looking into the sun
on sunday i went to a screening in a tiny very narrow cinema of In die Sonne schauen, english title Sound of Falling. it was fucking harrowing, and mostly very good, and i am desperately glad that i could hold my girlfriend's hand throughout it because i fear i would have utterly imploded if i didn't have a physical tether keeping me in my seat and in the moment. spoilers i guess.
it is a film set on a farm in saxony, across four time periods, where women's lives are brutal and vicious and terrible. it feels incredibly euro in its patient and mostly dispassionate bleakness. its also incredibly obvious with its psychoanalytic perspective, given its constant returns to moments of fantasy, to compulsive repetition, to hysteria as a feminine condition, to memory as an unreliable yet powerful narration of the present, and the family as the site of everyone getting absolutely fucked up. its also a film about the confrontation of the worst kinds of world ending horrors that a mundane family on a farm in saxony can offer over time. its about parental abuse, sexual violation, the spectre of death and the reality of death.
there were two kinds of moments in the film that were intensely difficult. the second is easier to talk about because its a more direct kind of terror: it showed moments where the worst possible thing a person could anticipate in a given moment was realised, or at least shown and acknowledged in thought. it is often entwined with fantasy or some obvious uncanny moment of substitution. a girl's siblings take a prank too far and she figuratively dies to them. a teenager longs to step in front of heavy farm equipment. the grandparent who is supposed to be immune to death dies. it appears that the neighbour that a girl is crushing on drowns in the river, thought she pops back up without really noticing the terror it induced after an uncomfortable wait. a life ends first through consignment to abject violence and drudgery and ends again though a rebellious suicide. parents who do not wish their son to be conscripted mutilate him. i feel like by the final act of the film the repetitions were too tight and too pointed, the sense of unease and unconscious weight was replaced by a heavy-handed writers touch. but for much of the film it was a deeply horrible confrontation with the kinds of moments that can scar a life. i've felt like i've wanted to annihilate myself, i've lost the person i wanted to care for me forever, i remember the moments where i have figuratively died to the people around me and it is a sensation that permeates my memory and dictates how i act more often than i'd like.
theoretical writing can slide around the corners of such a confrontation because it demands the reader stand at a safe critical distance. i was thinking a lot about how much of the film was structured like a Freud case study, but it simply refused the narrative arc that such a presentation offers, with the insightful therapist and the allegiance to encounter and conquer resistance and the passage of the symptom into the realms of the manageable and mundane. the case study or the clinical text can tell you about the horrors of the world with the promise that the narrative voice and the framing will gently hold you and guide you towards a place of critical, disinterested understanding. such a place is available to the reader, but not the subject of such a narrative. i spend a lot of time in theoretical writing and it has a formal structure i lean on a lot to avoid sinking into terror or despair. on the other hand, the conscious mind can do its best to efface and hide and disavow all the ugliness it is forced to confront. fiction is, for me, the place where i cannot hide, where im forced to stare into the sun and let my eyes get stung.
the other moment of deep difficulty was the opening collection of scenes where a young girl is spun into the course of the mourning practice of All Soul's Day. she watches her mother place pictures of dead relatives on the mantlepiece and watches her gag involuntarily, she follows the example of her relatives in bowing at the little shrine and is fixated by the similarity of the features of the young child in one of the photographs to her own. she understands the social scripts involved in maintaining the decorum of a holy day but obviously hates it, obviously is bursting with the discomfort and distress of a perpetual crisis being dealt with through silence and self-discipline. the camera throughout this sequence of scenes is fucking nasty. it is condescending and contemptuous of these small people with their desperate attempts to hold at bay the terrible and inevitable collapse of their bodies and their lives and their psyches through these vain little rituals. there is no redemption in this mourning. what the camera treats as meaningful is the young little girl's distress and intense identification with the dead, her feeling of being consumed in the death of others and not the ritualised mourning.
i know that when i am feeling intensely and uncontrollably, i tend to disconnect. my mother's funeral was fucking awful just as much because i was fighting the real and present devastating sadness of having lost her as because the entire process, of making arrangements and going through Processes and Negotiations and choosing photos and offering polite conversation and watching others try to compose their own feelings into quickly exchanged sentences was galling, and exactly the kind of aggravating and overwhelming serving of unwanted feeling that will cause me to dissociate or disconnect. which i did! and again i am so grateful for the real friends and loved ones who were there to ensure that i was among people i didn't need to be disconnected from, and who held my own contempt for the situation well enough that i didn't have to let it leak into the social environments it is never, ever supposed to touch.
i don't think anyone knows how to mourn correctly, but there is certainly a way to mourn appropriately, and i don't think it did anything for me. i desperately want to take the young girl's stance and run with it to its terrible conclusion, which is to scream about the absurdity of all this careful unfeeling, to try to put the terror of being separated from your most important objects into words, and express a pain that will stop mundane life from continuing, might stop the earth from rotating and respect the insanity and total crisis that is death. but that would break too many things and too many people and then there would be nothing left to mourn, and so i hold myself contained enough and wait to watch a film that dares to ask me whether that was the right thing to do. or at least, it shows the process of mourning as i understand it with the kind of contempt i share, and confronts me with the gap between how i have acted and what i want, and the gap between how things are and how i wish they would be. the first gap i can do something about, i can talk more freely and cry more openly and allow the earth to stop rotating for myself, even if it refuses to do so for everyone else. the second gap i cannot do anything about, because and nothing will prevent those moments of annihilation and figurative death from stalking me, and nothing will replace the person i have lost.
i have had a problem where i have avoided reading fiction about trans people because it cuts too close, and i might have unmanageable feelings about it. i was the one who picked this film for my date night, i think because i was certain it would be good but also that some kind of punishment, as delivered by a blurb so obviously full of family tragedy, was due. i don't think i need to watch films about mother-daughter relationships until i get my feelings sorted out any more than i need to read trans realist lit to get a better handle on how to navigate my actual trans social existence. i know it's hard enough and i know that i can, with cool reflection, give myself competent and reasonable answers to the questions that plague me. but i wanted to feel the sun on my face, and maybe feel my retinas get scorched just a bit. making myself feel bad isn't redemptive, but it's part of trying to live differently, or maybe live at all.