Embarrassing Myself on Twitter is Not Enough

I don’t want to insult you by assuming that you haven’t heard from more people than you’d prefer that all stories are about producing stories, and I want to write a story that is told through bowel movements. This would of course be the side plot, the not-at-all-sneaky thematic resonance. What is an American movie? Going by my only non-Europhillic American friend, it’s a movie that doesn’t begin with the pièce de résistance. Lady Bird is American, Call me By Your Name is not, which is to say nothing because this is merely an accurate if imprecise report of the respective locations in which they were produced. Before I saw Lady Bird I read a review, possibly unamerican, that told me the movie begins with a Joan Didion quote: “Anybody who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento.” My story would begin with someone asking over the phone from Sacramento why she misses the end of the world. On the other end of the line, in an exterior water heater closet, with the insulated pipes leading to three floors of showers and sinks, he would ask if it’s because she hasn’t gotten clear of it, and in an inexcusable lack of subtlety, a flush would slosh through the pipes.

Most of these conversations would take place with one or the other on the toilet, trying to obscure the noises of elimination or evacuation. In one touching scene, the ruse would be revealed. Like the disaster following the first sex scene in a romance, this moment of bonding would only deepen the dilemma: While each wait for these phone conversations to be transformed into something–healing, story, romance, understanding–they watch their diverse shits spiraling down the tube. The two of them aren’t the same person, but because I’m nervous of letting the psychic center of balance fall to one or the other, they are both more myself than they are others. This is not entirely a contrivance, which is the problem. They chew the scenery to each other, and begin to wonder how they have the stomach for it all.

“Is it a video?” wonders the song that closes Call me by Your Name. Sometimes the palpable attempt to create cinematic effects in prose annoys me, but this is a basically constipated attitude. Constipation doesn’t begin in the gut, but by eating to avoid movement, I say smugly like a health guru. The problem is that there are no causes, which is just a restatement of the previous sentence. You don’t know that this isn’t all being filmed, and likewise vision is a red herring. While I could be being filmed, for example, I could be invisibly writing this. To write does not require scribing. That can happen at any time. There’s the rub, for our as-yet barely distinguishable leads. They are not attempting to literally write, but they are waiting for all the material to add up. It feels to them, or maybe just to the unseen camera, that their intestines have more imagination than they do. Maybe the mind is just a video camera, and as it’s unclear in this story who if anyone is holding it, he and she exchanging material over the phone is more of a ring-shaped human centipede than a writer’s workshop. They long for the productive individuation that’s expected of them, but what they don’t know they need, because they think they’re drowning in it, is more input. Not in order to do anything. Just because.

“It claws its way down your stomach,” is how my friend describes digesting milk, after a pause, like she edited this line a few times. In France, she ate all the cheese she wanted and it was clawless. She speculates that the unpasteurized cheese there retains whatever it is that helps people to digest it. She retains nothing of her newfound alimentary tolerance, as if U.S. customs brought her to an antiseptic temperature.

Back in France, she instagrammed a sketch daily, alongside a photo of her subject. The sketch and the photo were in the order I prefer: a movie and dinner, not dinner and a movie. The sketches were full of movement, while the photos were, as photos are, lifeless. One sketch showed sunlight pouring onto floor tiles that appeared to radiate warmth. In reality, she bought slippers to walk on those tiles because they were so cold.

The night I saw The Last Jedi I had a dream as red as that movie. It concluded as The Empire Strikes Back began, but on a salt planet rather than an ice planet, so that instead of Empire’s arc of pasteurization (water, air, fire, earth), we get all the pinches of salt from a long time before a long time ago as a planet. It’s as if doubt has a gravity all its own, with a repulsion inverse to its ability to delaminate certainty. The planet’s composition is a kind of joke on Star Wars fans, who see a planet of roughly the same appearance as Hoth in Empire (white), and assume it’s cold. The white dust gives way to red underneath, which someone licks and is surprised to find salty. I have to assume that in a movie so concerned with cost in blood spilt that the red salt crystals, red windshields, red suits of armor, and red oval offices are as bombastic rhetorically as they are aesthetically.

Whenever I recommend something, I’m probably just saying that the disorientation has dividends. I want to say it’s more alchemical than that. A good movie shouldn’t just give you back the time spent watching it, but make the conservation of time illogical. The only things about The Last Jedi not in the realist mode are the color red, and cutting back and forth between shot and reverse shot of Rey and Kylo, who reside in different scenes. Montage is magic. Each episode of Endeavour begins with a dense, lyrical montage, which it then spends an hour and a half sucking the life out of. Detectives are basically vampires, and Morse particularly so. You pity how helpless he is to not be a killjoy. He has the foot-shooting tendency to take the moral high ground even when questioning people. His foot is perpetually in his mouth, it’s bleeding, and he’s sucking on it. Maybe murder mysteries have always been flat-footed prose chasing after poetry. The rabbit pulled from the hat of British mysteries is the mean material of the murder’s gothic symbolism. The genre’s interest is in the suggestive ellipses released by the many fissions of meaning and fact throughout, until finally the solution drops, heavy and depleted.

If you search for aesthetics without meaning, you end up finding fascism. America admitted that it never cared about content in a president and we can’t stop repeating him, the Freudian fidgit spinner. Politically, I ought to have a poetics of detection instead of murder. On the other hand, I know someone who is plodding through The Rise and Fall of The Third Reich in order to understand Hitler. Become seduced by form or stampeded by content.

In “New Rules”, Dua Lipa is a kind of upside-down, inside-out Moses, descending into the pit of her dreams to give herself commandments against God. Unlike reading a nonfiction tome to see the world from the perspective of a fascist, Lipa in no way finds an understanding of her undoing’s consciousness a necessary part of not being undone. (Not that it’s clear that the new rules aren’t another undoing.) The “understand Hitler” version of history, rather than being the only way to keep from repeating it, turns out to be a perfectly good way of repeating it both unconsciously and consciously. The monster becomes a distraction from itself.

“What’s the worst thing you can say as a Christian?” Anja asks Thelma in Thelma, and she answers “Jesus Satan,” a fairly good description of either herself or the two of them, as they ROFL. Anja mentions her own father only once: “He has a lot of children and I’m not really sure if he likes kids.” Thelma’s apparently loving father chastises her for thinking she’s better than other people, an affliction that is, to be fair, native to university, which she is attending. In return for attempting to repress her powers–amplified by repressing the memory of either telekinetically murdering her brother, or her parents psychically murdering her–she offers him a choice: burn or drown. No gradients allowed. The psychological thriller has the potential to be murder mystery in reverse, moving from prosaic to bizarre in a manner that suggests the former was always the latter. There is often a second conclusionary movement of retroactive scare quotes, the “it was all a dream” move. Double Lover turns this into its crowning disorientation, a twist that sticks. It’s revealed that most of the movie was somatopsychic, hallucinations brought on by the malformed fetus of her twin stuck inside her. The fetus is removed, and her psychologist husband doesn’t understand why she’s not over it. She and the audience experienced the revealing violence of her hallucinations. She remembers her husband’s twin, who supposedly doesn’t exist. Her twin, a lump of barely recognizable flesh (like what you get at the end of an Endeavour episode), isn’t alive, and therefore she’s doubly alive.

In the year 2016 the newspaper–not that there is a newspaper–asks you “what kind of fat are you?” There has not been an invasion of lipid-based life forms; you are a fat; I am a fat; we are all fats. Every fat’s story is one of redemption from fat. The newspaper says there are three kinds of fat: skinny fat, burn-out fat, and stress fat. The life of every fat is a kind of time travel, each year landing on each fat too early or too late. Chronology awaits its correct subjects who are nonetheless already so irredeemably othrodox that they imagine they are not.

In 2016 by appearance I am a skinny fat. I feel the visceral fat wrapped around my heart. A skinny fat is fine but lesser, someone who lives as shallowly as she breathes. She does little and eats little. Her whole body is atrophying. Fat clings to her vital organs, keeping her from freezing, keeping her muddled. The redeemed fat is Chris Hemsworth as a dumb secretary: all muscle.

But, feeling the 11 AM thrum of caffeine and no breakfast, every day I am a burn-out fat, every day I am a stress fat. I am exhausted by the not-newspaper and I am exhausted by 2016, yet its trinity of fats buzzes around and slaps the windows of my mind. I am so exhausted I eat breakfast, and breakfast, like ballast, makes me want to sink back into bed.

Though this not-newspaper is unreconstructed, I am uncertain what the difference between chocolate bars whose packaging is crammed with nouns repurposed as adjectives attempting to exempt them from capitalism, and American television. The last three years, the Interstate here has been under construction. This 15-mile stretch has late-night road crews, closed lanes, lowered speed limits, and one exit that is such a labyrinth I take any other route to avoid it. The construction is exciting for the future, and exhausting for its duration. Eventually, there will be another period during which nothing much happens to the Interstate, and then it will become exhausted.

I come home with bags of groceries, ingredients to dishes that I was excited to make. I collapse onto the couch and eat an entire chocolate bar, the wrapper of which assures me the farmers who grew the chocolate were never unhappy. I open another bar, which was on sale. It purports to end slavery.

As the theobromine works its way into my brain, I realize that I don’t understand what a burn-out fat or a stress fat is. At the times in my life when I over-ate to the point of constant indigestion, I did so out of anxiety. It was not a mysterious psychological mechanism. I was anxious that I would not be able to have enough energy for the long, stressful work days, so I wanted to top myself off. I thought I needed a reserve to cope with an uncertain future. At night I ate even more, to recover what I thought I had lost during the day.

Dumb Chris Hemsworth needs to be dumb because muscle offers no protection. There are two kinds of film in 2016: Fun, intensely referential reboots, and serious reboots that tell The Real Story. The villain in a film in the first category is a caricature of a depressive man (a burn-out fat?) who sees the world as “garbage” because it does not echo his suffering back to him. He steals and then discards Dumb Chris Hemsworth’s body because it was making him dumb, which is to say it, like the Ghostbusters themselves, pokes holes in his depressive realism. Dumb Chris Hemsworth isn’t so much dumb as a determined malapropist. He mixes up words as well as objects and their qualities. The fake phone in the aquarium looks to him like he needs to answer it, but he never answers the real phone. To the melancholic, this is unacceptable. It is hard not to think that Ghostbusters, both old and new, is hostile to historicism. Maybe that’s what makes it fun.

2016 is a year of crying in comedies for me. Not because the comedies (Absolutely Fabulous, Ghostbusters) are bad, but because the jokes brush away my habitual distractions, and then there are lulls between jokes. In most groups I am a Holtzmann, relying on others to be responsible and to define a continuity that I am left to observe and comment upon at my leisure. The expansiveness of her relation to time allows her to be laconic. Her jokes are burn-out jokes. Both she and the villain are destructive geniuses, but where he wants to blow up the world because it’s not up to his standards, she is a nihilist who delights in blowing shit up in general. His energy, as well as his dissatisfaction, comes from his retentiveness. His laboratory is filled with ghosts trapped in picture frames, whereas the Ghostbusters catch one ghost and release it in the next scene. As a scientist, Holtzmann is an omnivore; she is exhaustion turned inside-out. Everything is meaningless, so she “actualizes” every idea that occurs to her, which perhaps explains the Makers persistance into 2016, so tiring just to consider.