Scribblings with Green Chalk

 
 
Nie lubię poniedziałku: początku tygodnia radosnych obowiązków, listy spraw do załatwienia, nienapisanych z braku koncentracji prac, potrzeby wyjścia z domu w stanie mniej-więcej do użytku.

Ponieważ nie zjem porannej jajecznicy z Kazimierzem Rudzkim, brakuje mi motywacji aby w za krótkiej spódnicy wymaszerować dziś rano na spotkanie ze światem. Żeby choć w planach była kawa zbożowa w barze mlecznym w towarzystwie mężczyzny w dobrze skrojonym garniturze…
 
 

[Babelfish this or ...]

Truth be told, I saw Dogville a little while before I was plagued by the eye-eating curse from outer space.

Maybe you too know what it’s like: you hear about a movie, want to see it, but before you realize it’s in and out of movie theaters. Everyone around you is talking about it, making you feel like Rip van Winkle. Apparently it was there long enough for everyone and their uncle to see it but you, the one person on the planet, missed it. That, in short, is my unhappy love affair with movie-theater going. Recent additions to the list of the unseen: Control and I’m Not There. Turn the knife and send reviews if you like.
 
 

(Image found here)

 
 
Although it would have been nice to have seen the movie when the rest of humankind saw it and participate in the discussions, watching it on a small screen had its advantages. Due to its rudimentary set design, Dogville reminded me of Teatr Telewizji, the weekly play staged for Polish public TV on Monday nights. That’s where the resemblances end. The acting was nothing like the exaggerated Wyspiański or the exaggerated Brecht of TV theater. TV theater certainly didn’t feature graphic rape scenes, settling rather for suggestive violence. I understand that theater has since gotten raunchier with plays by Sarah Kane et al. Still, I think I could have grasped the idea without seeing Stellan Skarsgard’s bare buttocks. Again.
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Yesterday’s quite high up in the ongoing “worst day of my life” competition. I spent half the day pushing away the specter of a close person’s body lying in a ditch. The other half I spent pushing away the desire to strangle that very same person. There is no humorous punchline. My home phone died in the middle of an important conversation whose aim was to clarify what had happened. I ran out of money on my cell phone and the cashier at the supermarket was giggling amused that the till at which you can put money on your phone was closed and it was already 9 pm anyway. The phonecard machine at B-platz was out of order. I drifted towards the movie theater where I saw Juno with friends; not feeling better, but the movie was great and subtitled on that one and only chosen night and the ticket cheaper than a sea of vodka. Meanwhile, the eye infection I sensed I was getting was steadily getting worse. Reading hurts, writing hurts. Lying down with a chamomile compress doesn’t. If I don’t go blind, I will post something later.

My mild obsession with fruits I was always too slow and clumsy to pick brings me to interesting places. Like this town. Along winding roads of association and curiosity. Which, as they tell us, kills cats notoriously.

Something as banal as a night at the movies would seem almost not worth mentioning. Almost. Maybe I liked My Blueberry Nights for wrong reasons. Because of restlessness, blueberries, silly compassion for detail, that Cat Power song, Matejko colors (will you know what I mean when I call them that?). Or something else.

Because the movie has quite a bit of walking around in the night? And that reminds me of something… Encounters and disconnections. And letting go when you know you have to let go. Or a simple love story, if you want. But why cut it down to that?

Or it was being there with someone kind enough to accompany me? (I’m never up to going alone.) Someone kind enough to face German dubbing, where the voices are always wrong and English words are raisins in the pie but never enough to hold on. I thought the woman in front of us would eat me alive because I was trying to interpret the dialog for Kim, so that she wouldn’t lose too much. I’d never have guessed it would work better than the experiment I participated in during my second or third year at university. They said they were trying to establish whether interpreting between two foreign languages works through the filter of the native language. I’m not sure about the findings but it sure went slowly. Unlike this time. Necessity is the mother of all sorts of things. And I had ice cream and the movie theater was so small and the night when we went outside felt so cold…

When I lived in Poznań, someone explained to me why the city wouldn’t close down the old zoo, even though most of the animals had already been moved to the new zoo at lake Malta. Stare zoo, situated near the city center, was acquiring a ghostly quality, partly abandoned, dilapidated.

“They can’t close it down completely. There’s an enormous rat colony living off the zoo waste. If they shut it down, all those rats would flood the city.”

For a long time afterwards, I couldn’t shake the image of rat hordes overtaking the Poznań Old Town, streaming through Św. Marcin, swallowing Zamek. It reminded me of a movie scene I’m not sure I had actually ever seen. For all I know, I could have imagined the whole thing, as I admitted in my comment on Bowleserised’s post on foxes. My sketchy description reads as follows: … a movie scene from a USSR production which, come to think of it, might never have existed, only I dreamed it and convinced myself I saw it on screen. [T]he scene is communist tower blocks reaching high, high into the sky, concrete gray in a desolate landscape and wolves, wolves everywhere, with glowing eyes. And a voice saying that they’ve taken over the city.

Exaggerated, dreamed, romanticized, maybe morbid. Still, the rats are there, unwanted but hungry. Beyond antipathy and acceptance, rats simply exist in the cities as another layer of their population make-up. Tip the balance and they crawl out of hiding.

I didn’t know about the rat quarter under the old zoo before that memorable explanation, but there were plenty of strays where I lived then. My roommates and I helped feed the cats the janitor found in the dumpster until someone complained to the administration. The janitor was forced to give up the cats and leave rat poison in the cellar. Rats again.

In Vienna, a rat spotted one night by the main university building was the only stray I saw. After a couple months it became disconcerting. No surprises, no uncontrolled life. It’s hard for me to imagine that Vienna reached some sort of a higher level of “cityhood” when it became simply uninteresting for undomesticated animals. It seems more likely that only rats survived the effective catching and killing.

Where do you find the life of a city, in what circumstances do you see its contours? When I read Reznikoff’s animal poems, I see the city as a living space in an instant unmade and made up again by the discovery of birds in naked trees, foxes on the park lawn.

So I was wondering about the request for information about fox sightings in Berlin (see link above). Is the man looking for stories that a reader of Reznikoff might appreciate? Does he want to re-imagine the city in the mode of my USSR movie fantasy? Or is he a member of some sort of vigilante fox-hunting group for which fox is the new rat? Let’s get them before they eat us?… I’m too lazy to write to him. In this case ignorance might be bliss.

She should not have refused to kiss her lover the next morning using the silly excuse that “kisses are intimate.” Immediately we saw the face of Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman sliding over hers like a mask in a bank robbery, borrowed where it wasn’t needed. She probably shouldn’t have played with the yellow bandana either, because the rag failed to be her story’s falcon. But the doses of naivety were necessary. After all, it wasn’t Shakespeare retold by simply adding non-European cast. The allusions to Faulkner didn’t make the girl Quentin Compson’s Caddy as she lightly leaped off the pedestal (got out of the car and started walking towards the city).

If we take Asian Americans to be a ‘model minority’ – well-educated, staying out of trouble, quiet – then we should think of this movie as something made with a magnifying glass. The quotes and mis-quotes would then help us see what would otherwise be doubly invisible, because it is a story about Asian American women.

There are few things that are as translucent as girls trained in meekness. Their fingers pick through heaps of trash and no one comes to their aid. Joy Dietrich’s movie doesn’t scream about this, it simply says this is the case. We see a girl picking through garbage when everyone else is asleep, a college student in both pre-law and pre-med whose perfect body is no comfort but yet another duty, and finally the protagonist who refuses to be her brother’s incestuous fantasy and turns back. The keepers of their stories, the white landlady and the demanding parents who say volumes with meaningful pauses, cannot be slain like dragons. Years of silencing cannot be likened to a dragon and therefore a brave knight is absolutely out of place. When the protagonist’s brother appears at her door trying to play that role, his quest slowly dissipates into a drive around New Jersey. It’s up to Jenny to end it and head back to what she left behind. There are no songs of triumph in this picture, just a mix CD playing in the car during Jenny’s unfinished escape. Listening to it, she is not daydreaming about romantic fulfillment but figuring out a way to speak in and to the world. By that time she knows she will have to learn to speak for herself rather than let Joe guard their story and carry it off into the fields surrounding the road. She’s a photographer, not a model.

Beatrice is the model. She is also the meek girl eventually found dead in the bathtub, because she does not manage to break out of the canvas on which others projected their fantasies of her. Quite literally, in the beginning of the story, Dietrich has her posing as one living element in a painting of fields stretching towards a lonely farm. She plays a crawling invalid, thus prefiguring that she will be trapped in that momentary pose for the rest of the movie. Her demanding parents and abusive boyfriend make her crawl from one form of perfection to another. In the end, her stunning beauty, undeniable intelligence, and dedication are meaningless. She is ridiculous standing on the parapet in a silk nightgown as if she were slipping into yet another familiar role even when considering suicide. When Jenny pulls her corpse out of the bathtub, the pretty dress and lightly smudged make-up cake the person who suffocated underneath. A person who didn’t know herself and in her textbooks, which she read out loud, didn’t find a way to speak her self. Beatrice’s death is not meant as a mere warning. We are aware that there was a person underneath the make-up. Her suicide is the dotted i of her presence; it’s the only outlet for the otherwise incessantly curbed will. The banality of her death and the borrowing involved in the story are necessary. In her white nightgown moment on the parapet, Beatrice refers us to the cliché image of Emily Dickinson.* If you can recall a line or two, you can hang on to them as hints at the story which Beatrice – an unfulfilled creative writer – cannot tell. The poem she does leave as her suicide note is neither good nor enlightening and, to my mind, could have been left out just like the clumsy allusion to Pretty Woman.

The girls in Tie a Yellow Ribbon do not speak magic spells or start revolutions with declarations full of fire. The act of speaking is here practical and concrete. Towards the end of the movie Beatrice and Jenny’s neighbor finally plucks up courage to talk back to the landlady who made her sort the garbage. Jenny calls her foster mother whom she hadn’t talked to in years. After much consideration, they put together sentences through which they can become actors and not recipients of their own story. Does this sound like a description of a cheap assertiveness course? It should not. Dietrich’s juggling with banality brings us to a place where banality matters. The patterns of everyday become no less real because of their familiarity or similarity to random novels or movies. Just because so much has been written about identity search, feminism, depression, doesn’t mean that all is resolved. On the contrary, the seemingly resolved slips back into invisibility. Although this is not the age of sentimental heroines, meek girls drown in bathtubs, as quietly beautiful as when they were still alive.

I do not quite understand why the title is Tie a Yellow Ribbon, maybe because for me the motif of the bandana misfired. The German title, Die Koreanerin, makes even less sense to me, because although the main character is Korean American, the two other girls are of Japanese (I think) and Chinese descent, and the bonding of these three women lies at the heart of the tale. It is where the connecting and disconnecting that Jenny repeatedly mentions takes on a different form.

It would be misguided to liken it to male bonding as presented in, for instance, Moby Dick. It’s not a myth but one of those unseen, untold everyday affairs. My friend Junyoung (who happens to be a Korean New Yorker like Dietrich’s Jenny) made me realize this when she told me about a movie called Take Care of My Cat. “There are no movies about single women in their twenties,” she said. “They begin to exist in popular imagination when they turn thirty. Before that, they are always presented in relation to men in their environment.” I have been coming back to her point ever since. With Tie a Yellow Ribbon I found my tentative response.

Not only are the three girls dogged by the stereotype of the meek Asian woman but, because of their age, they lack the privilege of experience. Speaking therefore means in their case breaking not just the cultural taboo but entering a gray area between experience and innocence. Which is to say, disappearing. However, through their bond they escape invisibility as they see one another. While I am not denying that it is a movie about identity and about problems facing Asian Americans, problems I may not be fully grasping, not being touched by them, I think that this aspect is equally significant. I am impressed by Dietrich’s ability to give those twenty-year-olds voices and bodies. Throughout the story she lets the audience know that she could easily make her characters slip into ready-made roles. But even with one girl drowned, she didn’t make them a threesome of amateur Ophelias. There is a story within, between, and beyond the borrowing.

*I would like to thank Asia for hissing “Emily Dickinson” into my ear during that scene.

He could not resist a city called Boat so far inland.

I remember reading a few years ago about Lynch’s visit to Łódź and how he took thousands of photos of old tenement houses and abandoned factory buildings. Film journalists held their breath, hoping the images would yield inspiration that would yield a movie. It seemed like everything was in place, just the story missing — Łódź, the home of Polish film industry with a partly unremembered past, seemed perched in expectation. The city’s name is feminine; a woman in trouble, a boat pulled ridiculously far inland. Of course it exists beyond and apart from personification. The buildings from the photographs have new tenants or waste away quietly. No one knows the names of their pre-war Jewish landlords anymore. Anecdotes of old days at the film school hang in the air, half-repeated. And both the quotidian and the solemn mar the delicate process of making things up. If all is too obvious and too serious, there can be no story. Think of the human eye and its blind spot. If you take too much for granted, your blind spot expands.

Does the ability to see lie in undoing habits of thought and sight? I wouldn’t want to put this forward as some kind of grand rule, I think it depends on what you want to see. I was not interested in guessing the names of particular streets. In fact, I’ve never been to Łódź. I wanted to see images of the place pared to what Lynch found useful. I wanted glimpses that could diminish my blind spot.

(Image from Dream Videophile)

The reason why we fear and revere dream logic is its ability to make things visible through series of improbable juxtapositions. My homemade dream method consisted not only in having David Lynch show me Łódź. I saw INLAND EMPIRE in Vienna, till the last moment not sure whether to expect German dubbing (luckily, the movie was subtitled). How strange the opening dialogue must have sounded to the majority of the audience. The white letters faded into the black and white picture, so it must have been difficult to follow. A piece of exotica. Or a piece of home. If you allow it to be both, it becomes a tightly sewn lining to the California scenes. Not a backdrop nor an alternative dimension. For what could be more bizarre than that which is so familiar you cease to notice it? As the emotions of the character she is playing sift into Nikki Grace’s consciousness, the now of the Polish girl watching Rabbits collapses into pre-war Łódź. The desolate Californian suburbia winds up in a Polish street in the middle of winter.

I am not trying to crack any kind of code, only saying that the unfamiliar always has its inverse: there is someone to whom it is domesticated. When I saw Leon Niemczyk in one of the scenes, a chill went up my spine. I’m afraid that for everyone in my generation he will always remain Golarz Filip from Akademia Pana Kleksa, the enchanting and terrifying children’s movie that seized our imagination. It comes in here, that cold and unlikely fright, whether anyone told Lynch about it or not. There’s Cyrk Zalewski, which I saw at least twice before I was big enough to disapprove of the circus. The question rozumiesz?, repeated several times, seems ironically turned towards itself. It means “do you understand?” but it marks the failure to communicate. It is funny to think that the first word I knew for understanding is meant here as opaque noise. And even when the noise is heard and comprehended it means little. You may know Polish but how can you locate the referents of the deictic terms? Where is “here”? When is “now”? Who is the “he” that did something to the “you”?

These are just glimpses, and for many viewers they will never exist as part of the movie. I looked at several reviews — American and Polish — curious about what others have identified as meaningful, what they dismissed, and what their blind spots blotted out. Common to most of the reviews was a thirst for coherence and a focus on what to their authors was the more immediate context. American reviewers placed the inland empire in California, as their sense of direction told them, and mentioned the Polish scenes and actors fleetingly. Someone identified the neighbor who visits Nikki Grace in one of the first scenes as a Russian. I don’t know why — perhaps on the assumption that all Slavic people are Russian “by default,” unless specified otherwise. Polish reviews were sparse and I did not find the insights I counted on. The three hours strain the attention span and allow for picking and choosing. I’d be interested to see what others pull out for close inspection, setting aside cries for logic.