Intimate and gruelling

Most films about people undergoing a slow death have an inevitable sentimentality about them. It’s a feeling I resist and then fall for – like eating too much chocolate. Not so Stopped on Track, a new German film. It’s about a man, Frank, who is diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumour. It's gruelling and true. It combines all the wretchedness, tedium and sadness that accompanies a slow death. And I think the audience feels these three qualities in equal measure, with a couple of light moments thrown in. Very powerful. Great acting. I did not feel emotionally manipulated, just very sad. And a bit bored at times – which felt appropriate.

I felt there was some irony at the expense of the health profession. Their capacity to do anything in the face of his dying and the terrible burden this placed on his family seemed limited in the extreme, and their words felt kind but hollow. I doubt that this was the intention of the director, Andreas Dresen, who also made Cloud Nine – a film I really liked at MIFF a couple of years ago. In this film, he used a mix of professional actors and these real-life health professionals, and much of the dialogue was improvised as the filming took place.

The Eye for Film critic said: “It's seamlessly delivered; it just doesn't seem to have much to say.” I felt that this was missing the point – it is about a journey – the most universal of journeys and one that we often resist seeing up close and slow. The Telegraph critic got it:

”For this is a film about adaptation and coping. It’s a record of a journey as difficult as any polar expedition; counselors offer Simone and her husband’s family sketchy maps of the new, fraught world in which they now find themselves, but essentially they have to draw on their deepest reserves of love, pity and resourcefulness."

The film begins in a hospital waiting room. Frank ans his wife Simone are called into the doctor's surgery where he shows them slides of Frank's brain and tells them what has been found. The scene is quiet and sparse. They are shocked. Simone cries silently and Frank looks like he has been run over by a bus ('stopped in track, in fact). There is a lengthy silence, eventually filled by the doctor with information about potential life span. It is very well handled - no music, no embellishment - just sparse and empty. One other aspect that I liked was that over the course of the film, Frank used a mobile phone to records short bursts about himself and to capture his family reacting to him. This mini film within a film not only gave us insights into how he was feeling but mimicked, for me, the fragments of memory that you retain of someone who has died. This is an intimate and authentic film.

Reading crime. Norway v Australia

I’m an erratic reader of crime fiction. Mostly, I like to read it at Christmas – where I suspect it works at sublimating my desire to murder my family. Right now I’m in the middle of a Norwegian crime spree courtesy of Jo Nesbo. What I like about his books is what I like about most detective novels – the character of the sleuth or anti-hero detective. In many ways, the plot is less relevant though I like things to make sense, to add up. I like to think about “whodunit” but this is secondary to the anti-hero’s journey.


In The Leopard, Harry Hole (pronounced ‘Hooler’), the detective, is holed up in Hong Kong at the beginning of the story. He’s in a bad way; bashed up by a triad over gambling debts and a cosy little relationship with an opium pipe. In a way, I wanted him to stay there. Kowloon is vivid in my head, after my recent visit there and it seemed like the perfect destination for a man like Hole – so rife with possibilities. But he is bundled onto a plane by a young Norwegian female detective who inevitably provides some other ‘rife with possibilities’ moments.


The novel actually begins with a torture scene. I was thinking quite a lot of things while reading it. How often this genre starts with this kind of scene – the reader is placed immediately in a scene of great danger – portrayed either exclusively through the panicked eyes of the victim, or the paranoid nastiness of the killer. The scene is often so strange and disconnected from the subsequent narrative, which usually defaults to something way more domestic, that I usually forget that I have read it. It’s never my favourite part of the book, even though I suspect that the writer will have laboured over making it gripping. The opening scene of this novel is graphic and horrible. I felt voyeuristic reading it (as I did with a couple of other violent scenes in the novel). In searching for a novel kind of torture, I think that Nesbo has stretched too far. It’s likely that the whole thriller/detective genre has run out of realistically gruesome new ways to die. One reviewer, Patrick Anderson, wrote of this scene:

“The novel opens with a four-page exercise in horror. A young woman — captive, confused, desperate — is in the grip of a fiendish instrument of torture. As we watch, this device inflicts a terrible death on her. This is a brilliant scene, in its way, but it’s also stunningly sadistic, both in terms of what the killer is doing to the woman and what the author is doing to the reader.”

However much of the novel is devoted to Harry and his struggle with officialdom, with the politics operating between two institutions fighting for jurisdiction over murders in Norway. These, for me, are the most satisfying parts of the novel, just as, in a drama series like The Wire, the political machinations, treachery and power plays provide the gripping underpinning of the drama. The parts that I don’t like are the most dramatic: an avalanche, a volcano, a trip into Colonel Kurtz territory in the darkest Congo. I just don’t buy the melodrama of these events. But I’ll wear them because I’m a Harry fan and I do like a good murder. Anderson, the aforementioned reviewer, was not as kind, but I did enjoy the way he described The Leopard:

“Now, alas, I must report that ‘The Leopard’ is a bloated, near-total disaster. Reading it, I came to imagine myself trapped in a vast, fetid swamp from which I might never emerge."

The reviewer in The Independent, Paul Binding, writes about the ways in which family genes and upbringing become a theme in ‘The Leopard’.

“Nesbø's insight into inherited conflict – of which this novel affords a disturbing double instance – must emanate from his own declared family background. His father fought for the Germans in the Second World War, his mother for the Resistance, this duality being the emotional foundation of The Redbreast.


Nesbø's imaginative preoccupation with division, above all in the individual, makes him a distinctively Norwegian writer. His mentors – Ibsen, Hamsun - have magisterially contrasted the wild with the harmonious, the lover or explorer with the conscientious citizen, the stern moralist with the easy-going hedonist. This distinguishes him from the Swedes Mankell and Larsson, to whom he is so often compared.”

Finally, the other thing that the opening scene made me think about was the absence of torture from Australian detective novels. I need to say that I have not read really widely of the entire genre but within my experience, we kill quite quickly and efficiently for reasons other than straight-out sadism (I’m recalling a quite bizarre and stupid scene from Peter Temple’s otherwise very fine novel The Broken Shore as an exception.) Perhaps I am wrong – happy to be corrected. Our sadistic murderers tend to be more of the Wolf Creek mode – their place is in the outback or Bangalo State Forest. Our detectives are slightly less anti-hero – Cliff Hardy, Murray Whelan, Jack Irish – more Diver Dan than Harry Hole. If Paul Binding is right, that Nesbo is preoccupied with ‘division’ in the individual; that is a trait less obvious in Australian protagonists – who tend to be outsiders, but intact outsiders without the self-destructive aspects of a character like Hole. I will keep thinking about this.

What is right?

Joseph Kony is flavour of the Twittergeist at present along with controversy about how we manage bad things in Africa. And who is “we” and what should be the extent of “our” influence. And is it OK to buy wristbands for moral causes when you’re not sure just how moral they might be? Or is it OK to buy wristbands (assuming that the bulk of the money goes to a good cause) just because it’s trendy if you don’t actually care about the cause. And are we seeing the rise of “Slacktavism” as opposed to “slacktivity”? Weighty questions for a Tuesday.


They fit well with the latest “novel” I’ve read titled What is the What. Written by Dave Eggers, it states that it is “a soulful account of my life” – the life of a young Sudanese man variously named Achak, Valentino, Dominic or Gone Far. There are two things of interest in respect of this novel. The content, and the politics of the way it is written. Let me start with the content.


Achak is about six when Muslin murahaleen sweep into his village, destroy houses, kill some of the inhabitants and carry off children, women and livestock. He survives this attack and eventually sets out to walk to a safer location in Ethiopia. It is an epic walk of young boys who become known as the Lost Boys of Sudan. Horrible things happen to Achak and those around him. I can’t do them justice here but am glad I read the book – I know more about this period of recent history now and that’s a good thing. Death, hunger, abuse, the ambiguities and cruelties of the liberation soldiers (SPLA), the loss of family – these are just a few of the elements of the book. He spends many years in two refugee camps, the one in Ethiopia and then one in Kenya. No plot spoilers here – we first meet Achak in the United States so we know he survives.


Survives is a good word for what happens to him in America as well. This is the part of the book which worked best for me. I kept thinking of the Sudanese who live in my local neighbourhood of Footscray. (See the Footscray Food Blog for a taste of this.) It must be radically different living here. From 2001, 3,800 Sudanese were allowed to settle in the USA. Most of these were young men. Achak ends up in Atlanta in the States. He arrives just after 9/11. He has high expectations of his ability to prosper quickly; to go to college and emerge with a good job and good prospects. It does not play that way despite his determination and clear intelligence. He is looked after by some people and harassed by others. At one stage he is working for $8.50 an hour as a storeman. It takes him three changes of bus to get to his workplace. Some young Americans stop him, harass him and tell him to go back to Africa. He says:
Through Eggers we experience the increasing cynicism and disconnection of Achak in his new home. It’s a powerful thing to read about, falling as it does on top of the truly horrible experiences of his previous time as a lost boy. Actually he is a lost boy in both countries…

“When I first came to this country, I would tell silent stories. I would tell them to people who had wronged me. If someone cut in front of me in line, ignored me, bumped me, or pushed me, I would glare at them, staring, silently hissing a story to them. You do not understand, I would tell them. You would not add to my suffering if you knew what I have seen.”

A little of the comparison.

“Some sociologists, liberal ones, might take issue with the notion that one society is behind another, that there is a first world, a third. But southern Sudan is not of any of these worlds. Sudan is something else, and I cannot find apt comparisons. There are few cars in southern Sudan. You can travel for hundreds of miles without seeing a vehicle of any kind. There are only a handful of paved roads; I saw none while I lived there. One could fly a straight east-west line across the country and never pass over a home built of anything but grass and dirt. It is a primitive land and I say that without any sense of shame. I suspect that within the next ten years, if the peace holds, the region will make the sort of progress that might bring us to the standards of other East African nations. I do not know anyone who wishes southern Sudan to remain the way it is.”

The title? Achak is from the Dinka people of southern Sudan. Dave Eggers is quoted in The Guardian as saying: gifts, and were using this What to inflict unending pain upon the southern Sudanese.”

“We had agreed that we would include in the book an ancient creation myth known in southern Sudan. In the story, God, pleased with his greatest creation, offers the first Dinka man a choice of gifts: on the one hand, the cattle, visible and known, an animal that can feed and clothe him and last forever; on the other hand, the What. The man asks God, "What is the What?", but God will not reveal the answer. The What was unknown; the What could be everything or nothing. The Dinka man does not hesitate for long. He chooses the cattle, and for thousands of years Dinka lore held that he had chosen correctly; the cow is thus sacred in southern Sudanese culture, the measure of a family's wealth and the giver of life. It was not until the torment of the southern Sudanese in the 20th century that the Dinka began to question this choice. What was the What, they wondered, and speculation about the answer abounded: was it technology? Education? Sophisticated weapons? Whatever the answer, it was assumed that the Arabs of the north - who, legend had it, had received the What - might have got the greatest of God's

The controversy? Eggers was asked to help Achak write the book and recorded many interviews with him. At first I think they intended some kind of factual account of the style of ‘They poured fire on us from the sky’ but that book emerged first and Eggers felt that they could not add to that narrative. He also ran into some issues with recreating the story using just the fragments of Achak’s memory. It’s the usual issue – how do you recreate conversations with people where someone may only remember the intent or outcome, not the actual words. So he eventually decided to tell it as a novel but to use the first person voice of Achak as the narrator. IN doing this, he has got himself into trouble. I wasn’t too bothered by it because I think the story itself is really important – but here’s some of the criticism:


Lee Seigel’s review, titled The Niceness Racket says:

“The generation of people who survived the Holocaust and Stalin's vast network of camps is disappearing, but the number of novels about modern genocide has increased, and most of them are written by people who have no firsthand experience of their subject on which to draw. This presents a curious problem. Bearing witness, even in fictionalizing form, to extreme historical events that you have experienced is one thing. It is quite a different thing to try to recreate extreme historical events that you have not experienced, and then to try to imagine what it would be like to think and feel your way through them. This is hardly an illegitimate endeavor -- the imagination has an obligation to wrestle with even the most unimaginable experiences; but it is an intensely demanding endeavor, with moral and aesthetic pitfalls all around.”

Interesting, this connection with The Holocaust. Having just read The Street Sweeper, I had thought about this a lot. Seigel goes on to say:

“Deng's attitudes are tyrannically refracted through Eggers's reshaping of them. Deng does not represent himself. Eggers represents him. You never know whether the startling self-pity that Deng occasionally displays -- when two other boys are eaten by lions, Deng laments his unluckiness -- is his own or not. In Deng's own voice, these flashes from the underside of his ego might have been extenuated by irony or self-awareness. The same goes for Deng's hostile, suspicious, sometimes contemptuous attitudes toward American blacks. They might have been somehow vindicated in the full-throated revelation of his personality. Or maybe not. We will never know. In Eggers's hands, the survivor's voice does not survive.”

To some extent, I think Seigel is right but Achak has read and endorsed the book – he labels it his “soulful account” so do we take his own words at face value? Does it undermine his power and agency as a person to say that he is not capable of judging and addressing the ways in which Eggers has represented him? Is this just as patronising? I’m not sure.


Seigel goes on:

“And Eggers's book is also another unsettling thing. I never thought I would reach for this vocabulary, but What Is the What's innocent expropriation of another man's identity is a post-colonial arrogance -- the most socially acceptable instance of Orientalism you are likely to encounter. Perhaps this is the next stage of American memoir. Perhaps, having run out of marketable stories to tell about ourselves, we will now travel the world in search of desperate people willing to rent out their lives, the way indigent people in some desolate places give up their children. Perhaps we have picked our psyches clean, and now we need other people's stories the way we need other people's oil.”

I selected What is the What to read because I’d read Eggers’ Zeitoun and thought it very impressive. It’s a later book – about a Muslim man and his family who are victims of some truly appalling events post-Hurricane Katrina. It’s written in the third person – it’s very clear that the author is not the person experiencing the events. But vivid and compelling all the same.


I like Eggers – he is a good man. You can read about the things that he and Achak do in Sudan after the book is written, to try to improve the lives of the villagers where Achak is born. (See the article in The Guardian.) He wants to make a difference. He, like Eliot Perlman in The Street Sweeper, is driven by the need to have the story heard. I think this justifies what he does in telling it.

Disappointment is a beautiful woman reading Ann Rand

The title of this blog post comes from one of the stories I have just finished reading. It's The Best American Short Stories 2011. One of my favourite reading events for the year – time-out with a 20 page short story that almost always leaves you transported in time and place and most importantly, wanting more. It’s like a perfect little entrée. I try to use it as a guide to new authors – to read more widely in the coming year. In this case I’d happily read any of the people featured in this anthology though I don’t think it was quite as startlingly good as the 2010 collection. And a quibble – last year’s edition featured a story from Jennifer Egan’s book A Visit from the Goon Squad which is arguably a novel. I felt a bit cheated encountering another piece from the same book, even though this is a classy bit of writing. It either falls into publication in 2010 or 2011, not both. My favourite stories were ‘Foster’ by Claire Keegan (you can read it as first published in the New Yorker, A Bridge Under Water by Tom Bissell, The Sleep by Caitlin Horrocks, Housewifely Arts by Megan Mayhew Bergman and another story by the fabulous Rebecca Makkai who has been anthologised in this series four times.

Series Editor Heidi Pitlor makes some general comments about the kind of short stories that American writers are producing. She says that each of the 2011 stories sustains its own momentum through “premise or language, character or even perfectly placed silence.” Geraldine Brooks, who was the guest editor of the 2011 collection, is forthright about what she encountered(or did not encounter) in whittling down 20 stories from 100.

"Enuf adultery!" "Foreign countries exist." "Consider the following: Caravaggio's Conversion of Saint Paul, Handel's Messiah, Martin Luther King. Why, if religion turns up in a story, is it generally only there as a foil for humor?" and on said humor: "There's so little. Why, writers, so haggard and so woebegone?"

I can’t really do each story justice here but there is a blogger who can. She is working her way through each story with a detailed review – very interesting and entertaining reading. Go to Claire Guyton’s Sideways Reviews. If this is too much info, there is a shorter but detailed review which discusses each story in some detail.

Wrapping

The contenders for the Foreign Language Oscar in 2008 were The Baader Meinhof Complex, Revanche, Waltz With Bashir, The Class and Departures. Departures, which I saw on the weekend, was the winner. It’s a good film but not in the competition when you compare it with Waltz with Bashir and The Class – both films that I loved and which experimented a bit with form. Both a little more interesting.

Having said that, Departures made me think of my mother, it made me cry and only resorted to sentimentality in the last part of the film. It’s about a very good looking musician (Masahiro Motoki) who becomes an “encoffinator”, a "nokanshi", a professional who prepares the recently deceased for their funerals. The most interesting part of the film is the insights into Japanese traditions and also into contemporary culture. In traditional society it seems that one of the rituals is to wash the body of the dead person in front of the family. This is a highly ritualised event taking place in the tatami room with the kneeling members of the family in rows and the nokanshi at the front, slowly and methodically wiping the body, plugging the orifices and dressing the person in a fresh kimono.

It’s likely that this tradition is dying (sorry) away as the Japanese gradually take on the Western habit of whipping the body away quickly to the funeral parlour. I’m guessing about this after spending some time trying to research what is current in Japan. Departures implies that this is the case. (I found a good description of a Japanese funeral on the website Traditions and customs from all over the world. I also discovered that almost all descriptions of Japanese funerals come from the same source and are repeated word for word all over the web – one writer with a lot of clout.)

The lead actor developed the idea for the film while he was in India. Varanasi is a place where dying is front and centre and the rituals have both a spiritual and a pragmatic edge to them that has quite an impact. The bodies of dead people are placed on funeral pyres and burnt and it is not uncommon to see people bearing the wrapped dead body through the alley ways to the funeral ghat. It's often confronting but real. The film made me think about my mother; I didn’t see her after she died (through choice) and always feel ambivalent about that decision. Film director, Yojiro Takita films the nokanshi scenes slowly and beautifully though not everything is romantised; the first corpse that the fledging nokanshi deals with has been dead for two weeks and is not a pretty sight. It reminded me that I also saw Sunshine Cleaning this year, an American film that deals with the ways in which we manage cleaning up after deaths though this is not its central interest.

Writing in an online magazine Curator, Makoto Fujimura says:

“The Japanese have the ability, and the unwritten code of honor, to make all acts, however mundane, beautiful and refined. There’s no reason why they cannot apply the same principle to acting as they do to every other task. When I was coming back to the airport from Tokyo, I saw several elderly workers clean the elevator belts with sanitized towels because of the flu threat. They had developed the “art” of the belt cleaning, each with a distinctive style. Every subway announcer, Koshien (high school baseball) cheerleader, department store elevator operator, and gas station attendant all take pride in what they do and create unique signature to their “art.”

Japan is also a gift culture, where things are wrapped and presented beautifully. It is a country full of artful wax models of dishes served in restaurants (a welcome sight for gaijin visitors), and anything bought in the stores is wrapped carefully and diligently. So it is no surprise that there is such an art form of nokanshi, a delicate ritual of wrapping the dead.”

This is one of the most interesting things I’ve read about Departures. It connects with what I think of as the introverted nature of Japanese society; the way in which emotions are hidden away too. For example, we are given little idea that the nokanshi’s wife is unhappy in her new home until she discovers what her husband is really doing (she thought he worked in travel) and then she lets go with her grief and anger. Emotions are tightly wrapped; as tightly wrapped as the stiff hands of the dead bodies in the film. There is an artificial gloss on many things. Takita depicts this part of Japan as less glossy and more real. The bath-house, which is clearly slowly dying too, is shabby but comforting as is the place where the nokanshi and his wife live.

In an interview with Takita, he is asked about the location.

“The location should be in wild nature, since the theme relates to "death." I especially focused on snow. [Snow] sometimes looks so beautiful, but at other times, it makes life so difficult. Snow can be a symbol of the difficulty of life. Now, Japan is quite tired, both in Tokyo and in other local areas, in terms of the economy and other aspects. In such a situation, people tend to forget about important things that have been there. As you know, the theme [of the film] is "death," but I wanted to portray fragility and beauty that are fading away. So I selected the Shnai area in Yamagata prefecture for the location."

Fragility and beauty are fading away. In an interview with a contemporary nokanshi, Okuyama, some aspects of contemporary life are highlighted.

“The bodies sometimes reflect the social situation of the deceased. Last spring, Okuyama treated the bodies of many deceased people who had committed suicide by inhaling hydrogen sulfide gas they had created by mixing household chemicals. Last winter, meanwhile, the number of bodies of middle-aged men she dealt with increased. The deceased were dispatched workers who apparently had lost hope and killed themselves after being laid off from their companies, Okuyama said.”

Japan is changing rapidly – like all societies – and there are casualties.

Takita, who also made The Yen Family, doesn’t have quite the same touch as my favourite Japanese film maker Koreada. Departures is no match for a film like After Life. At the end, it succumbs to an unnecessary sentimentality and there’s probably one too many lingering glance. But is a film that takes you places and makes you think about important topics. And made me remember and cry over my mother, whose birthday is would have been on the 26th of October.

Homage to Marilyn

Not Monroe but French. The writer of The Womens’ Room. Two books had a profound impact on me in the 70s. The World According to Garp and The Women’s Room. It’s a funny combination but they do have some things in common. Marilyn French died recently. I bet she had a significant impact on a lot of women. When my friend Jane and I went walking the other day, she mentioned her death and the impact that she had on her life as well. Her novel made me aware of aspects of my own life, especially the relationship I was then in (in the 70s) and ultimately I broke up with Geoff as a result of this awareness. Marilyn French helped embed the feminism I had; she had a greater impact than Germaine Greer and Simone de Beauvoir on me. I wonder what The Womens’ Room would be like now?

"How am I blest in thus discovering thee!”

Been thinking about the word Elegy after seeing the film of that name. John Donne was really the Elegy man and this thought sent me googling the connection. The first one I came across was Elegy XX To his mistress going to bed. Like a lot of Donne’s poetry, it’s about making the most of the limited time we have. In his world view, its best spent in bed with a lover (apart from the time taken with wondering what happens after you die). Sex and death weighed heavily on the man. I liked re-discovering him- here's a snippet from that poem.

“Licence my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O, my America, my Newfoundland,
My kingdom, safest when with one man mann'd,
My mine of precious stones, my empery;
How am I blest in thus discovering thee!”

The word elegy is more usually used to mean a song of mourning and perhaps Donne is thinking of the ephemeralness of this relationship and the frailties of the human bodies, both his and his lovers. As the title of the recent film, it is less harsh than the title of the novel it represents “The Dying Animal”. Roth’s book and this film is about David Kupesh, a man in his 60s who falls in love with a much younger woman played by Penelope Cruz.

The opening of the film shows him in his New York apartment quoting from Tolstoy: "The biggest surprise in a man's life is old age." This quote has the kind of truth about it that made me want to agree out loud in the cinema. Age has been much on my mind lately, not just my own but the people around me. I thought about my father who seems constantly bemused by the treachery of his body. On the weekend he said to me “I used to be an athlete; I could run 100 yards in X (I think he said 11 but this cannot be right) seconds.” He can’t understand where this fitness has gone, what has happened to him. It’s unbearably sad. And perhaps that means that what happens to Kupesh in the film is sad but not tragic (in comparison with my father who is 80 and tragically sad.) After all, Kupesh has the beautiful Cruz fall in love with him.

Kupesh is something of a tosser but the universality of the aging process is the compelling part of this film. It’s the third film I‘ve seen about aging men this year which perhaps tells us something about the demographics of current film producers. And audiences. But ultimately I had to agree partly with Monalah Dargis in the New York Times: “There’s not a hair out of place here or an emotion. It’s as if Ms. Coixet (the director) had tried to quiet the howls of a dying animal.” I thought the film would end about 20 minutes before it did; there is a twist in the plot that shifts our perspective somewhat. What the twist raised for me is the question – do we feel more keenly for the really beautiful? Would the impact be the same if the plot twist was applied to Kupesh’s older lover? (A woman who I identified with quite strongly). Would that have made the story more interesting? Made us forget the twee beach love scenes that populate the early part of the film?

Cruz plays the role as a cipher; unknowable in her beauty. This tease of the audience is set up quite early when Kupesh first sees her – she is carrying a copy of Roland Barthes “The Pleasures of the Text”. And Kupesh’s friend says something along the lines of the unknowability of the truly beautiful woman; it is a complete distraction. I don’t think that Mr Donne would have agreed but he was truly a renaissance man. Head and heart. Go John. He was up for it – the howl of a dying animal in a way that this film isn’t quite. Re-reading Donne's words, there's a robustness and energy that is never felt in the film; the Kupesh character is way too restrained and melancholy. at one stage, Kupesh compares the Cruz character to a painting by Goya and the relationship has that element; a woman reclining to be admired, a woman looking lovely on the beach, a man looking sad in a darkened apartment. Somehow the blood has left this film. I'm going back to Donne for a bit more sex and death... And maybe Philip Roth. And definitely John Updike.

Ego integrity and despair

I like listening to Radiotherapy on RRR on Sunday mornings. It’s a bunch of doctors chewing over medical stuff and sometimes they do film reviews. I don’t know if it’s the same reviewer every time but he often comes at things from a psychoanalytic POV – often quite a different take on films. Yesterday he reviewed Gran Torino which he and I both liked. He talked about Erik Erikson’s work on the 8 stages of man – the last one is Ego Integrity vs. Despair - old age. “Some handle death well. Some can be bitter, unhappy, dissatisfied with what they accomplished or failed to accomplish within their life time. They reflect on the past, and conclude at either satisfaction or despair.” (Wikipedia)

This had huge resonance for me because I think this is where my father is at; reflecting on his life and in his case, I think he fluctuates between the two Erikson categories of despair and ego integrity. In the case of Gran Torino, it’s Clint Eastwood who plays an angry, lonely old bastard, a man who has just lost his wife and who has the slightest of relationships with his family. I’m not going to write at length about the film; I liked it despite the fact that most of the plot is a basic redemption plot - dysfunctional person is led to a better, happier life almost in spite of himself. It is also about the Hmong community in the USA, a community I know a little about because of the book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. While Gran Torino is not a great film, the baddies (Hmong gangsters) look like total baddies and it is largely though not entirely predictable, it was oddly satisfying seeing this old curmudgeon gradually accept friendship even though he never lost the surface elements of racism. I really enjoyed it. We love seeing bad guys get what they deserve. And Eastwood obviously had a lot of fun with the non-PC aspects of the character he plays - there are some very funny moments. He is great – and brave – he looks his age. Which is old.

I thought of the film gain yesterday after watching The Wrestler which I thought was great. Mickey Rourke was playing a man at the end of his wrestling career, held together by steroids, bandages and headlines from the glory years of his character, “Randy the Ram”. His life is crap: trailer park trash, he’s lonely, broke and damaged. Like Eastwood, he has fucked up relations with the only family he has, his daughter. It’s a stretch applying the Erikson stage to it because Rourke’s character is, I think, meant to be in his fifties but steroid abuse and the damages perpetuated by wrestling have really aged him and one of the events in the film causes him to want to change his life. Rourke is really fabulous. It’s painful watching him try to connect with the lap-dancer character played by Marissa Tomei. He is embarrassingly gauche and shambling with the Tomei character Cassie/Pam, as he also is with his daughter. The Cassie/Pam character has a twofold purpose in the film; she represents new possibilities for Randy and her own life parallels his – they are both struggling with jobs that require a specific and damaging kind of performance that is at odds with the “real” or regular lives that other people live. Both have a performance persona, they frock up (or down in Tomei’s case), they play for the punters and suffer humiliations as a result. (One of the best scenes in the film shows the small cohort of deadbeat wrestlers seated at card tables in a community hall, selling videos (not DVDs) of past glories and signing autographs for the meagre numbers of fans that trawl through this bleak and wintery town)

I can’t do justice to the treatment of wrestling in the film. It is remarkable. The wrestling scenes are violent and theatrical and there were segments in the film which were hard to sit through even though I watched knowing that it was all about performance. Like lap-dancing. The film avoids predictability; I thought it was great. In an interview conducted by James Rocchi, director Aronofsky credited a 1957 Charles Mingus song "The Clown," an instrumental piece with a poem read over the music about a clown who accidentally discovers the bloodlust of the crowds and eventually kills himself in performance, as a major source of inspiration for the movie.

Life is short and then you die

The length of a film is not the best grounds for choosing which one to watch but the over 40’s Melbourne temperatures of last week made the decision easy. Find the longest film on offer at the closest cinema. And so I went to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I liked it more than I expected even though I have an automatic resistance to these kinds of films. By this I mean extremely polished, expensive, emotionally manipulative films from the Hollywood stable. I don’t like crying over crap or having sentiment front and centre as a device. I don’t much like Brad Pitt as an actor either. Less pretty is good. And this film is all about pretty – in lots of ways. (And on the Brad topic, I loved this critique of him from film critic A O Scott in the New York Times; “Mr. Pitt seems more interested in the nuances of reticence than in the dynamics of expression”. Originally John Travolta was to have had the role; he would have been a better choice.)

So, what‘s to like? Almost every scene looks like a scene from a picture-story book, with the exception of the “modern” scenes which contrast nicely. The historical scenes are filmed in a luminous sort of candlelight which makes then look both rich and mysterious. I’m sure that part of the reason for this would have been the need to cleverly manage the process of ageing Brad backwards; he is born in the guise of a very old man and becomes younger as the film develops. So soft lighting is important; as the Brad character, Benjamin becomes younger, his co-star, Cate Blanchett, playing Daisy, has to age. The scenes are visually striking; lush and dramatic. It's a lovely film to look at.

The picture story book effect provides the film with licence to be melodramatic. A baby is close to being thrown in the river by his father, a tugboat is blown to bits at war, a woman is knocked down by a car, Hurricane Katrina is whirling round the edges of the modern story. It’s a fable. And provided you accept that it’s a fable, it’s quite satisfying.

A lot of critics have rightly criticised the lack of characterisation in the film. Usually this matters to me but I think this is a film about a larger topic; the passage of time and how humans manage it. It’s about the brief ephemeral intersections of contact and about loss. Loss caused by death and loss caused when people move on or move out of your life.

The most poignant scene for me was late in the film. Benjamin and Daisy intersect many times as she ages and he goes in the opposite direction. After a gap of several years, Benjamin walks through the door of her dance studio and stands, looking at her. She doesn’t initially recognise him. Her face is lined, she is a middle-aged woman. He is a young man, glowing with all the gorgeousness of youth. My mind went immediately to my recent meeting with Geoff, a man I lived with a long time ago. We hadn’t seen each other for many years and so meeting again, were confronted by physical change, by memories of the relationship we had shared and by what was left - nothing really. I felt a sense of loss – not that we no longer had a relationship but that there was nothing left now. No yearning, no nothing. I had the “So what’s it all for?” feeling. It made me feel terribly, terribly sad.

The focus on aging also made me think about my father and his own aging process, the pain of it. It’s painful watching my father go through this. Painful, sad and frustrating. The world becomes smaller and more circumscribed. But not necessarily. Geoff is not in my current life and making that decision decades ago was a good decision. What I have now is rich, lively and full of opportunities. Some options have closed down but I don’t feel like my world is getting smaller; if anything it seems more open-ended and full of promise.

The film comes from a short story written by F Scott Fitzgerald, who had an ongoing preoccupation with the ephemerality of things. I haven’t read it yet but you can download it. The screenplay was written by Eric Roth, who also wrote Forrest Gump. I was pleased when I read this – not because I liked Forrest Gump much but I was reminded of that film while I was watching the Benjamin Button film and I couldn’t work out why – something to do with the over-orchestration of effects and emotions, I think. It’s made me want to go and re-read Scott Fitzgerald which is no bad thing…

Alone in the world

I’ve been thinking about therapy and its literary and filmic representations lately. Purely by coincidence, I saw the films One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest and Men’s Group within a 24 hour period. Both films are broadly about men in trouble, though this is perhaps where the similarity ends.
I think I saw One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest last in 1976. It was quite shocking. Literally of course but that’s a pretty lame joke. I remembered the shocking aftermath of Nicholson’s treatment but not the way the film ended. I don’t know how prevalent lobotomies are any more. I saw it at a time when shock treatment was very controversial as was the institutionalisation of people. I saw it in the free-wheeling 70’s where the mood of rebellion against authority was very strong. I am betting that I saw it just as Whitlam had been kicked out of office and we in Australia were battling against the early, nasty impact of the Fraser government, the razor gang and, interestingly, the first incarnation of John Howard.

Filmsite.org describes it as

“one of the greatest American films of all time - a $4.4 million dollar effort directed by Czech Milos Forman. Its allegorical theme is set in the world of an authentic mental hospital (Oregon State Hospital in Salem, Oregon), a place of rebellion exhibited by a energetic, flamboyant, wise-guy anti-hero against the Establishment, institutional authority and status-quo attitudes (personified by the patients' supervisory nurse). [Forman himself noted that the asylum was a metaphor for the Soviet Union (embodied as Nurse Ratched) and the desire to escape.”

The film holds up but looks quite different to me now. I have a greater appreciation of where Milos Forman was coming from. He says in the support material for the film that he felt like he had been living in an asylum for 20 years in the Czech Republic. Most of the filming was done in the mental hospital; the actors would come in the morning and rehearse then just hang around getting themselves into the feel of the institution in the afternoon.

I see Nurse Ratched differently though. In some ways, I think she is treated unfairly – this is a film where the only women are whores or nurses and maybe this is how some of these dysfunctional men perceive women in general but it seems a little unfair that Ratched carries the entire can. The doctor, who is a real psychiatrist, is not demonised in the way that Ratched is, though it’s he who is responsible for what finally happens to Nicholson. A nurse, in reality wouldn’t have had that sort of power, even though Ratched is depicted as conducting the therapy sessions by herself. And in the first instance, the Nicholson character is incarcerated in prison because he has had sex with a 15 year old girl; it’s a construct that a director wouldn’t use now if he was looking for audience sympathy for the main character. There is some unpleasant gender stuff lurking in the dark recesses of this film but it is really about dysfunction, abuse of authority and agency.

Critic, Roger Ebert said it “is a film so good in so many of its parts that there's a temptation to forgive it when it goes wrong. But it does go wrong, insisting on making larger points than its story really should carry, so that at the end, the human qualities of the characters get lost in the significance of it all. And yet there are those moments of brilliance.” He and I both liked the small scenes of rebellion inside the ward and the depictions of the ways in which people collude with authority; the scenes showing just how hard it is to take stock, stand up for yourself.

Following my at-home screening of Cuckoo’s Nest, I went to see Men’s Group. I was very disappointed in this film. I had high hopes of this film representing my personal experiences of a women’s group on the big screen; the value of doing the work and the toughness of the experience. And it began promisingly with the very first meeting of the 5 men. This meeting was filled with the confusion and difficulty of making contact with other people; it felt authentic in the strange embarrassment of the session. Their consultant who says, at the outset ”This is not therapy. It’s simply a space to be safe and talk about things.” And this was the truth of the work that he does and that they are up to doing. The consultant seemed unable to work at any depth with the men in the room. They were there for the regular variety of issues that people (men?) face; loneliness, fathering problems, father problems, relationship issues, just generally being disconnected. And why they turned up again after the futility of that first session, I don’t know.

It gave me plenty of time during the film to think about the kinds of successful renderings of therapy on film. The best one for me is the fractious and flirtatious relationship of Dr Jennifer Melfi and Tony (or Anthony, as she likes to call him) Soprano. It is my favourite part of this series. Other people might reference the Analyse This/That films but they are much more about other things than therapy. Pyschotherapist, Irvin Yalom has done so much to render therapy an accessible and interesting thing in fiction and in his books about his practice. I’ve been profoundly influenced by his work. In Love’s Executioner he talks about 4 fundamental things that we need to come to terms with as humans. The first is obviously death. Another is our fundamental aloneness – not loneliness but aloneness. I can’t remember what the other two are but these two are big for me. Here is a little of an interview with him in Salon:

Q: “Most of us feel we do not want to think about death. But you assert that confronting death is a key to living a full, authentic, happy life. I wonder if you could describe in personal terms what living authentically means to you?”

A: “Certainly as I've grown older, I've been thinking a lot more about the end of my life, which may not be too far away. My father and his brothers all died relatively young because of heart conditions. So I think, Well, life is finite. I don't have unlimited years left, and I want to know what is more central to me and my life right now.

Above all, I don't want to do anything that feels repetitious. And I tell myself that I don't want to belong to any more committees or teach anymore, because the field is becoming drugs, pharmacotherapy. The next generation of therapists isn't going to be trained for psychotherapy because the insurance companies aren't going to be paying for it any longer.

What feels most central for me is being creative and looking at the way in which I have creative talents and gifts that I haven't used. I basically see myself as a storyteller engaged in ideas that have to do with an existential, deeper approach to life. I feel very uncomfortable with the idea of these gifts being unused.”

It reminded me of going to hear David Tacey and John Carroll talk about Jung at Readings. One of them said that in this secular society, we use stories to make meaning out of life. This statement sounds so painfully obvious but when I heard it, it resonated so much - this is the compelling thing about stories, in the absence of that large meta-narrative about God, we need some others. (The blog Thinking Shift has some writing about this topic.)

I think that when it comes down to it, this is why I felt so cross with Men’s Group. The film fluttered across the surface of the stories of these men; all of whom had deep and painful histories. The film-maker, Michael Joy, said “Within my own life I ended up needing some people outside of family and friends to talk to and I found myself going to a men's group this one evening and heard these guys' stories and just realised that there was a story there that had to be told.” Joy needed to hang around and do the stories justice. He needed to attend the men’s group for months to see what deep and painful issues were raised and worked through. If they were worked through. Or to read a little Yalom and see what universal truths can come from the process of therapy whne you stay with the pain of the person you are working with, when you linger.

So out of it all, when I talked about it with Naomi, my FFFF, we decided that there was merit in showing the fact that the 5 men were facing similar issues (as opposed to making a film about any one one of these characters seperately). Loneliness. Disconnection. Inarticulateness. Aggression. How to be a father. How to love a father. How to manage that sense of being alone in the world. These are the stuff of important stories; they make meaning for everyone. But while there is great merit in trying to work with these themes, the film did a pretty crap job of it.

It did, however, spawn this funny piece of dialogue between Margaret and David (At the Movies):

MARGARET: Getting away from that, I mean it’s interesting for me, having that sort of rawness of blokes’ emotions. How do you, as a man, react to that?

DAVID: I found it - I think I’m the sort of person who keeps my emotions in check.

MARGARET: Yeah.

DAVID: And so I don’t entirely recognise that, but I was impressed by the way the actors handled it and the way it developed during the course of the film. I would never go to a group session like the one in the film. Never.

MARGARET: I can imagine. No, but because, you know, I think that’s true of a lot of men. They’re too contained and they are in the beginning of this film.

DAVID: You’re looking...

MARGARET: It’s not easy to expose yourself.

DAVID: You’re looking at a very contained man, Margaret.

MARGARET: Oh, I know that, David.

DAVID: In case you didn’t know after all these years.