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I may not know everything, and I don’t need to, but I want to know what I believe. I want to know what I believe is immoral or justified and I want to know what I believe is true or misunderstood. I want to know where I stand on spirituality and religion and ethics and superstition and all of those things that fall into the ‘unverifiable’ grey area of knowledge, but I don’t. It’s those sort of things that boggle my mind so much that I end up thinking myself into an endless hole that no one but I can get myself out of, only, oftentimes I find that I don’t know how to get out of it, either. It’s the sort of things that I can’t ask for help to understand because of how deeply personal the answers are. I can’t ask someone how I feel, and I can’t compare what I know to what someone else knows about themselves because it’s all just so impenetrably personal. It’s all up to me and my individuality. All I can do is look into my experiences and surroundings and try to understand what made me feel what and why, only, everything I understand in any case is shaped by those experiences in the first place. And then the same goes for anyone else on this Earth. So, the problem I’m trying to solve shifts from my classically teenage journey of self-discovery to the universal impossibility of objectivity that is paradoxical at its very core to investigate. That’s when I go thinking myself into that hole. 

That’s what seems to happen every time I try and figure out what love feels like to me. I can’t even seem to decide if I have multitudes of love for different people or if the crux of it is so stationary that it’s all the same. Of course, there’s romantic love, platonic love, familial love, and then, I guess, the love that I hold for music, film and writing. But are any of them really different from each other? Say, if a girl kisses her boyfriend but doesn’t kiss her best friend, does that really mean that her feelings between either of them is different at all? If she tells both of them she loves them, does the depth or extent of that love vary between romance and friendship? Would she go to the ends of the Earth for one of them, but stop a few kilometres short for the other? I don’t think so. While she treats them differently, I don’t think the fundamental feeling of love should vary all that much. The idea remains the same. 

One thing I can be sure about, especially, is the existence of love in the first place. I’ve never doubted that. Whether there’s a thousand or a million or just three kinds of love, I know there is at least one, and I know that that is all there needs to be. I know that love exists because I know that it exists in me. I’ve loved before—maybe not in every way, but I have loved before. I continue to love. As all of my emotions do, love sort of billows out of me in everything that I do. I love words. I love writing. I love thinking. I love movies. I love music. I love my mother. I love my best friend. I love my cats. I love pink. I love my bedroom. I love cursive. I love fold-over pants. I love lacy underwear. I love talking. I love dancing. I love black pens. I love the font Georgia. I love a lot of things. 

Is that reassurance enough for me? I’d like to say yes, for the most part. But, can I ever really be so definitive about that? Can I be definitive about any answer to any question if nothing is totally independent from its circumstances? It’s incredibly difficult for me to wrap my tiny little monkey brain around such overbearing concepts like love, especially as someone who has only experienced so much of it. It’s hard to leave it at just that: love exists. Like, yeah, okay. That’s all? Despite myself, I think in circles and circles about all of the meticulous parts of it until something else arises to occupy my mind and I leave it just as unfinished as I did the last time. I never find the satisfaction of coming to any conclusion, and I never will. But, maybe, the very absence of satisfaction is satisfying enough in and of itself, as long as I can accept it. And I really try to accept it, but then things just keep happening. People and events keep stumbling into my life and making me question what I was already wondering about. A single person can make me believe the entire world is completely barren of any love, or, at least, totally undeserving. That feeling doesn’t last forever, obviously, but those 30 seconds can be quite depressing. Just as well can a single person can make me believe the complete opposite. And, really, this could also just be me and my rampant hormones seeing everything as black and white as Robert Eggers’s The Lighthouse, but that movie still has visual depth. I don’t even know what I’m saying anymore. 

Usually, anything making me wonder about love is a thing that I’m at least mostly sure about—someone I’ve cared about or known for years and years. Someone like my mother or my brother or my cousin or, hell, the shirt that my dad gave me before he moved away. As much as I question it, I, at least, have always had a basis of what that person means to me. I grew up alongside my cousin, so, of course I love her, maybe I just didn’t know how much. My father may have moved away after promising he would never leave, but he will always be my father, and that shirt will always be his. That’s how it has always gone for me, and I think that’s why I’ve never been this distraught over what love means until now. I’ve only ever experienced it in that one way. Even in the movies, however complicated it gets, the answer is always given. They meet, fall in love, perhaps break up, then get back together, then maybe break up again, but, in the end, it’s never up to me. I just watch. And the familial love is never really up to me, either, because family is family. There has always been an answer to every question. But, now, it seems the Q:A ratio is wickedly imbalanced. 

And, see, now I’m rambling. The whole point here is that I don’t know how it feels to be in love. I don’t know when I am or when I am not. I don’t know if I am now or if I never have been at all. All anyone seems to say about it is that “it feels like home”, which sort of really makes me want to rip out my own throat. People always seem to find a way to say something without saying anything at all. “It feels like home”. What feels like home? What does home feel like? Do I know that it doesn’t feel like home because I don’t know for sure? Am I supposed to just know? Or is everyone just lame and stupid? Me, personally, I think it’s the last one. I think it’s, again, just the impenetrably personal nature of everything. That crap. I hate it.

The propellor behind this whole rant is that my friend wrote in my birthday card that they had the privilege of ‘watching me fall in love for the first time’. Now, the bamboozling part about that is, this friend has watched me do just about everything since the first grade. It’s impossible to know who or what they’re referring to. I’ve had wholesome first relationships bloom in elementary school, a handful of sporadic dates in high school, and a continuing, very unreasonable passion blossom for certain rock bands as of late. This person has probably watched me fall in love with 100 things since last week. I could ask, perhaps, for some specificity, but I don’t want to. Maybe I know the answer. Maybe that’s the whole propeller behind this ludicrous rant about a tired topic like love. 

I really don’t know what the guidelines for ‘being in love’ are. It seems like such a heavy word, even worse to say ‘falling in love’. It just seems so irrevocable and deep. I don’t want to fall anywhere. I don’t want to claim I’ve fallen if I haven’t, because what about all those people that actually have? I don’t want to call out from the summit of the mountain that I have fallen. For all I know, I could be so high up the mountain that the air is still thin. For all I know, I haven’t even stumbled, let alone fallen. I just don’t know how I’m supposed to know any of this. I won’t claim to have fallen from the mountain if someone would just tell me where on the mountain I stand. How am I supposed to tell if it all looks the same from here? I don’t even know where ‘here’ is!

What it is, is that I’m feeling things that I never have before. Even just saying that seems kind of like the start of textbook movie love. People are always saying that, and it makes me not want to say it because it seems to trivial. I don’t want to feel like a cliche, because it makes me feel like my emotions are smaller than they are. I don’t want to say things that lump me into that heap of spiralling teenage girls even though that’s probably exactly where I deserve to be lumped. That’s my issue with vocalizing the majority of my feelings. Before I let them out, they feel very powerful. They feel like the end-all/be-all of the Earth and my being. I am my feelings. But then, when I try to describe them, I diminish into nothing but words. As much as I love words, they do me no justice. They leave my mouth in a small, tentative voice, and it makes the feelings, in turn, small and tentative. It undermines how much influence they have to me. The words leave my mouth and float away, and it leaves me feeling stupid for being so affected by something that can so easily be carried away by the wind. There aren’t enough words to describe how I feel. And there goes another cliche. 

If how I feel is truly only the surface—if, perhaps, I am just a spiralling teenage girl, and I haven’t even made a dent on the mountain before me, then, what does it feel like to love? What does it feel like to love someone if not this? If this is only my puny inkling of loving in the real world, why aren’t there entire museums curated by the true lovers dedicated to those that they love? Why aren’t the people who have found love dancing in the streets every morning to celebrate all that they have found, if what I feel is only a fraction?

I could go on, but, at some point, it gets personal on an outrageous level. I’ll yell pretty much anything into the void of my Tumblr page, but I fear that posting rambles that pretty much diminish into altruistic love letters is a line I’m not keen to cross. We can leave this as yet another inconclusive, amateurly philosophical rant. 

It’s Natalia’s blog, isn’t it? I think that my ramblings, especially considering their verbosity, deserve at least somewhat of a supportive foundation in how they were authored. 

Forgive me if some of what I say may read like a decrepit old veteran shaking his fist to the sky from his rocking chair, shouting with an aimless glare: “Things change, and I don’t like it! The talkies should never have evolved past Charlie Chaplin!” The reason being that I believe there is a bitter old man that has made a home behind my ribcage, and he likes to spit his sour takes out into the un-listening void. Given that the old man is so close to my heart, I feel that his opinions don't totally deserve to be swallowed up by the emptiness underneath my chest. He deserves catharsis, too!

I like to believe that I live by Kurtis Conner's philosophy that “every movie is good”. While he follows it with much more loyalty, and maybe I’m a bit too critical to ever truly have faith in such a statement, I believe in the principle. However lacklustre or objectively lame any movie might be, any single redeeming upside should redeem all the downsides. At the end of the day, a movie is a movie; at the end of the movie, you watched a movie. And, really, what else could you ask for? Would you rather have not watched a movie at all? I know I wouldn’t. Anything that makes you feel something—anything—was worth the experience, even if that feeling was disappointment or frustration for how terrible it might’ve been. Behind every film is a team of filmmakers that have poured (at least some of) their heart and soul into creating something to put on your screen. From Pulp Fiction to Evil Bong 888: Infinity High, every film has, fundamentally, the same amount of love and effort put into it. Whether or not it came to any substantial avail, it is something, and that something is substantial in and of itself. 

Despite however much meaning we can strip away from them, movies are the backbone to how our society views things and how our society is viewed. The simplest and most reliable way to see how things were in the past are to venture back into history’s filmography, because film is the closest thing we can get to freezing a moment in time. Back To The Future 2 can remind us of the hopes we had for the future; The Devil Wears Prada can remind us of the fashion trends we left in the 2000’s; Cinderella can remind us of the practices in marriage that have since loosened up. Just as a picture can memorialise a moment, a movie can memorialise an era of society. Cinema is always a reflection of culture because the people behind the camera are always apart of a culture. The writer has written something that has unavoidably been shaped by her surroundings, because the writer’s foundational views and ideas are, too, shaped by her surroundings. The same goes for the actor, director, sound designer, editor, and on and on. Everything and everyone associated with creating the film has the wonderfully human quality of being impressionable. Even if someone were to try their absolute hardest to create something with absolutely zero meaning, the pursuit would be derailed from the get go considering that the person’s very idea of ‘meaningless’ could only be formed by something with meaning in the first place.

Because of this, cinema holds a very vital role in modern life. Even beyond the passionate cinephiles and dedicated movie critics, it reaches an impressive audience that, in a way, clobbers most other contemporary sources of media. Only dorks read books, only great-aunts read magazines, and only grandpas read newspapers. And, soon enough, the movie watchers may become the grandpas, and instagram reels suddenly may become the only real source of media for the next generation. But, thankfully, until then, movies and series hold most of the importance. However disheartening, it is inarguable that a good amount of the population is unlikely to lend a listening ear unless someone like Brad Pitt is the one talking. This means the big films and filmmakers have the responsibility to be wholeheartedly intentional in everything they put out. This isn’t to say every single movie has to have some hard-hitting and deep message to slap everyone in the face with, it just means that they have to be careful. They don’t have the privilege to be careless in what they’re portraying because of how crucial their portrayals have become to society. It’s that idea that ‘intentionality doesn’t matter because the effect is ultimately the same’. It doesn’t mean much that, perhaps, Disney didn’t mean to trivialise genocide in Pocahontas, because they did. Although, it definitely was purposeful, but that’s beside the point.

All of this is what makes it so disappointing that such a significant amount of filmmaking is being diminished into uninspiring regurgitations of what’s already been done for the sake of profit. While I can acknowledge that so much of it is still authentic, just the sheer amount of the market that exists purely for revenue is truly a stab to the heart. 

Now, I'm not going to sit here and preach that every adaptation and remake is utter garbage, because that would be just as outrageous as it would be inaccurate. There will always be a special place in my heart for the reimaginings that came at the very beginning of this renaissance—the 2015 live action Cinderella, the 2017 live action Beauty & The Beast, the 2018 remake of Little Women. Truthfully, some of my favourite movies are remakes: The Shining was a book first, John Carpenter's The Thing was a novella first, 10 Things I Hate About You was a Shakespeare play first, and there must have been a million adaptations of Frankenstein before Guillermo Del Toro got to it. Even still, all of those movies remain, in my opinion, some of the greatest pieces of cinema out there out of all that I've ever consumed.

As there is to everything, there are right and wrong ways to reinterpret a piece of pre-existing media. It all boils down to the motivation behind it. I have much more respect for Stanley Kubrick's The Shining than I do for Jared Hess's A Minecraft Movie. Maybe this is like comparing apples to oranges, but I mean it in only this sense: one was made with an appreciation for the source material and a genuine artistic vision to bring to life, and the other is... a minecraft movie. However entertaining and joyfully thoughtless, A Minecraft Movie was made for one very obvious reason. The producers saw a successful video game that had already reached a large audience, and decided to make a movie off of it so they could slap that title onto it and throw Jack Black into the mix. Which, really, is no cardinal sin. It's a kids movie anyways, and who would I be to criticize a movie like that for it's filmmaking merit or lack thereof? That's not the point, so I won't make it the point!

What I cannot say the same about, however, is the planned film adaptation of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, set to star Billie Eilish as Esther Greenwood.

Words cannot express how much painful loathing bloomed under my bones once I heard just the whispers of such a thing. I didn't know I was capable of such hatred. It is absolutely absurd. I try not to be so opinionated and close-minded to most things, especially art, but you will never catch me hearing anybody out about this abysmal—hear it again, abysmal—idea.

I love Billie Eilish. I love Sylvia Plath. I love The Bell Jar. I have always loved The Bell Jar. I read it for the first time in ninth grade, and I kid you not, I have not stopped thinking about it since. Sylvia Plath has way of writing that makes you feel like you're somehow seeing her life as well as your own. The excellence of her writing comes from how phenomenally intimate the internal monologue is. The Bell Jar isn't about any life-changing events or compelling external storylines, but just the truly striking manner in which Plath articulates inner turmoil. She writes so beautifully while managing to maintain a sincerely personal and conversational tone as her main character navigates everyday life with severe depression and suicidal ideation. The arc is almost entirely internal, and the captivating part is realizing how, even as the reader, the mental deterioration managed to fly under your radar. That is entirely accredited to the craft of the writing. The Bell Jar is a poet's only novel written about a semi-autobiographical poet's struggle to write.

In what world would that translate well onto the screen? If the medium famously is the message, WHY! CHANGE! THE! MEDIUM! The only way I can imagine the book being done even a sliver of justice is either a gross amount of voiceover that blurs the line between film and audiobook, or unnaturally spoken internal monologue. Not even the most inconceivably—even outlandishly—extraordinary actor could portray everything Esther Greenwood is and feels without the written word, let alone a pop star making her film debut. That is in no way the fault of Eilish herself, but the remarkably dense producers that thought it was a good idea in the first place.

Not only would this adaptation completely undermine the very fabric of the novel by simply existing as a movie, but it would take a big, fat, stinky dump all over Sylvia Plath's legacy as a writer. Everything Sylvia Plath wrote about was so incredibly personal and rooted in her life experience as a woman struggling with mental illness. She was so committed to being faithful to herself as an artist that she wrote about whatever she felt necessary despite the unforgiving norms of her time. Her poetry was so innovative that, today, she is still revered as one of the pioneers for an entire genre of literature. The name Sylvia Plath is wholly synonymous with artistic integrity, authenticity, and ingenuity. So, why, oh why, would the filmmakers today take her work and use it as another tool for feeding their insatiable greed? Actually, not just her work, but her SOLE and ONLY finished work of fiction.