Three eleven
Bugonia
Opinions vary on Bugonia. Mine fwiw is that it was bad in a
way that no other film has been bad in before. It had nothing to say but it
pretended it did and it didn't really have much plot but pretended it did by
adding on stuff that was like growing an extra dick rather than growing an inch
on the one you already have.
Nihilist trash. I do not approve.
Frankenstein
I seem to be almost entirely opposed from the "correct
opinion" because I really liked it. I felt it was note perfect but for one line. The key would be to ignore the book and not try to compare the film to it but to take it on its own terms. It's a banger. Yes, it's not as subtle as Shelley's work but she wasn't writing a filmplay. And it looked so good!
If you're going to do a remake, make it your own. And don't make it dreary rubbish like Nosferatu.
Thirty one ten
I read Counterweight by Djuna.
The premise of the novel was interesting. An unnamed, perhaps unreliable narrator (although nothing hinges on the narrator's reliability) finds out that the deceased head of a multinational that has built a space elevator has planted a copy of (some of) his memories into a working stiff's brain.
The slender book is why and some chasing around. Bish bash bosh. But the worldbuilding is really thin, so you have no good picture of the place the narrator is running around. Or even really why. There's some nonsense about AI but any insight is literally just put right in front of you and it amounted to "it's inevitable, yawn". The characters had no character, the action had no action and the denouement didn't make much if any sense.
It's the kind of book reviewers fawn over because they think cutting-edge Korean sf must be good because everyone says it is. But it isn't. It's supposed to be less is more. But it's just less is less. Didn't enjoy; don't recommend.
Eleven ten
Rereading Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang, I was actually surprised at how different it is from the film (Arrival, if you don't know). The story is a reflection on free will and inevitability, although you may well not see it that way. It's chiefly a statement of existentialist philosophy: you cannot choose what you do but you can choose how you feel about it.
In Chiang's story -- and this isn't a spoiler -- the narrator's child will die. But we will all die. Should we not have children when we know they are doomed? How must you act when you are confronted with the inevitable? For Louise, the choice is maximum joy or maximum sorrow. There is no option to just not do it.
This is the Myth of Sisyphus retold. Louise cannot, and does not, choose for her child to exist. She must have her and lose her and take that as an occasion for joy or for sorrow.
The difference between the story and the film is that the aliens bring enlightenment to Louise in the story, while in the film they are the solution to the problem they themselves present. Which you find better is probably a question of taste, and I liked them both, but I much prefer the story, which made me cry.
Twenty-seven seven
It is late. I probably could sleep. But I don't want to. Sleeping means waking up. And waking up means deciding if I can face another day. They have no end. They simply proceed one after the other.
I do, I did and I will think about ending my life. I know that if you read this, you will likely say, oh, you should not. You should fight for it.
Fight for what? When I wake up, I find out if there's any work for me. If there is, I know I can do it and make maybe enough to pay the rent. I usually can't stand to do much more because it's not fun, it's not good work. It's not boring like your job is boring, or tiring like your job is tiring. It's not even soul destroying. It's crushing because it's the best I can hope for. It's all I am good for.
Doing all you are good for is not soul destroying. It's a way of reminding yourself you do not have a soul; you do not have any beauty; you have nothing that anyone wants.
I don't have friends. There are a couple of people at the dog park I talk to but those are all the friends I have. Why don't I have them? Why don't I make more? I'm not unfriendly. I'm a bit odd maybe but not even really so much that you'd notice. If I can fight down the little professor, I'm at least sometimes interesting.
Or I thought I was. I had a couple of people I talked to regularly. But they grew bored of me. Sufficiently that they just didn't want to be my friend any more. It has left me profoundly empty, bereft.
The cause of not having friends is that I worked from home. I gave up having a life, friends, everything for people I loved. And what does that reward you? One woman I just couldn't love any more; the other, well, she never was the person I loved, and finding that out crushed me. It caused a crisis of confidence that I have not recovered from. It left me unable to find anyone who might care for me.
I know that some people who read this will protest that they do care for me. I don't mean you don't love me. I don't even mean you don't think about me. I'm sure people do. I mean you cannot care for me. Not as a child. As someone who is present. As someone who will share their problems with me and listen to mine. Not even that. I don't want to spend my days bleating. As someone who already knows them and will be a safe place for me.
I do not have anything safe in my life. I just have things that hurt. They hurt all the time. Each thing sits there and says, you deserve it. Because that is how I see the world. Despite all the unfairness, the injustice, the wonky scales that I can see all around me, I am still getting what I deserve.
I just can't get out of it. I can't get a job to give me the money to save to have the backstop that you are supposed to have. I cleared most of my debts and then I got more because I didn't have work and I have to live. I am crushed by rent and I can't afford not to pay it. What a quandary! I am too poor to move out. It haunts me: how easily I could be free of those debts, for what a low price. But it's a price I can't pay. And I had a car crash that left me hurt and broken, and facing even more debt. I can't do anything about it. I dread hearing about how much people think I will give them. I cannot give them anything.
I cannot even be bankrupt. To survive, I had to create a situation that if I reveal it to an insolvency official, I will be in even worse trouble.
I do know what some people will think. Just suck it up. Get an extra job and work hard. But I have had to try to make my life less miserable so that I can bear it. And seriously, what job? What extra job can I have?
***
It gets worse. I can't talk about it here but this is not all that leaves me powerless and bereft. I recently went to England and that made things worse. No one intended that it should but it did. Because I know that being here is what makes me want to die and I can't change it. It's no one's fault but my own. But I know that that's a losing battle, something I can't fix. You cannot reason with something that howls with its own pain that makes no sense, knows no reason. I will talk about it another time. I cannot afford therapy so this is all I have.
So tomorrow I will wake up and hope that it looks a little brighter. But it won't. There will just be a voice following me around the house as I clean it, whispering did you think you could have a dream? Did you think you could have what you wanted? Did you think you could be happy? Did you think you could be loved? And laughing at me, screeching with laughter, while me, I can't laugh along with it. My laughter vanished seven years ago and it's the fear that it won't come back that is making me think about stopping.
Twenty-two seven
When you feel, or maybe are, powerless, it can be hard to sympathise with people who are struggling with the outcomes of their own choices. I think that's probably truer if those choices are more proximate but aren't your own just the same, just more distant?
I think that the obvious conclusion to draw from that is that you should have more sympathy for those people but on the other hand, sometimes because the more proximate outcomes are much easier to see and expect, you feel they deserve it less.Is that right? If you say, I chose to love her and I couldn't know that it would be a mistake or at least that it would turn out badly, are you a more sympathetic figure than someone who is feeling overcommitted but made those commitments last week and didn't have to?
Two three
A, maybe the, problem with communism is that it prescribes a revolution and then invites everyone who has been dispossessed by said revolution to live with it. In a world where capitalism still exists, that presents obvious hurdles for the communists. Not least that the dispossessed people won't just live with it and they are going to resist because no one likes to be dispossessed, and they can't be convinced by your very rational and obviously correct political philosophy. So the problem is what you do about them.
Of course, the outside capitalists are a large part of the problem, because they are full of people who also don't want to be dispossessed, and plenty of other people who you don't really have the means to convince that they won't also be dispossessed. In most respects, it's rather successful. But the revolutionary problem has this same issue of not preparing the ground sufficiently, so you end up needing a secret police to make sure that people aren't discussing how they can possess more. They mostly can't but propaganda is a strong driver of the horses. And it's hard to convince people that American jeans and Coke will not in fact make them happy -- have they never met Americans? They're the most miserable people you've ever met on the whole and being fat doesn't make them any more happy. They are raised in a society that values nothing except money and the main "value" that they are imbued with is a disregard for other people that really if you think about it is quite astonishing.
So really you need to build the regard for other people before you have a revolution and that isn't easy among people who grow up learning that others are there to be used and discarded as they feel fit.
Another problem is of course that there are sociopaths in every society and you really do need a mechanism to make sure you can deal with them before they attempt to make themselves kings. I mean, everyone knew Stalin was a piece of shit but no one thought, well, in that case, I should just whack him now and spare everyone a lot of problems. Part of it was that no one quite believed that Stalin could rise to the top, because everyone thought he was an arsehole and why would anyone want him in charge?
Well, people see arseholes as people they can use for some reason, and by the time they've realised that they made a mistake with the likes of Stalin, he's executing them for "treason".
Not that I'm saying that communism would have worked but for Stalin. There's always a Stalin. There's always a guy who's convinced that no one else can do it as well as he can, and maybe for a while, he seems to be right. But it's part of the human experience that people mistake skill at one thing for skill at all things. So you get Castro -- genius revolutionary, bad king -- or Pol Pot -- great theorist and look, theory would be great if it had a separate universe in which to work -- or Mao -- another genius revolutionary whose ideas about everything were terrible when they were his own work and great when they were cribbed from Lenin.
And look, many of us think, maaaaybe Trotsky, if he had been just a bit more personable and a bit better at politics... well, we'll never know, because he wasn't. That, ultimately, is the problem. Humans are never infallible. We have strengths and weaknesses, good and bad. But many of us, looking at ourselves, see pure gold and never quite grasp that our good, your good, their good, altogether is that gold.
Fourteen two
Meet Joe Black has so much good in it that it floods over you when you try to think of it. Yes, I know it's schmaltzy but I love schmaltzy. I have always believed in the lightning strike. I have always believed in "you were there; you were the guy" and it's all I've ever wanted to be there and be the guy, even if that is an impossible dream.
I adore when Quince, who is borderline pathetic but finds his balls, courtesy of Joe, to rise to the occasion magnificently, tells Mr Black that Alison knows the worst thing about him and he about her and that means they can love each other without restraint, and yes, I believe in that too.
I knew the worst thing about my Alison and yes, I would have loved her even despite that but she has no capacity to be loved. It's so much worse than being incapable of love, or even just being really bad at it. My dad is really bad at it to the point you wonder if he ever has been capable of love. Not infatuation. He can do that. He is and always has been infatuated with one of my sisters, just like Bill in the film. And poor Alison, who is almost a comic figure trying to put together a party to show her love for him while he just cannot be arsed with it and despite being portrayed as loveable, just not being good enough at loving her back even to pretend to care, well, she is a story about what is just enough for you if you cannot get the real love you yearn for.
There are plenty of wrong notes, mostly stemming from Brad Pitt's mannered "acting", which sometimes really works and sometimes, well, just doesn't. But I think you forgive him because of his incandescent chemistry with Claire Forlani, who is magnificent, even if he does get acted into a tiny ball by Anthony Hopkins, who doesn't steal every scene so much as caress it out of the room and off to a quiet place with him. The wrongest note may well be at the end, where Joe's sacrifice ends with letting Susan have what she should have? could have? will come to want? It's just awkward and weird, and you have to wonder whether she really would just go with it. Anyway, films are not after all real life so of course she does, and if you are a lady, I don't need to ask you if you would because you would. He's the guy and there he is.
So of course this is how I spent my Valentine's night. I have no Valentine but I have not entirely given up on ever having one again. I think that I have spent so many years just with what is enough, or even what is nowhere near enough, that I'm not sure I always mind so much. I am just sorry to have been that person for other people. For some, just enough is enough. It always has been and always will be. Meet Joe Black will never be the film for them. But for me, it is. It is the film for me, the dream of the gauche boy, overfamiliar with loneliness and pain, who wants the love with no restraints, off the edge of the cliff and no regrets.
