a long slow look at the real naked thing

Sometimes the thing you think you didn’t need, the thing that in fact pisses you off the most, whose uninvited appearance in your lazy Saturday afternoon, is exactly the thing you didn’t know you needed.

The way I go about the business of living my own life, if left too long to my own devices, shares an insidiously innocuous quality with most of the mainstream entertainment I’ve seen lately: the characters’ problems are too perfectly contained. Their entire world is wrapped up in manageable plot points, packaged for digestibility. It’s an undead snowglobe: all the real magic and untamed mystery lives on the outside, but inside the bauble at least we’re safe from anything that can’t be assimilated or defined.

This weekend I watched about three fifths of a movie that implodes that dynamic—the specificity of the characters creates a portal for unbridled vulnerability and horror. Instead of a caricature of anguish, painted on and pointed at for comic effect, instead of a coy burlesque of suffering, I realized about halfway through, in one wrenching, utterly unexpected moment, that I was being offered a long slow look at the real naked thing.

I couldn’t handle it. I walked out.

Actually I almost left within the first 15 minutes because I was kind of bored, but there were enough glimpses of humanity and imperfection to make me say, well, I’ll just wait until the next little scene change, and then decide. Almost without noticing, I started to love the characters, and by “love” I think I mean something like “recognize.” But after that moment when everything shifted and I realized there was no possibility of a misinterpretation, there would be no satisfactory undoing of what I’d just seen, I waited (mostly out of self-consciousness) through a couple more increasingly bleak scene changes, and got up and left. On the drive home I predicted I was going to be depressed and pissed off, and it came true and lasted for several hours, like a regrettable, un-fun drug trip.

I don’t know if I’ll ever watch the rest. Might not need to. But the next day, I changed my mind about the movie. It’s spacious. It's not “self-expression,” speculation, philosophy, nor gratuitous gloom. It’s not self-pitying or complaining. The part I saw at least felt rather like an acknowledgement, a representation of a sensed reality whose explicit acknowledgement or representation is taboo unless neutered by snark, depersonalized by gore, cloaked in high-mindedness, or presented as the abstract backdrop for a comic hero’s redemptive arc. Nope, in this case all we’re given is the raw horror, not sugared up with intent to titillate.

I feel like I got the message, got a small signal. I can ignore it if I’m capable of ignoring it, or let it irritate me into something else if I can’t ignore it. What’s the something else? I don’t know yet but it has to do with attachment, abandon, a certain stinginess of the spirit, a Scrooge-esque presentiment that I’m gonna look back and realize I wasted most of my life worrying about the “wrong” things. Survival as something other than avoidance. The presence of death, unfettered by depression or forced hilarity, becoming its own thing—just there, just existing, as it always has and always will. It doesn’t really matter—whatever it is I’m “meant” to do with it I can’t do or not do on purpose anyway; I can only do on purpose the things I can do on purpose, but those aren’t the only things I can do.

Ever since COVID, I’ve had no room in my schedule for “serious” TV or movies. Alarmed and uncertain, my daughters and I waited out the “safer at home” months watching all the dumb shit Netflix had to offer. It was fun and wretched at the same time. But it worked. Of course it wasn’t just COVID, it was everything else that was going on all at once, much of which has continued to spiral into chaos. I started thinking if everything “out there” is so depressing already, why would I want to watch depressing stuff on TV? If the end of the world is coming for real, why would I want to watch overwrought TV shows trying too hard to be earnest about the end of the world?

But as one of the characters in the movie I walked out of observes, “It’s been the end of the world for a long time.”

Funny how it was COVID that set me on the path of avoiding this kind of “entertainment.” A pandemic is a global reminder of the illusory nature of safety. But it wasn’t a one-off. The end of the world proceeds apace, or rather doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

“[W]e are living in a very thanatophobic society, where the notion of death disappears. But as a person, and as a filmmaker, I need to meditate on death. I think it’s healthy to see death not as an end, but rather as a passage to something. It means death allows you to speak more clearly about life,” said the filmmaker.

These stories, these horrors, these anti-resolutions exist, always, just under the surface or juxtaposed with our intentional narratives, our optimistic schemes (the best laid of which gang aft agley). Well-tempered positivity or self-defensive pessismism, take your pick; the relentless coulter doesn’t care how we act, or what strategies we employ.

Your story is bigger (and smaller) than you think it is. This is liberating because you can’t fuck it up. Every page is page 192. Most TV shows and movies (and probably a hefty percentage of internet writing) have very little to do with your story, unless you just happen to be the exact, highly specific type of chosen one or child wizard or animated moose or whoever or whatever you're supposed to think you want to be. They’re a commodity, an assemblage of plastic parts, a thing you can buy whose price is determined by what you will pay. This is why “creatives” complaining about “AI” are right to be upset but diverted about what’s really upsetting. You can always go off in the desert. Nobody can take that away from you. You just have to be willing to take death with you. If you’re not OK with that, you’re not arguing about art, you’re arguing about your job, and you only have the kind of job you can argue about if you have a boss to argue with, and you only have a boss if there’s someone who’s willing to pay your wage.

How do you want what you already have? Writing and movies and art that don’t piss you off or fuck you up somehow give you more of what you already have. There’s nothing wrong with that, unless you’re using it to feed a hunger for something you don’t already have. If your hunger is completely sated, whether by real food or AI food, you’re done. Check please! Arguing that AI food isn’t real is beside the point. There’s always something else you can be hungry for.

Or maybe you feel betrayed because someone lied to you about the story, or because other people refuse to play their correct parts in what you thought the story was supposed to be. Dumb example, but when we first moved into my new house, L– and C– got paint on the carpet in one of the bedrooms, and I yelled at them not because of the paint really, but because the imperfection it represented contravened my belief about the story I expected my new house to encapsulate. But stories are bigger (and smaller) than beliefs or expectations. If you think you understand the whole story, you’re not close enough to it or far enough away. If you think you know what a “house” is or what happens in it, you haven’t read page 192 of your own story yet.

So much energy goes into selecting items from a menu (without pausing to consider who proferred it and why), thinking these selections are real choices. What kind of a this or that are you? What kind of a story is this? Who’s the main character? Which brand of preprocessed commodity do you like, and how many stars do you give it? It doesn’t matter if I “liked” the movie or not. It doesn’t matter if I “like” my job or my “life” or not. If you order something and you get the wrong thing, you complain to the server or the manager. Well done, go home, spend your money somewhere else, die. The movie I walked out of reminded me that not everything is on the menu. Another reason I habitually resist the raw, the unsatisfying, the impossible or the disgusting is that the presence of those things is incompatible with identity, with belief, with knowing what every item on the menu tastes like and how to pronounce it all without embarrasing myself.

When too many thoughts defy simple answers, we need the primitive, the pre-cognitive—music, motion, nonverbal vibrational life force intentionally sustained. When there’s constant insecurity, economic coercion, mandatory cute emoji for publicized emotions, we need to make things out of broken stuff. There will always be broken stuff, or stuff that is about to break, or stuff that can be broken (including ourselves) and turned into something else.

I don’t think this means you should only create devastating deep serious abstract stuff. It’s OK for example to want to write goofy formulaic fantasies with all the best clichés. It doesn’t matter how you spend your days. We don’t all have to have the same obsessions. It’s enough that we share what/where our various obsessions teach/take us.

Before I moved back to Milwaukee, I used to come here to walk around in a melancholy fog, asking myself “What happened to my city life?” Then when I finally came back to stay, it turned out the city of my dreams was dilapidated and derelict. I can’t know if it’s really the city that changed or if it’s me. Either way, somewhere along the way, I built a defense against this kind of disappointment. I made a deal with myself: It’s OK if I’m left out of life, as long as life is clearly defined, so I know what I’m pretending to aspire to. But I never stopped craving the opposite proposition. I don’t care if it can be defined or not, I just want to be a part of it. I want to be alive. Still. Again. I miss being alive. I miss being in love and in trouble. I miss saying fuck it in the middle of the night for all the right reasons. Or the wrong reasons. Or reasons that can’t be defined. I miss being yanked out of my binary existence by the impudent thrust of the present moment right up in my stupid face.

Talking or writing or making a movie about tragedy isn’t the same as living it. Fanciful deconstruction isn’t the same as an actual emergency that you’re actually in. All these words I’m typing are meaningless in the face of reality. I know that. You know that. We know it for different reasons. But it doesn’t matter what you have or haven’t seen. It doesn’t matter if you’re more or less qualified than I am or anybody else is to talk about sorrow. It doesn’t matter how deep you are, what you have or haven’t been through, or if you’re any good at the thing you think you’re supposed to be good at. It doesn’t matter how many stars you have.

Maybe the occasional reminder of the omnipresence of pain and suffering and death is not an artistic posture but a necessary breakdown of the false distinction between the safe and the vulnerable, the visible and the invisible, the productive and the expendable, the legitimate and the freaks. I went to the mall today to drop L– off at work, and imagine my surprise when I loved everyone I saw, every tightass, every fatass, every loser, every snotty kid, because they’re all alive and they’re all going to die, all totally fucking clueless just like me. It’s like an invisible curtain in the air shimmered, and “they” became “we.”

You can’t love unless you’re willing to touch death. Death can’t touch you unless you’re willing to love.

Does this mean I’m ready to quit using the defining personal disaster of my adult life (long story, I’m not talking about COVID now) as justification for the isolation and immobility I’ve let myself become comfortable with? Y—ye—s? Could a movie I swore I hated and regretted buying a ticket for do that to me? Maybe? How humbling.

Will this last? Will I forget? Go numb and need to get punched in the gut again?

Does it ultimately make any difference either way?

Shake the 8-ball. REPLY HAZY, TRY AGAIN.