Cinematic Joule

I have mixed feelings about Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone after watching it again at cinema after 10+ years.

Of course, it was a cute and moving kid's movie, binging back such memories when I watched it as a kid. As an adult, I am still impressed by their courage, their sense of justice, sportsmanship etc, and I feel just as lonely as Harry. 

But it's full of trivial incidents of the days and nights of Hogwarts, or shall I say Hogwarts in four seasons, or Everything about Hogwarts. It's like reading a very long introduction of an article. Although it seems okay if you put it in the big picture: after all there’re eight of them so they take time to construct a whole new magical world and you could see a lot of motives that would come back in the sequences (eg. the mirror, the invisibility cloak).

I also don't like the way the good and the evil are presented. It draws a stark line between the good and the bad, nothing in between. They all seem like stock characters and you could recognize them upon their appearance. You could tell Malfoy is a little bastard at first sight but you don't know why. Harry's aunt and uncle are even worse - they are simply snobbish, and snobbish only. Isn’t there any good side of them? Are they really that bad?

Another bummer was that those kids can't act, but I guess good enough for 10-year-old kids. Plus I truly resent watching 3D movies at cinema.

“Finally, I enter the world. A world that I will never feel comfortable in, never understand, and never approve of or forgive.” Yeah, me too, being outcast from the world. I could always relate to Woody Allen’s views of life in his movies and books. (Of course, he is much much more insightful than I am.)

So the other day I had such a serious mental breakdown that I decided that I had to see a psychiatrist. While I was sitting at the dim crowded mental hospital, I happened to read this from Woody Allen’s autobiography Apropos of Nothing where he was talking about his years of mental treatment:

“For me a big plus [of getting treatment] was the delusion I was helping myself. In the blackest times it’s nice to feel you’re not lying dormant, a passive slug being pelted by the irrational lunacy of the universe, or even by tsuris of your own making. It’s important to believe you’re doing something about it. The world and the people in it may have their boots on your throat, stomping the very life out of you, but you’re going to change all of that, you’re taking heroic action. You’re remembering those dreams. Maybe writing them down. At least once a week you’re going to discuss this with a trained expert, and together you will understand the awful emotions causing you to be sad, frightened, raging, despairing, and suicidal.”

“The fact that solving these problems is illusory and you will always remain the same tormented wretch ... The illusion you’re doing something to help yourself helps you. You somehow feel a little better, a little less despondent. You pin your hopes on a Godot who never comes, but the thought he might show up withanswers helps you get through the enveloping nightmare.”

These paragraghs actually made me feel less stressed-out as I sat there uneasily waiting for my call. It’s good to know that I am not alone, that the old guy with glasses behind his typewriter has also suffered and felt suffocated, for a much much longer period of time. 

From there, I started taking medicines today. I know it’s not magic. (So was I told.) It’s not the cure. But from Woody Allen I learned that at least I’m doing something about my problems, that I finally take the courage to try a new way and see if it works. This is an heroic action. I should be proud of myself for having gone through all that shits and shity feelings. It was very difficult and frustrating but I’m still here at this moment making an effort while writing this nonsense.

One of the many things that I hate about the city I live in is its asexuality. Totally unromantic, having no lust, no trace of love.

It’s a young city full of young people (or maybe robots or zombies) – I learned that the average age here is 32 but you’re wrong if you presume the residents are energetic or passionate. Nope. They (by they I mean the general they) are fucking zombies who shovel themselves up in those ugly-looking buildings that are so fucking tall that make you dizzy and work their asses till late having no love life nor sex life nor even masturbation because they are too fucking tired to even think about it.

Even if they do have that so-called love life, it’s a distorted one. I ran into heterosexual couples at restaurants and shopping malls at working day’s night  and they sickened me and yes it’s called heterophobia. Example: today at a restaurant next to me there were two people (a guy and a girl) who seemed to be on a date. The girl was busy crunching her laptop while the guy complained about her being ignorant and annoying with a sense of self-importance (as he would do to all other women). What a douchebag. I wish I did something against this his gender violence. I wish he choked on his stupid Gyudon. Those men and women who are so well-shaped by their gender stereotypes cannot be truly together as there’s always a conflict rooting in the gender roles endowed by the almighty system.

The shopping mall and its consumerism make all these even worse. Couples lingering in shopping malls instead of hitting home and fucking the hell out of the world. I know love life is not only about fucking, but it seems to me that they don’t fuck at all. I see no couples kissing, no hand-holding nor hugging. Only boys taking pictures for girls and what the fuck is the point of that. No affection. No chemistry. Not to mention no sign of queer couples. I myself had one or two romance in this shopping-mall-based city. Here I don’t blame the omnipresent hetero – there’s literally no place to go except for shopping malls alike. No good food. No quiet coffee shop. We are all drowned in consumerism.

Oh, and if you open up your dating app, it’d be like a ghost town where people are lonely as fuck but no one makes the first move. I once met a guy from one of the dating apps. After lunch he invited me to his apartment but then he started cleaning his house and I just sat there watching him doing housework for a fucking hour. I wondered if he ever got horny because I certainly did not. Maybe he was turned on by tidying things. Maybe I am crazy.

Self-help, self-care? I’m too tired to even bother to try.

What about all the years we had together? -  C‘est la vie.

I was reading The New York Times’ cover on The Great Google Revolt, in which I learned that a Google software engineer circulated an essay he had written arguing that women were less suited biologically for careers in technology than men. Ridiculous as this Mr Misogynist may sound, sexism is more ubiquitous that we thought. 

This engineer forcefully reminds me of Professor von X, a character in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, who wrote an essay called The Mental, Moral, and Physical Inferiority of the Female Sex and is heavily cursed by the author. He is the 21st century version of Professor X - Professor X in real life. Woolf portrays Professor X as a “villain” of the book and effortlessly wrote quite a few pages to redicule (men like) him. Mean but right on the target.

This is one of my favourite paragraphs in the book. It’s really funny:

I had been drawing a face, a figure. It was the face and the figure of Professor von X engaged in writing his monumental work entitled The Mental, Moral, and Physical Inferiority of the Female Sex. He was not in my picture a man attractive to women. He was heavily built; he had a great jowl; to balance that he had very small eyes; he was very red in the face. His expression suggested that he was labouring under some emotion that made him jab his pen on the paper as if he were killing some noxious insect as he wrote, but even when he had killed it that did not satisfy him; he must go on killing it; and even so, some cause for anger and irritation remained. … Whatever the reason, the professor was made to look very angry and very ugly in my sketch, as he wrote his great book upon the mental, moral and physical inferiority of women.

Unexpectedly, the internet access at my home broke down for an hour tonight, which provoked great anxiety to me. It felt like a part of me was blocked, subdued, muzzled, among all those unsent and unreceived messages. Certainly, the horror of being offline is a very modern problem.

Born at the turn of the 21st century, I have been too familiar with modern technologies since forever. I owned my first telephone at the age of nine, a time when I started learning to use the internet and chat online. I grew up playing computer games and watching TV – but at certain point, people simply stopped watching cable, just like that. Then came the emerging smartphone and e-commerce and social media. Convenience is the key word, as we willingly fall into the trap of consumerism.

Sadly, I’ve never lived in a world without the marvellous internet, so as I went disconnected for an entire hour, I panicked. I forgot that I could text and phone my friends (had I their number) – I could even write them letters or knock on their door (had I their address). (P.S. I’ve never written and snail-mailed an actual letter in my life.) I became anxious, unsettling, and inattentive.

From this little incident I recall an essay that I studied in class last year, The Telephone by Anwar F. Accawi, which is about how the introduction of telephone radically changes the life of people in a small Lebanese village. The nostalgic tone between the lines made me sad about how unpredictable life is, about how people are always “looking for a better life”, in vain.

Anyway, my professor asked us to take on a “no smart phone challenge” for just one day. I tried it. It was fun. When I had to arrange the meeting time and place with my friend prior to that day, he commented that I was “old-fashioned”, and that when he was a child back in the 80’s, people actually had to ring each other from home to make rendezvous and wait at the agreed spot, which I found interesting, even a bit romantic.

This is how I wrote about this “stone age challenge” in my journal that day:  “Generally, I didn’t suffer much inconvenience from this challenge. But to be honest, I did feel a kind of anxiety towards the end of the day. I worried if I missed any important messages given that my phone had been turned off for nearly 24 hours, yet the sad but obvious truth was: I didn’t.”

Incidentally, I was reading Ang Lee’s biography this arvo and a quote of his childhood friends gave me the nerves: “ Ang Lee was unpunctual, neither was I … I once waited for him for two hours. There was no such thing as cellphone and we were not able to get in touch, but I just knew that he would come. We wouldn’t get upset with each other for being late – simply seeing each other was enough.”

In hindsight, maybe people back then were used to waiting – it was a norm for them. Life’s moving way too fast nowadays, and we forget/have no idea about the merits of waiting – waiting for someone you care show up – it must be exhilaratingly torturing.

Extra: I would like to share a quote by The Fox in The Little Prince.