old man at heart

In my first year of undergrad, deep in the COVID lockdown, there was a windstorm that ripped through Portland. For a few days, I would look out my window and see trees swaying, silently but with such strain that it seemed they would be pulled from the ground. Some were. The day after it ended, I walked outside into a still world. The feeling of quietude so overwhelmed me that I tried to elaborate it to myself in a piece where I compared the world to a snowglobe that had been shaken and put down, and was tinged in its stillness with the dreadful possibility it may never be picked up again. I rewrote that piece a number of times, I doubt if I'll ever share it with anyone. Soon after, I decided, with greater intention than it seems like most people require, to start making friends. And for a while, I didn't think about that feeling of stillness at all.

It snowed. I figured that, in any case, life had come to a halt … that nothing more would happen … and that I should wait for the snow to stop and then melt. It snowed for a very long time. Four days.

Maybe bottom five worst scripts of any movie I've ever seen. A couple of shots where the choreo and cinematography work together and it looks like action figures fighting, and the first twenty minutes or so are almost charming, but the rest is horribly muddled.

A level of compassion and care I've only ever seen exhibited by Lynch. I didn't know anyone else was really capable of it, in this way.

I wish there was a movie showing right now.

Leviathan (2014) dir. Andrey Zvyagintsev

Bones and All (2022) dir. Luca Guadagnino

I Am Not A Witch (2017) dir. Rungano Nyoni

Funny Girl (1968) dir. William Wyler

Suspiria (1977) dir. Dario Argento

The Wizard of Oz (1939) dir. Victor Fleming

Krichman's landscapes are all-consuming. The players fumbling about on their stage are not separated from it. They are merely a small part. Ants crawling around. Dust. In their lives, the Leviathan looms large. The arms of the state, of the church, of human power, can reach into their homes and hearts and choke them. But what is human power? If the Leviathan is large, then what is the sea?

Of course it is absurd to build a life, to love life. But then how absurd must cruelty then be? Some day, cruelty will slow and stiffen, its meat will rot away and only the curious skeleton will remain. Perhaps the same will happen to love. And world will persist. Beyond even the eyes that behold its beauty.

I do want to write about this some day more seriously, but I don't think I'm quite up for it today. I'm sure I won't ever be able to convey how much this movie means to me. But, for posterity, here's a brief summary. I spent the summer of 2023 living in Helsinki, Finland, working on a math problem that my advisor solved last year using completely different methods. It was a fascinating experience. I was lonelier than I've ever been.

In Helsinki, there's one subway line that the city is built along, and at each stop is an enormous mall, so that during the winter people spend as little time outside as possible. Some of these malls have Finnkino chain movie theaters, where the popcorn is prebagged and kept in heated cabinets and there's more sparkling water than still. When I felt too lonely, too alienated, too envious of my friends living in Portland over the summer, I went to one of those theaters. And I fell asleep.

And once, early in the summer, I sat down to watch Asteroid City. A movie about a group of strange people from strange places who came together, without knowing each other, to watch something curious. And what they see instead is something extraordinary.

A void of purpose filled by indulgence, until the indulgence runs out and one must find real purpose. Chytilová's Maries are excluded from the framework of purpose, from the social scaffolding afforded men. They do not exist within the world of labor, and so they cannot be sure that they exist at all. Until they realize that their materiality, of which they are so conscious, is a social one, but it is too late. They cannot put the pieces back together. They never had a chance.

I feel a little bit like I'm going crazy. Obviously this is an impressive technical feat in terms of set design, costuming and lighting, and much of the sound design is interesting, but that's about it. Introduces a dynamic regarding the prodigy and the relationship between envy and mentorship that I desperately wanted it to explore, that it so easily could have teased something real out of. But instead, it presents a rote series of the same events happening over and over again with the same characters reacting with the same expressions in ever more elaborate set pieces. Abraham does his best with the material but there are only so many times I can hear him express exactly the same thought in exactly the same tone. Repetition is not interrogation. Interrogation would have involved anyone rebutting anything he or anyone else says, rather than each character just stating their opinions until they are no longer relevant to the drawn out plot. How long is it between the burning of the cross and the final shot? Could Forman not have done anything else with a self-identified antichrist? It's so tempting for me to read more into the psychological reality of the film, but that would be pure eisegesis.

The cinematography I don't want to harp on too much, because it's always annoying watching wide screen movies on my laptop, but frankly it was really boring. Like the rest of the movie, far too agreeable. The camera tries to immerse itself in the spectacle rather than reflecting it, and what we see is exactly what we get, there are never turns, never revelations, never curiosity. Only presentation.

Nyoni is solidified in my mind as among the greatest working directors. A sense of the frame like nothing I have ever seen, outside of her sophomore effort. Negative space that sticks in the mind. I don't know if I'll ever stop thinking about it.

Freedom will come. We must galvanize ourselves towards it before we lose any more.

Perhaps the best of novels. G.H., you are realer than I. But you have made me realer than I was.