4. January Digest/Digress
Writing is how she tests her intuition, kindness and courage, how she feels alive. I always want to know what she’s been reading and writing; it’s the best guide I have to how and who she is.
- James Button on Helen Garner
It’s been a month! A month since I left New Zealand, a month since I arrived in London, a month since we all started this Gregorian thing we call 2020. During that month we’ve also had the Lunar New Year - gong xi fa cai and lots of love to all you rats. This month’s newsletter is less personal and more review-heavy. Well, less reviews and more off-the-cuff etchings following first impressions. If you want more of the autobiographical you can find snippets on IG (featuring a lot of time in Scotland with my miraculous grandmother, Joanie). But reviews and post-mortems are the ticket this time - and mostly films, at that. I’ve been reading a lot this month, but I don’t feel ready to pick clean the books’ bones just yet.
My sister (a rat) must immediately pounce on every review and every related wikipedia page after finishing watching any film or reading any novel. These searches and gorges are her wanting to know more about the constituent fibres of the work’s construction (curiosity, yes, but also a way to ease out of the state of suspended disbelief and transition back to Normal Life - ahh, so that’s how they did it). It’s also wanting to know if there’s anyone out there that can articulate her particular experience of the work or broaden or shake the way she thinks about it.
That’s the thing - reviews are not meant to be mere endorsements or genuflections. Because, to me, what’s morally or intellectually worse than a takedown is sycophancy. I am wary of too much ra-ra, too much yes-ness, too much hype. Fandoms are different. I respect a fan. But reviewers should not be fans (privately, perhaps, but not as the animating principle). We should, by all means, write expansively about that which moves or challenges us, but I’m for holding off a little on the unthinking hyperbole.
This newsletter could be said to contain spoilers. Let’s go!
Greta Gerwig’s Little Women
Well it was almost made for me, target audience-wise, but I struggled with Little Women. When I read the book, years ago, I remember hating the name Marmee. I hated it in this film adaptation, too - so cloying and identity-obliterating. Laura Dern’s Marmee did at least follow through with the original in confessing to possessing an abiding daily rage, hinting at a lived reality of mothering as obliteration. Of course there could be no evidence of such rage in her outwardly sunny, bland behaviour as matriarch. Bland was the brand of justice on display in the film, too, which centred around giving. Philanthropy is not radical. Philanthropy requires a downtrodden Other upon which to perform its good intentions, while the structures that create downtrodden realities are barely questioned. Missing from the film was a fuller sense of the civil war home front. Were we meant to feel surges of admiration for the sacrificing of breakfasts and scarves? If we hadn’t picked up that message already then we certainly did when “the best of us” was stricken and then martyred for her goodness. The sisters’ middle class concerns for fine fabrics, pianos, dances, and society connections were perfectly understandable within the context of a family only recently down on their luck, but such concerns made me wonder why we’re all still worshipping such a bourgeois tale.
The film sacrificed the more subtle possibilities of dramatisation when it instead opted for a didactic speech from Amy on marriage as an economic proposition. In Alcott’s book Jo marries an older German professor and, together, the couple opens a school for boys. I don’t think there are any improvements in Gerwig’s swapping of the older man for a younger one, or in swapping the school for boys to a school for any-gendered children. In the book the husband and the school read as a compromise, but in the film they felt exalted. The romance of the sisters at play as teachers telegraphed as totally twee. And the generically dreamy score grated. Penned by the ubiquitous Alexandre Desplat (who has composed for everything from the Twilight franchise to Wes Anderson to Roman Polanski…), the melodramatic swells were entirely overcooked. A reasonable retort is that the overcooked effect was entirely the point, capturing the self-centred flush of adolescent dreams, indulging in a flaring feminine precocity before it is tamped down, too soon, by societal and marital expectations.
I get that, I do, it’s just funny (not funny) who gets represented (again and again) as being permitted this precocity and frivolity. On that note, you might have seen Natalie De Vera Obedos in Teen Vogue, who argues that “a Little Women film that completely suspends disbelief and racebends every character seems entirely possible, and would have been major in terms of on-screen representation”. Directors need not be castigated for all the choices they do not make - we’d be here all day, in too many parallel universes of possibilites. But upon seeing no marked departure from past adaptations I see no reason for the fervour around this film. Gerwig’s Little Women is made up of linen and tousled hair and stoic tongue-biting and expressive arts and quiet compromises and passion-flushed cheeks - we love to see it, I love to see it, but let’s admit that that’s about the sum of it - a film worth no more than those very lovely parts.
An answer to Little Women’s unfulfilled motherly and marital rage: Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living
A fine dose of rage and recalibration after a period of contorted wedded compromise. In this book, the second instalment of her memoir, Levy does not try to see divorce from ‘both sides’. Instead she is completely, delightfully partial - leaving her ex-husband to his own discretionary representational devices and instead focusing on her own new life, newly released from her dutiful role as “the architect of everyone else’s wellbeing” (15). As we’ll see with the next work, noble attempts at evenness are often doomed to fail - the partiality of the maker can’t help but leak out around the well-meaning but far from watertight fairness.
Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story
A tale of marriage-as-divorce, Baumbach has claimed in interviews that the film is about not taking sides; that it’s about hope and new starts and finding your voice. But when I watched it for myself what I first saw was a poorly-disguised masculine contempt for the figure of the wife. That resentment was thinly papered over by the film’s attempts to represent Nicole as innocent or clueless - a move either too unrealistically kind or too underestimating of her intelligence. The portrayal reeks of over-compensation - a desire to redeem the past through an impossible kind of ‘both sides’ depiction. The film wants to be above blame but it traffics in it all the same.
Rather than all-out combatants, the film is careful to instead frame both Nicole and Charlie as gormless participants tangled up in an overly adversarial legal system. The film implies that responsibility for this litigious ensnarement lies with Nicole (she is the one that first engages the services of a lawyer, after all), though swerves out of definitive finger-pointing by framing her more as a hapless woman whose emotional vulnerability makes her easy prey for lawyer Nora’s brand of weaponised feminism and revisionist marital history:
Nicole: “I’m just worried because we said we weren’t going to use lawyers. I don’t want to be too aggressive.”
Nora: “What we are going to do together is we’re going to tell your story […] What you’re doing is an act of hope. Do you understand that?”
Laura Dern as Nora was brilliant, though. Taut with ready articulacy, she performs so well the rehearsedness of Nora’s Virgin Mary soliloquy (“she's perfect. She's a virgin who gives birth, unwaveringly supports her child and holds his dead body when he's gone. And the dad isn't there”), giving us the uncanny sense that the lawyer must trot out this outrage-empowerment speech for each of her marriage-dampened clients. But, again, the contempt for women - the implication of a plastic, monetised kind of feminism - made me bristle at the film-maker’s claims to evenness.
I did love the lingering intimacies of Nicole ordering Charlie’s lunch for him at the divorce proceedings, cutting his hair for him, tying his shoelace - the muscle memory of marriage; the wifeliness of these small acts of service. It turned me inside out with creepiness and delight to think that many of the things we do seemingly out of love could really just be habit; when, deep down, we could hate the objects of our love. Then again, there’s probably no could about it. Love is so close to its shadow, hate. The now meme-ified fight scene in the film not only conjured tragedy but comedy, too. It reminded me of the way that our best one-liners and wit often come in the midst of fury. It reminded me of the way we all need to clear out our cobwebby niceties once in a while, voice our most irrational assumptions, get high off the sound of our own rage, reduce ourselves to tears, and then promptly get over ourselves:
Charlie: You don’t want to have a voice, you just want to complain about not having a voice.
Nicole: You hated me!
Charlie: No, you hated me!
Nicole: I can’t believe I have to know you FOREVER!
The fight scene not only allowed Charlie to get over himself, but it also let me let go of some of my resentment of Charlie as a kind of Baumbach avatar - one who tries to be self-effacing but who secretly sees himself as the more comprehensively wronged party. Righteous or not, I felt for Charlie during the court appointee’s observation of a night at home with his son. It reminded me of being observed as a teacher - the justified paranoia of having my whole approach to life and care under scrutiny. I wouldn’t know, but I suppose divorce really could be like trying to staunch a self-inflicted wound with a bandaid. Divorce could be like finally learning to organise your own haircuts. Divorce could be like being alive.
An answer to Marriage Story’s balance-straining, cash-draining middle class divorce calamity: Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite.
No hint of cloying saintliness in sight, the impoverished Kim family manage to insinuate themselves into the employment, home, and lives of the wealthy Park family. Lurching, giddy, comedic, and thrilling, Parasite takes us on a working class wish-fulfilment trip, from small prods all the way to nihilistic revenge. At first the Kim family bear their indignities with the sheer strength of their intelligence and humour (raising questions about who might be the real social parasites here - perhaps not the conniving Kims, after all, but rather the obscenely wealthy and utterly vacuous Parks). The son and father share observations about their oblivious employer Yeon-gyo:
Ki-taek: She's rich, but still nice.
Chung-sook: Not "rich, but still nice." She's nice because she's rich. Hell, if I had all this money. I'd be nice, too!
The scene to really send me over the edge was the one in which the master of the house, CEO Dong-ik, speculates on his new driver Chung-sook’s personal smell, “what is it? Like an old radish. No. You know when you boil a rag? It smells like that.” Clearly this detached disdain also sends Chung-sook over the edge. Watch for yourself to see just what going over the edge looks like, if you haven’t already. The film is over-the-top and totally troubling. Like the constricted headspace in the Kim family’s basement quarters, there’s not much interpretive breathing room around the film’s big throbbing INEQUALITY pulse - but why should there be? I do worry that the thrum of the working class revenge plot is more for the flirtatious masochism of the film’s likely middle class audiences. The Kims are curiously flat beyond their clever antics - not really allowed to be people beyond their alternating struggle and glee. We may feel troubled by the surreal depiction of very real economic injustice, but will we do anything about it?
Recommended aticles and essays, in brief:
I seem to have gone all-in on the hot topic texts this month so why not mention American Dirt, too. I have not and will not be reading it, but I have read Gurba’s Pendeja, You Ain’t Steinbeck: My Bronca with Fake-Ass Social Justice Literature, a great example of rightful anger generating withering wit: “[Jeanine Cummins’ character’s] head north, or, as Cummins’ often writes, to “el norte,” and italicized Spanish words like carajo, mijo, and amigo litter the prose, yielding the same effect as store-bought taco seasoning” - Myriam Gurba, Tropics of Meta.
On the Australian bush fires: “It’s a particular grief, to lose forever what connects you to a place in the landscape. Our ancestors felt it, our elders felt it, and now we are feeling it all over again as we watch how the mistreatment and neglect of our land and waters for generations, and the pig-headed foolishness of coal-obsessed climate change denialists turn everything and everyone to ash” - Lorena Allam (Gamilaraay and Yawalaraay Nations), The Guardian
A sickly situation for Wendy C. Oritz in Adventures in Publishing Outside the Gates: “When I learned of the book My Dark Vanessa, via synopsis online it sounded so much like [my book] Excavation I thought I was going to pass out [..] The similarity of the stories, and how the book was being marketed, were too obvious to ignore. As much as I would like to avoid a book that fictionalizes an experience I lived, it will be difficult to — the publishing machine will make sure as many people know about it as possible. It will be placed, sponsored, touted, “dementedly praised” and more, because it has to — there was a seven figure deal.” - Wendy C. Oritz, Gay Magazine
An I-feel-seen of Instagram essays, if ever I read one: “so rarely does our present seem like a future the past would have wanted, this embarrassment of a world, with its neofascism and technology addiction and carbon levels rising and all of us incapable of handling it” but “Instagram people did not seem mean or clever. They were earnest and sincere.” - Dayna Tortorici, n+1
Brexit Futures: Between a Model and a Martyr. A good one to read on this, the the day of Britain’s departure from the EU: “[t]he best option for the purposes of EU legitimation – and the one that the EU has followed so far – is to stick stolidly to its own rules: offer the UK no special privileges, nor any special punishments. In short, the UK will be able to have its cake, but not to eat it too” - Paul David Beaumont, The Disorder of Things
Thank you for being here, until the end, on this new month’s eve. Take care, be kind, be critical.
Until next time, thinkers!
Hannah x