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Bedtime

Bedtime is one of four new episodes of Peggy and Fred in Hell completed since 2000, along with Have a Nice Day Alone (2002), The Splendor (2002), and The Fold (2013). Like other parts of the project, Bedtime sees a sustained use of found footage and integrates archival images—factories, military personnel, trolly rides, and explosions—with scenes of Peggy and Fred in their home. Speaking over the images, Peggy and Fred each tell a story, both fantastical and involving death. Closing with an image of Peggy and Fred playing with what appears to be a large grenade, Bedtime continues Thornton's meditation on the perils and potential of technologies, made playful and absurd by the narratives of her protagonists.

Peggy and Fred in Hell, Thornton's ongoing and open-ended series, maps a surreal, quasi-apocalyptic realm littered with the detritus of a pop culture bursting at the seams. Castaways in this wilderness of signs, Peggy and Fred are, as Thornton states, "raised by television," their experience shaped by a palimpsest of science and science-fiction, new technologies and obsolete ones, half-remembered movies and the leavings of history. An exploration of the aesthetics of narrative form as well as the politics of the image, Thornton's rigorously experimental oeuvre has forged a unique and powerful syntax.