An almost love letter to Haruki Murakami
Dear Mr. Murakami,
the first time we met, I was very angry at you. I had just finished reading the Wind-up Bird Chronicle, which I had received as a Christmas gift. I’m a slow reader in English, but a mysterious force pushed me to go through the 607 pages of the Vintage International paperback edition like a maniac, turning page after page as if a gang of rabid dogs were chasing me, making me forget about my family, my work, and the dirty dishes in the kitchen sink. And here I find myself, on the last page, out of breath, exhausted, sweat on my forehead and eyebrows. I’m puzzled. I look for the missing pages. Where are the answers to all my questions? What about of all those lose ends that I hoped to see neatly tied up?
“Who do you think you are, Mr. Murakami?” I cry. “What am I supposed to do now? Chase you in Tokyo to ask you what happened?” (I’m not the only one to feel this way, Mr. Murakami) This is it, I tell myself. The end. No more Murakami. Ever.
A couple of years later, my sister read Dance Dance Dance, and fell in love with your books. She even created a website for you. Then one day, I walked in a bookstore, I saw Dance Dance Dance, and I bought a copy. It was winter; a cold, dark, rainy, and unforgiving New York winter day. I found myself reading the book and sipping hot black tea in a coffee shop in the West Village. The handsome young man sitting at the next tiny table noticed the book and said: “I read all Murakami’s books. Dance Dance Dance was the last one. It’s different from the others, almost hopeful.”
I had my laptop with me and I showed him the site that my sister had created for you. He smiled. “It’s fate,” he said. “You had to read this book.”
“People fall hopelessly in love with you, Mr. Murakami,” I thought. They don’t just read your books, they spend hours and hours with you. There is something in the atmosphere you conjure in your books that captures us and keeps us prisoners. There is something in your characters that we want to keep with us. We love their company.
Feeling Nude these days
I’ve never paid too much attention to Radiohead until In Rainbows, and now I’m obsessed with it.
Don’t get any big ideas
They’re not going to happen.You paint yourself white
And fill in the noise
They’ll be something missing.And now that you’ve found it, it’s gone
and now that you feel it, you don’t.
You’ve gone off the rails.So, don’t get any big ideas,
They’re not going to happen.You’ll go to hell for what your dirty mind is thinking.
Obsessed, I assure you. Can’t do anything about it.
[By the way, have you noticed the slick interface of the YouTube player? Pretty cool.]
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Radiohead, Nude, In Rainbows
The allure of intellectual discomfort: Alain Resnais’ Last year at Marienbad
Note: Last year in Marienbad is playing at the Film Forum in NYC through January 31. This article contains spoilers: consider yourself warned if you have not watched the movie but you are planning to do so.
The “story”
A (Delphine Seyrig), accompanied by M (Sacha Pitoëff), who may or may not be her husband, and X (Giorgio Albertazzi), whom she may or may not have seen before, meet at an opulent European hotel that may or may not exist.
- Howard Schumann, CineScene
The title of the movie specifies a time (last year) and a place (Marienbad). Yet, in the movie time and space are never stable and never reliable. Did X and A meet last year? And if they did, was it in Marienbad? Or was it perhaps in Fredericksburg, or Baden-Salsa? Are we seeing the present or the past?
The movie shows us fragments; scenes and dialogs repeat but they are never quite the same. What is real? We see people, but also mirror reflections, flashes of memories (perhaps), and actors in a play. At the same time, every word uttered in the movie is obsessively referring to the same one story.
Like the best of the avant-garde, it seems important yet one is at a loss to truly understand what it is about. Like a small handful of films and stories, it defies comprehension yet still has enough meaning to allow each viewer to conclude for himself what it may be about.
- Filethirteen.com
In traditional movies we have the reassuring certainty that, in the end, all will be revealed: every piece and lose end will magically fall into place into one, logical picture. All the discomfort and unbalance we felt while watching the movie or following the story (the very reason we stuck with it until the end) will transmute in a moment of exhilarating satisfaction: yes, it all makes sense now!
Don’t expect this to happen in Marienbad.
At the beginning, we behave like normal movie viewers. We try to figure out what’s going on (did X and A meet last year? Is M A’s husband? is X trying to hurt or save A?). By the end we realize that understanding what happened or did not happen is irrelevant.
The structure
Marienbad forces our attention away from content and towards structure. As in the game of Misère Nim (see also), one of the recurring themes in the movie, what counts is not the identity of each piece, but their organization and the rules of the game (Nim is played several times during the movie: first with cards, then with toothpicks, matches, poker chips, and domino pieces; Robbe-Grillet’s screenplay also shows A arranging rose petals in the same 7-5-3-1 scheme).
According to screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet, the movie is a pure construction, without a frame of reference outside of its own existence — the lives of its characters begin when the lights go down, and conclude when they come back up.
The Oscar site
Towards the end of the movie, X explicitly refers to M as the person who may or may not be A’s husband. We get annoyed. We realize that there is no story to discover. There is no truth. The characters don’t know more than we do about themselves or the events they incessantly discuss. A doesn’t know if she ever met X, if X is somebody she should trust or run away from, or if M is or is not her husband.
What you see is what you get.
The specific identity of characters and events is not as important as the mathematical relationships between them. Characters and events are not trying to convince us they are real. They are presented as archetypes of characters and events: a formal narrative structure that applies to many stories.
[If Marienbad were a shape, it would be a triangle. The story is about a character triangle (not quite a "love" triangle). The Nim game is based on a triangular structure of pieces. The prospective view of the garden as well as the stylized shrubs show a series of repeating triangles. Triangles are as rigid and unforgiving and the atmosphere throughout the movie.]
The meaning
Perhaps the ultimate puzzle film, with dizzying time shifts and flashbacks, real or imagined—or are they shifts into the subjunctive? Possible solutions have included the Orpheus-Eurydice myth; a visualization of the process of psychoanalysis; or the whole as a kind of stream-of-consciousness of a single mind, encompassing truth, lies, and visualized whatifs.
The Reeler
There is no limit to the interpretations of this narrative structure:
- Marienbad represents the making of a movie, or any art creation from the characters point of view. There are many repetitions and reshootings. The story changes in the course of the production. The characters don’t know nor can choose what is true or false about themselves and what their next move would be. Thy are trapped in a story structure that limits their motion and their destiny.
- From a Buddhist perspective, Marienbad is a representation of our limited mind trying to make sense of our life and what is happening to us by creating rigid and dualistic structures (the Self, the Truth, the unidirectionality of time). Eventually, we’ll learn that there is no self, there is no truth, and reality is fluid and contradictory. In our path of liberation, we will get rid of the rigidity of habits and repetitions and find our way towards the pure freedom of seeing things as they are, in all their uncertainty and contradiction.
- This movie is about death and our fear of death. A tries to delay as long as she can the inevitable end, when she has to leave her trapped but reassuring reality and follow X towards the unknown.
And so on.
The accidental spectator
For me, the film represents an attempt, still crude and primitive, to approach the complexity of thought and of its mechanisms. I have found that in each descent into the unconscious an emotion is born.
– Alain Resnais
In art, sense and meaning are created by the interaction between the object and the viewer. Is the Monna Lisa art if nobody is looking at it? Art exists in the encounter between an object and a creator of meaning.
As in a very complicated and multi-level cloud, each of us can see different things in a painting o art installation. Yet, art is realized not in the content of our interpretation, but in the process of connecting and finding meaning.
In commercial movies we are passive spectators of something happening in front of us; we are puppets whose reactions and emotions are manipulated by the director puppet master. We become voyeurs waiting to learn what somebody else has already figured out for us.
Marienbad irritates us because it’s an unforgiving representation of passive consumption. Marienbad infuriates us because, without warning, forces us to be as creative as the director and writer themselves: we have to create the meaning that is hidden (or we perceive hidden) in the scenes, dialog, locations, brightness contrasts, geometric compositions, dynamics.
We feel cheated by the effort required. I’s hard. It’s boring. It isn’t satisfying. Yet, this movie and the experience of watching it hunts us for days.
Blade Runner’s Memories
[Spoilers alert: Don't read this if you've never seen Blade Runner but you are planning to]
Husband seems to believe that watching the same movie over and over again is fun. He likes how old movies feel familiar–you’ve learned all the lines by hearth and known exactly what to expect. They become part of you, and it’s almost like watching yourself. To me, watching the same movie twice feels like a waste of time. I like novelty. Familiarity bores me.
Well, except for Blade Runner, of course. I lost count of how many times I saw Blade Runner.
I blame Ridley Scott for the multiple versions that continue to crop up every decade: the first and studio-engineered voice-over version (”Families considering viewing this film should avoid the original like the plague; instead go with Ridley Scott’s vision” write Afsheen Nomai and Marjorie Kase in Common Sense Media), the Director’s Cut, and now the “Director’s Final Cut”.
Yes, Blade Runner is in theaters again (well, at least in one theater, the Ziegfeld in NYC) and yes, I went to see it again. (I wonder, how many times can a director make the same movie?)
I just cannot resist existential sci-fi, the type of sci-fi that explores other worlds and creatures as a way to reflect on what makes a human being human (is it emotions? memories? dreams? compassion? empathy?).
Blade Runner’s cinematography and the atmosphere are still amazing. Inside buildings and in the streets everything is dusty, messy, and wet. You can almost smell the moldy and rotten stench of the street of 2019 Los Angeles. Most scenes are dark, but bright artificial light intrudes and blinds. And it always rains.
Some scenes are more violent than I remember, probably because even the first time I had to close my eyes (this time, I knew exactly when it was time to keep my eyes shut). Watching replicants die was hard the first time, and hasn’t got any easier. They die with a fight, and they are painful to watch. But this is exactly the point.
Replicants are the scary others–so strong, unpredictable, and merciless–but killing dangerous creatures who don’t want to die still feels very much like killing.
Above all, Blade Runner is a movie about memories. Are we our memories? What if our memories are not real? What happens to our memories when we die?
At the end of the movie, Roy saves Deckard life, and it’s for not compassion or a sudden awakening of empathy. Roy needs a witness. A part of himself will continue to live if somebody listens to his memories and survives: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”
Time to die.
I love MOMA
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I love MOMA.
I love MOMA because I got a membership for Christmas and I can go there any time I want (thank you Kt, that was one of the best Christmas presents ever). A MOMA membership card is like an unlimited-rides metro card, but better: you don’t have to think twice if you need art; you can go to the same show many times (and you discover that every time is different). A membership card makes you free and eliminates any money considerations standing between you and your art cravings.
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I love MOMA because they allow people to take pictures. You cannot quite touch the paintings and the scultpures, but you can smell them, capture them, run around them, bond with them. Art becomes something that happens between you and the piece. You are not forced in a stiff, “just watch and shut up” pose, which is the paradox of so many museums that want to preserve art (and the art mystique) so badly that they kill it. (There are limitations at MOMA too, of course, but they are few and enforced with some respect.)
I went to see again the sculptures of Richard Serra, which illustrate so well why museums need encourage people to get more intimate with art. There was a group of young guys visiting the exhibit and one of them said, standing still in front of the huge round copper-colored wall of Band: “I just don’t get it.” A few minutes later, they were walking through the tilted passages (if you stay with it, you can feel the space continuously warping and changing texture and you can feel your body opening up and tensing, in an almost predictable pattern). They had big smiles on their faces. They’d got it.
[Watch Richard Serra's walking and talking about Band on YouTube.]
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