hard Work"

An amazing animator and artist Mack presented a video that was highly relavent to what we have talked about through out the year. In the beginning of the film, she questions the necessity of love and marriage, but has the main character marry because it is what everyone does. She lists a few romantic movies to prove her point of the inevitability of a happy ending. The style of animation she uses, implementing recycling materials such as magazines and newspaper clippings in order to tell a story, is what makes her film so unique. She contrasts the notion of a average romantic story by using a distinct medium to tell it. Through her film, Mack suggests that since we hear the same kind of love story again and again, the only way to make it new is to change the medium not the message.
To illustrate the lack of originality in love, she uses all types of women and pictures for the same character, which is a similar concept to the one presented in "That Obscure Object of Desire," where the female protagonist is played by two different actresses as the same person. Since the characters represent a larger idea of putting perfecting over reality, Mack can get away with using a plethora of women images to represent a single character.
She based the entire film on the one phrase of "Yard Work is Hard Work," and despite sounding silly and superficial, I think the phrase holds more depth than that. Mack chooses the song "Yard Work is Hard Work" to be the climax of her opera, so one can assert that it means more than just, doing yard work is difficult. I think she is referring to maintaining a certain image in marriage. In her story, the couple was so focused on making sure the exterior of their house and by extension their relationship looked perfect, that they were not connecting in the inward part of their relationship  They were so intent on fixing the house by making it green that the wife admits to her friend in the end of the film on the phone that her marriage is still a work in progress. I think Mack's film speaks to America's idealization of relationships in films and television, and her work rejects that by parodying the ideas presented as oversimplified and trite.