Embarrassing Myself on Twitter is Not Enough

In The City, infinite aesthetic distance is always possible. This is necessary. Imagine having to share a limo with Robert Pattinson. In that limo, two people I know are receiving a text from me exposing the name of the song I hid behind last week. They put the song on and share a look of knowing amusement mixed with sympathy, both of which are just imagination. They’re in a car but they don’t need to be and could easily have taken the subway. They’re in it for the glitz, but they can’t afford it.

Nobody can afford anything in The City. I myself can’t afford my apartment, but I don’t need to, because it’s covered by parental love, which nobody can afford, even its recipients. Nobody can afford the life that a body can afford. Worry about the national debt has always been about another debt, but the people who worry are never the ones who should be worried.

Strange birds arrive by storm in The City, and attempt to mingle with the locals. There may be many such birds, but locals, out-of-towners, people on the other side of the world, everyone, can only be aware of the birds whose lovely plumage makes headlines. Every beloved bird tells the story that every bird can be beloved. If you wait at a window long enough in The City, you’ll see a bird you’ve never seen before smack right into its own reflection.

One of the people I know is looking out the car window, but it’s too tinted to see much of anything. She’s taking a phone call. It’s the woman she called yesterday for the first time in years, calling back, but it’s not her. “I think you have the wrong number,” this woman says, sounding nothing like the woman, but also just maybe exactly like the woman, beneath a thick sediment of new personality and stale memory, as though the woman moved to The City and has since out of necessity become almost unrecognizable. “Hello?” says the woman or not the woman. Not believing this is her, the woman I know hangs up.

If one isn’t meeting anyone in particular in The City, one dresses for no one in particular, which is possibly impossible. Despite the density of people, it’s impossible to imagine The City, and therefore to live in The City, without thinking of someone not present, but everyone does it anyway. The City is a miracle but it’s not holy, it’s not good, it’s not even okay. It’s possible to wander aimlessly in The City, because no matter where one goes, one is still in The City. In The City one suffers from a fear of abandonment to the same degree that one is relieved from the necessity of ever meeting anyone again. The degree is considerably less than total. If one doesn’t meet someone again, one may end up thinking of that one.

The City is arranged in blocks, which passers-by in turn arrange into sequences in their memories. A visit to The City is setting up a game of Jenga or a building of many floors, each one pressing down on every previous. The bottom of the building is under great stress, and then a commercial airline smacks right into the top.

Before her flight takes off, she gets a bagel. Nobody has ever seen The City. In The Country, or as people from The City like to call it, The Mountain, many see many parts of it all the time, but nobody talks about those parts. The Country exerts great pressure on the senses, so that everybody appears still, calm, and laconic. People in The City often think people in The Country are very scary, very stupid, or experiencing joy.

In corrolary, there are certain parts of The Country that make it onto postcards, onto little points of public photos on a map, like constellations, that if not present in a given part of The Country make that part uninhabitable to an habitual inhabitant of The City. A landslide may well bring it down dramatically, but you can only see your reflection in the snow-covered hills or something like them, not for instance in a landfill.

If there’s one thing that marks somebody as nuts, it’s laughing loudly to nobody in public. If somebody is with somebody, they might gesture at such a person, and laugh quietly, perhaps making a “craaazy” gesture with their hand. Whenever I find myself laughing alone, it’s not, as in nature documentaries and with salad, a confirmation that some body is enjoying her body, but at memories of unbearable things people have said, which, now that I’m not in their presence, I find myself flying over, like the Midwest. But still, my own laughter feels unbearable; I’m longing for someone to make eye contact with, or now that the scene has passed, to have made eye contact. I feel that we would have been above the fray, as if we would not have then become the fray.

Films can make eye contact without requiring us to look away from the scene framed by the glance, but sharing a laugh is still tricky. Framing a scene as comedy is cheating, because nothing is between you if it was already there. The paraideal moment of bearing together is looking to the other and finding them laughing at almost the same thing. It can only be almost, and only almost ideal, and if it were exactly, that might be worse. In his three 90s films, Whit Stillman is trying to create in-jokes with camera and microphone, hoping we’ll almost laugh with him at the unbearable conversations of his remembered youth.

None of these are sitcoms exactly, but a historical situation in broad strokes deflates everything within. For Barcelona, it’s the opening intertitle that states the story takes place “in the last decade of the Cold War.” The male leads being soldiers in America’s dominophrenic ideological struggle abroad, it’s understood from the beginning that it’s still paranoia if they’re wrong. Ted and Fred, their names easily misheard for each other, especially if, for example, one’s first language isn’t English, are cousins with such a parodic childhood trauma dividing them that if this were sci-fi, I’d think it was an implanted memory. Instead, their unstable complimentarity keeps almost sounding like a metaphor for the relation of their adult roles of marketing and military, religious and patriotic, minds and hearts. In probably the most obvious joke shot of the film, we are shown that Ted hides The Holy Bible in the latest issue of The Economist. Fred meanwhile agrees that he really believes in “this shining city on a hill stuff,” while being the opposite of a volcel, which Ted seems to be becoming.

What Ted still holds against Fred is that Fred stole his kayak, and now Ted is always thinking that Fred is stealing from him. In my bad metaphor, it’s as if Ted is annoyed, in an Austrian School misapprehension, that Fred is impeding the free flow of capital with all the government spending he receives. This is the kind of meeting of eyes, fully believed in the moment, that if recalled alone, would be ruined.

It’s as if what Stillman took away from having really been an American verbally defending America in Barcelona is you can’t convince anyone, you can only make them laugh. As Chris Eigerman, who has starred in all of Stillman’s first three films, puts it, “you are allowed to laugh at these people, and when you laugh at these people, you actually start to sympathize with these people.” Stillman says he writes dialogue “from arguments that I’d lost,” but does he want to win? I feel like he’d rather poke out his eyes than expose his ass.

In the commentary track for The Last Days of Disco (a slightly more nostalgic film about a deflated historical moment), Stillman is at his most generous, praising the performances of Chloe Sevigny and Chris Eigerman, who are in the room with him, curious how the production went for them, and reminiscing about the real-life clubs the movie is based on. Sevigny doesn’t say much, but she does say “I don’t say much,” commenting on her character, Alice, in the film. Stillman explains that he intentionally wrote Alice as the everyperson, and that, moreover, he prefers to write women. He has also said that he “would like to write a movie about sociologically likeable characters.” Uncannily like the characterization under which her character struggles, when Sevigny speaks, it’s to make sharpish observations. Charlotte convinces Alice for a time that Alice is a joykill in a manner repellent to men, but she’s more of a Leia harmlessly ribbing Han. “You keep asking me about the fashion,” Sevigny says, laughing at Stillman when he asks her now likes what she’s wearing on screen for the third time. He becomes interested in her experience on set as an instance of what it’s like being a woman in a film, something else she seems irritably amused by. The whole conversation, she lurks like Sigmund Freud.

Without the palpable transferrance in the room, Stillman gets sour that the Barcelonian critics of Barcelona saw it as an inauthentic representation of their city (which is understandable, given its title). Bringing this up a decade after the fact is I guess an answer to my question: he wants to get in the last word after all. The argument about the film is a weird restaging of the film’s conflict between “American imperialists” (Stillman’s words) and Barcelonian intellectuals. Making the film was already a self-reproducing ritual: as Taylor Nichols, who plays Ted, says, it’s a script written by a guy who goes to Spain and falls in love with a girl, about a guy who goes to Spain and falls in love with a girl, the on-location production of which causes the lead actor to fall in love with a girl.

There’s a scene of dialogue that uses the language barrier to create a double entendre of looking and being looked at, between Ted and Monserrat, played by Tushka Bergen:

“You’re very perceptive.”

“What?”

“You’re very perceptive.”

“What?”

“You are very perceptive.” (He makes a gesture indicating a line from his eyes to her.)

“Thank you.” (From the way she says this, she has understood perceptive to mean good to perceive, pretty.)

“I don’t like perceptiveness of that kind.”

“It’s a typical pretty-girl thing, using observation for ridicule, as if impertinence were cute and charming. My impression of Aurora is that she’d be more apt to use observation for comprehension.”

“You don’t think Aurora’s pretty?”

“No.”

“But she’s beautiful.”

“Physically?”

“Yes, her eyes.”

“She’s beautiful because of her eyes?”

“Yes.”

In commentary, Eigerman is so overcome by the beauty of the nearly vaseline-lensed shots of Tushka Bergen and Mira Sorvino’s faces looking into the camera that he exclaims aloud, while Stillman remarks on how closely he wrote the script to his life: “Sometimes relationships are so much better when you can’t understand what the other person is saying, but try to preserve that for twenty years.” He recorded this in the same year that he separated from his wife, who I assume is the girl he fell in love with in Barcelona. He talks about intending his films to be less or more than understandable: “the film should be open to liking or disliking these characters.” We don’t say much.

Ted’s holy books, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, and How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success, “really are good books,” Stillman comments. Of one of the first times in the film you get a sense of just what an ass Fred is, when he says that there’s no good way to say “American” in Spanish–the correct term, Estadounidense, “every time you hear it, estadouni-DENSE DENSE, it’s a direct slap in the face.”–Stillman remarks “this is true, there really is no right way to say it.” Ted sounds certain that he doesn’t want a woman to observe him for ridicule, but Whit doesn’t. The woman Stillman’s authorial voice aspires to be is, in Ted’s schema, neither pretty nor not pretty, neither ridiculing nor comprehending.

Ted’s farcial epiphany, “I’m beginning to reconsider my attitude toward female beauty; I think it’s very bad,” could thus be restated “I’m beginning to reconsider my attitude toward being ridiculed; I think it’s very bad.” But this is ridiculous from the start; Stillman is telling us “I would like to be ridiculed for once thinking that being ridiculed is bad,” by which he means to save himself from ridicule.

The movie ends with the most ambiguous scene with the most unambiguously ridiculous staging. Three American men are making hamburgers for three Barcelonian women, each man with a bottle of beer in their hand. The women go off to talk amongst themselves.

“What’s really terrific is that when we act in ways which might objectively seem assholish or incredibly annoying, they don’t get upset at all. They just assume it’s some national characteristic.”

“Cosa de gringos.”

“Yeah.”

“Fantastic.”

“Yeah.”

The flatness of this happy ending seems to feel that it isn’t fantastic. But, somehow, being understood is worse. Looking back on this story about meeting his wife, Stillman only laments that mutual incomprehensibility can’t be kept up. In film he’s found the technology to sustain incomprehensibility. It’s not through the surprises of a life that one evades the death of being understood, but through the control of theater that doesn’t rely on bodies to reproduce. The bodies on the receiving end of the fixed recording knowingly laugh alone even if together, and in understanding, don’t know anybody.

The boat has a hole in the hull and it would be filling up but there’s someone on it, in it, belowdecks. The boat is not full yet but his hands are. The boat is going up what people familiar with the swamp call a creek, and it’s unbelievable to me, a passenger, that the creek will end, and also unbelievable that it hasn’t ended yet. The course twists until I don’t fully believe in “upstream,” and I suspect the boat, or its captain, has unwittingly merged back into its previous course, and is going in circles. If I were to strap on a gopro, the internet could analyze the footage and discover my illogic, revealing, to the amazement of all, that I have feelings.

On land, someone calls me from far away and asks what the weather has been like here. “It snows, it rains, it freezes, it thaws, there’s just water everywhere,” I tell him. He’s excited about the water year. I concede it’ll be a good water year, but I’m thinking of how the precipitation is keeping me from taking walks, the formalization of a whim, taken up with the intent to resurrect the feeling that accompanied the whim by going through its motions.

Twenty years ago the combination of snow and rain created a flood, which inundated the low point of downtown, and we all congregated on bridges and other high ground to ogle the destruction, or helped sandbag. Today I find myself watching the high creek with the hope that it will get higher.

Almost as long ago as the flood, disasters were cool to a certain kind of anarchist, because in a disaster, people help each other and form bonds cutting across the usual divides of race, class, and gender. In a disaster it appeared that anarchy prevailed until it was cut short by governmental assistance and the resuming of the flow of capital. For the same reason, the desire for disaster that was read to be at the heart of not just disaster movies but urban blockbusters in general (in short: 9/11 action movies, even before 9/11), and in the hearts of audiences thrilled by the spectacle of collapsing infrastructure, was politically cool. What people really yearned for through the screen, it was understood, was the end of Capitalism. But for my fleeting, unserious desire for another flood here to be politically defensible, I think I would have to be affected by it in some way other than in the vagaries of living in a town that would have slightly less money. I don’t think there can really be a good political claim on my fantasy; I just want a spectacle that would externalize my feeling of having feelings.

The last two years of wildfire smoke smudging out the summer, or at least the expected and lucrative sensations of summer (light, air), have given the town anticonfidence. People here are into austerity now, which for a tourist town means for instance scaling back park projects. A hot issue is the redesign of the Japanese garden, implementing which would require cutting down a few native incense cedars. A–what, isolationist, nativist, localist?–contingent has emerged, writing in a letter to the editor that a single native tree is worth a million manicured Japanese maples. Environmentalism has spawned a kind of ecoreactionary, whose hatred of “invasive species” deploys the form but not the content of racist rhetoric–a displacement if I’ve ever heard one. Even though the whole country has been colonized by means of genocide, the attitude of the ecoreactionary seems to be that if one small part of an ecosystem can be brought back to its precolonial state, that would constitute reparations.

Amid the threat of smoke, the attitude of abundance also exists, but is a reaction of willful denial to the same conditions, as if the smoke came because we didn’t believe in summer. Or maybe it’s internalized Christianity bubbling through Baby Boomer Buddhism: We’re going to hell for failing to live in the moment.

Maybe with this much water, he speculates over the phone, there will be fewer fires. Crying does bring a feeling of well-being, I think, or maybe something else.

Fill in the blank. In Washington, North Carolina there’s a Rube Goldberg machine of a sculpture that’s supposed to teach audiences that water goes down, and in Raleigh, an installation on a fence that spells out in balloons “logic will let you ____” (the last word of balloons have popped or floated away).

Multiple choice. Water:

A. is warmer before you emerge.

B. is the same temperature whether you’re in it or not.

C. feels cold only because of its velocity relative to you, an object sharing an inertial frame with the bedrock.

Back on the boat, I recall a friend reminding me that, like every Luca Guadagnino movie, I Am Love ends with death plus a swimming pool. This isn’t quite true: Call me By Your Name begins with bringing up inanimate body parts from an ocean. Reassembled, the bodies are marionetted to flirt in various pastoral bodies of water. Suspiria I have not seen, but there’s a scene in the original of swimming in an enormous indoor pool (every dance academy needs one), and by this point in the movie, the lead and her friend, shot long and very small in the frame, feel doomed.

There’s a small pool on the boat, and there’s a man floating in it face-down, which feels more Swimming Pool than Guadagnino. I flip over his body and it feels not just lighter than water, but lighter than air, and he floats to the ceiling, looking, although dead, more than a little annoyed.

Synthesis is always bad. Every Endeavour episode begins with analysis, in the opening montage’s breakdown of what will become, like having tonight’s dream this morning, the concerns of the episode, and in the first half of the investigation, which engages in the depressive cognition of cutting up character’s lives (and sometimes bodies) until their suffering is reached. Morse is at his most sympathetic when he’s perceiving the suffering of others (he’s very little if not an accomplished sufferer), and his ugliest when comparing people to his rigid standards. In the end, everyone is sewn back together, and netted back into the society that broke them. The criminal is effaced before the hard truth of the law, which is, like a tough-loving father, building her into a better person by punishing her. Morse ends up disappointed, and the show becomes disappointing, so that I want more.

One of my pet peeves is the critique that criticism without a solution is bad. Is constructive criticism still a buzzword in secondary education? It seems we were told that every critique must be productive. It’s not surprising, then, that criticism run amok is something of a drug to me, and I assume to others similarly brought up and disposed.

The most obscene analysis comes in the form of comedy, for which the highest praise is feeling murdered, needing a doctor, being out of control, hysterical.

I’ve been journaling in Google Keep notes, which I began as deleted or never-posted tweets, and remain mostly a heap of fragmentary analyses, but also sensations, memories, daydreams. Writing notes only seems to solidify the things I desperately want someone else to understand. Some let out this tension, I gather, not by loosening their tongues, but the rest of their bodies, but I jealously wonder if this lets anything out, and if multiple kinds of exhibition really negate each other. Some have a therapist, but the point of that relationship isn’t confession for its own sake per se.

We’re some very high percentage water, I hear, and the flow of language that is the self feels like drinking and voiding, negative and positive pressure. Eros seems like nothing more than withholding or telling. I’m always either feeling that to tell would be to lose what I would tell about, or that not telling will kill me. In that the realization of any desire is a petite mort, telling is never precisely a relief. Having told, I haven’t so much gotten something off my chest in the sense of someone finally understanding my Very Important Epiphanies, but in the sense of becoming temporarily disillusioned with the whole premise of talking about oneself.

In one alleged idea of how to cope with the concept of the self, you, the self-burdened, tell and tell until the self no longer looks like anything but history, or in other words, fiction. “Dig yourself out of the shit!” says the conspiracy-theorist purveyor of fine shovels in Twin Peaks: The Return and it feels like some asshole recruited half the world to fashion various kinds of shovels and invited the other half to join them in here, the water feels great, and therefore nobody will ever dig anybody out of this bog of a mixed metaphor.