Confessing to the Camera: Ulrich Seidl's 'Jesus, You Know'

While recently perusing some past papers, I came across this essay, which I delivered at a conference at Columbia University in March 2010. I decided to post it here, mostly since Seidl's film continues to fascinate me, though it's been at least a year since I've seen it.

Lord, I want to thank you for this film. I want to thank you for the shoot. Everything went so well. I want to thank you for all the happiness involved. We all made this film in honor of you. Let me pray for every single person who watches this film, may they be willing to encounter you in a new way. May they gain a new vision of you.

          – Elfriede Ahmad, Jesus, You Know

Lord, I dedicate this project to your cross, the cross of victory... I profess that you, Jesus Christ, you are our Lord and our living God, that are you are the master of this film, the master of Austria. I profess that you want to do something completely new with this film, something that no one can foresee or predict. Lord, you can do it.

          – Hans-Jurgen Eder, Jesus, You Know

Ulrich Seidl's 2003 documentary (or docudrama, or docu-something) Jesus, You Know begins with these words, intoned by two supplicants addressing the camera. In both instances, the speakers are viewed in a static shot from a frontal perspective, forming a rigidly symmetrical composition that places each individual in the midst of a network of vanishing parallel lines (pews stretching into the distance in the first case, two sets of votive candles in the second). This is an overarching aesthetic stricture that will reappear often in Jesus, You Know—a stylistic motif suggesting, perhaps, that a rigorous and coldly composed graphic network is the clearest way to denote the presence of a divine being.

But what divine being is this? If one detects a certain narcissism in the conflation between omniscient auteur and omniscient God in the film's opening lines, this, too, is a theme that will reappear often in Jesus, You Know (albeit implicitly). While the film is ostensibly a somber look at increasing secularization in Austrian Catholic churches in the modern age—it observes the prayers of devout individuals in an age that increasingly devalues religious morality—there is also the sense that Seidl smuggles editorial subversion of these themes into the film, positing traditional religious icons and rituals as empty objects offering nothing but emptiness and false hope. Indeed, the minimalist, spare aesthetic of the film—entirely static shots filming individuals from a close frontal perspective as they offer prayers to Jesus (or more accurately, to the audience; or even more accurately, to the camera)—would seem to suppress Seidl's authorial intervention entirely, allowing viewers to come to their own conclusions about his sincerity (or lack thereof) regarding his religious subjects. But as we will see, Jesus, You Know offers an extraordinary play with spectatorial identification, the act of visual mediation, and the role of the cinematic author, all of which serve to form an incredibly multivalent view of modern religion.

The sociohistorical context of Jesus, You Know is a continuing and accelerating trend of secularization in Austria. In 2001, a census report listed 11.5 percent of Austria's population (approximately 915,000 citizens) as regularly attending Sunday mass. As of the end of 2005, according to a report released by the Catholic Church of Austria itself, that number had fallen to nine percent of the total population, or approximately 750,000 citizens, a number that has continued to decline over the last five years.

Ulrich Seidl, the director of Jesus, You Know, is himself the product of a traditional Catholic upbringing, yet he's also a controversial maverick on the European art cinema scene. His 2007 fiction film Import/Export concerns two Ukrainian emigrants who experience brutal sexual degradation during their life-changing journeys; his 2001 fiction debut Dog Days was described by the Village Voice as a shining example of sadomiserablism; and his 1995 documentary Animal Love was described by fellow provocateur Werner Herzog as “looking directly into hell in the cinema.” In addition to his willful wallowing in sadistic and shocking human behavior, Seidl is controversial for his aggressive blurring of the boundaries between fiction and documentary. “I don't make any difference between feature films and documentaries,” Seidl said in an interview printed in taz magazine. “That's why the term 'staged reality' was coined. That means the people in my film are non-actors, but sometimes don't act that way. And that irritates some people. They want to think and see in tidy categories.”

Jesus, You Know as a whole will likely also irritate people who want to conceive of film in tidy categories. Although this “staged reality” offers no direct judgment upon its subjects as nobly devout or as foolishly naïve, Seidl's rigorous aesthetic and editing structures do convey subtle subversions of the characters' beliefs in an omnipresent and attentive deity. Seidl's editorial evasion is made doubly discomforting because we are offered access to such disturbingly personal information. The film is almost entirely a series of prayers delivered directly to the camera by real-life churchgoers (that is, as “real-life” as we may expect from a Seidl film). For them, during the act of filming, the presence of the camera has miraculously substituted itself for the presence of God. One woman tells the camera—tells us—about the crisis of faith experienced by her and her Muslim husband, a religious antagonism that is destroying their marriage; another distraughtly discusses her husband's infidelity and confesses that she has considered administering a lethal dose of poison to him; a man regrets how infrequently he saw his daughter after he and his wife divorced; and so on. The obvious emotional charge these prayers have for their speakers (and undoubtedly for the audience as well) makes it especially troubling when Seidl develops a sly exegetic counterpoint to his subjects' faith-based proclamations.

The primary way in which he achieves this subversion is by intercutting static (indeed, the camera never moves in Jesus, You Know) medium shots or close-ups of statues, altars, sculptures, murals, and other religious iconography into the subjects' prayers. Now, even such cut-ins could be interpreted as either affirmations of a benevolent divine force (represented through crucifixes, portraits of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary, etc.) or as evidence that modern organized religion (or at least the Roman Catholic Church in Austria) amounts to no more than empty signs and objects, mediated constructs, simulacra of religious forces that are meant to simplistically stand in for the real thing. We want to believe in the presence of a divine listener because the plight of these individuals is so palpably real. During one man's discussion of the collapse of his family after he and his wife divorce, for example, Seidl cuts to a portrait of the Virgin Mary cradling the baby Jesus, and we can hear church bells reverberating on the soundtrack; we want to believe that someone is listening to this man's supplication (staged or no, there's nothing phony about it). We want to believe that those church bells are some kind of divine rejoinder to this man's prayer. Maybe they are.

But more often Seidl juxtaposes these onscreen prayers with ironic editorial counterpoints. For example, after one woman voices her desire to call her cheating husband and pose as her own imaginary paramour, Seidl cuts to an image of a man carefully unrolling a plush red carpet before a church's pulpit, suggesting that the operations of this church amount to no more than a meticulous performance, a show of religious ceremony. This idea is similarly, though more enigmatically, represented in several scenes that act as “interludes” between subjects' prayers: performances by church choirs staged (like almost every shot in the film) in a static, frontally direct, rigidly symmetrical composition. Though the performances of these hymns and chants are beautiful and sincerely performed—on their own, we would have no reason to question their sense of religious affirmation—within the context of the film they serve as simply more performances, staged in front of grandiose altars and reredos. But the clearest example of Seidl's veiled religion-as-performance subtext arrives when one of the onscreen supplicants, who also serves as caretaker at her church, begins scrubbing a large crucifix with a rag. At this moment, the divine import of religious imagery and the more pragmatic concerns that keep religious institutions functioning smoothly could not be more distantly separated. Furthermore, the existence of the crucifix here as an object, a construct, an adornment in need of constant upkeep, reminds us of the film itself as a mediated construct. While Jesus, You Know is concerned with increasing secularization in Austria, with the emotional and ethical value of prayer, and with the very real hardships experienced by the individuals onscreen, it too ultimately cannot amount to more than an object—a thing—pieced together into a very specific arrangement by a sole overriding author. It cannot be a religious film, then; indeed, taken most purely, no film can be a religious film, since the transplantation of religious subjects into mediated objects necessitates an elimination of the theological ambiguity that must define every spiritual relic or experience.

This theological ambiguity may also be termed the “aura,” a concept that has been discussed by Walter Benjamin and Andre Bazin, among others. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin warns us of the loss of the artistic aura necessitated by the cinematic form. Since film, at both the level of production (the recording function) and of exhibition (the function of the projector), operates through an automatic mechanism rather than through human reproduction (or its context in a culturally validated gallery space), it loses the “aura” that had once been attained by painting, by sculpture, even by theatrical performance, with its actual presence of flesh-and-blood thespians. This aura that is conveyed by art (or, in Benjamin's estimation, used to be) is akin to the aura that surrounds the religious icon: an awe in the presence of a symbolically-weighted artifact—in the first case, an awe for the transcendental skill of the painter or the sculptor; in the second case, an awe for the divine and intangible force the exists beyond or is represented by the religious icon. Benjamin would likely agree with the interpretation that I have drawn from Jesus, You Know: that no film can truly be a religious film, since the one necessarily dissipates the aura, while the other relies upon it for its existence.

Bazin would disagree, however. In “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” he correlates the relatively young art form of cinema to the ancient Egyptian practice of “mummification”—not only as a literal practice, but also a figurative one, through painting and sculpture. In his theory, both cinema and ancient Egyptian art forms serve to immortalize the human body through art, to preserve one's physical presence through a visual likeness. Indeed, Bazin argues that in the fifteenth century, Western painting sought to achieve its fullest spiritual expression by imitating as closely as possible the outside world. Given this philosophy, cinema was not the loss of the aura in art but the fullest achievement of it, the manner in which artists could most closely correlate their spiritual (creative) expression with an imitative likeness of reality. So, we have another contradiction which does not help us to resolve the ambivalence in Jesus, You Know: the visual representation of religious iconography in the film could either be a Benjaminesque condemnation of the loss of the aura through reproduction, or a Bazinesque respect for the transcendental power that can be attained through reproduction. (It is my interpretation, however, that Seidl aligns himself more closely to Benjamin, undercutting the potential “aura” these icons and supplicants could have by juxtaposing them editorially.)

The question of the loss of the aura in visual reproduction is even further complicated by the fact that Jesus, You Know is shot on digital video. In a way, this stylistic choice is necessitated by the shooting conditions of the film: recording extremely long takes in the low-light levels of church interiors (often at night), shooting on celluloid would have required elaborate lighting setups and cuts between reel changes that are counterintuitive to Seidl's spare aesthetic. But shooting on video achieves an added, some would say deleterious, effect. Cinematic purists have proclaimed, since the rise of videography especially in the 1990s but as early as the late 1970s, that only on celluloid can the “aura” of cinema actually be achieved. This art form was conceived and developed as the rapid movement of still frames imbued with a physical and chemical thickness struck by the interplay of light and matter itself; the projection of light through this physically thick, tangible substance miraculously embodied the movement of reality. It was (and is), then, an art form not only striking in its closeness to the physical world but powerful in its deviations from reality, in its graphic interplay of light and shadow and motion. Digital video, celluloid purists would say, removes cinema of its painterly aura by flattening its physical thickness (no longer chemicals reacting within a strip of celluloid, we now have only pixels logging binary information) and, unless the video is transferred back onto celluloid in postproduction, by removing it of its very tangibility and physicality during projection. Of course, a digital video when recorded or projected would still exist on a disc, a mini-cassette, etc., but this physicality is obviously different from a strip of celluloid several thousand feet in length. If my sympathies with the celluloid purists are noticeable here, so be it: even supporters of the digital revolution would likely concede that viewing celluloid through a film projector is a more “transcendental,” more oneiric, experience than seeing an image recorded and projected digitally. What's striking in Jesus, You Know is that Seidl seems to use the flatness and the muted colors of digital video as an essential component of the movie's bleak, spare aesthetic. Aided by his tyrannically symmetrical compositions, Seidl and his cameramen, Wolfgang Thaler and Jerzy Palacz, achieve a world that is oppressive, unexciting, and alienating. We may want a certain aura to manifest itself for the subjects who pray onscreen, but we must admit that, even with its close-up cutaways to religious icons, this never happens throughout the course of Jesus, You Know.

Indeed, the gap between visual mediation and traditional religious morality is a recurring theme in the movie. If its opening words, quoted above, seem somewhat absurd in attributing authorship of this decidedly problematic film to Jesus, this unsettling disjunction, this disharmonious cohabitation, of religion and mediation is constantly reiterated by Seidl and by the supplicants onscreen. One woman claims that her husband “simply does not have the gift” for choosing the right television program while channel-surfing; he often turns to titillating talk shows that act as a “legitimization of sins and redemption” (she says). “The aura on those shows is just plain negative,” concludes this woman in a serendipitous coincidence. Later, a young man confesses that he watches television solely for the “pretty actresses” on the programs; these shows instill in him immoral thoughts that further make him question his purity and his faith, especially since these television-fueled fantasies inspire him to find sexual gratification in many biblical stories. The suggestion implicit within these prayers is that television—or the visual media more generally, given that the young man later claims that he envisions himself as a vengeful and absurdly virile hero from a Hollywood action movie—has replaced the church as the modern discourse for questions of morality, sexuality, and other existential crises. “Problems don't get discussed anymore,” says the woman whose husband watches those tawdry exposès, “but watched on TV.”

Perhaps one reason that visual mediation and traditional religious morality cannot coexist is the conflation of an omniscient auteur with an omniscient deity. It is a commonplace that the cinematic auteur reigns over his or her set with an all-powerful omnipotence, and in orchestrating a world that commonly dismantles the real-world “rules” of spatiotemporal linearity, it must be said that the filmmaker does act something like a microcosmic God, deciding for the audience what we will see (and hear), when, and in what manner. Seidl constantly troubles this notion throughout Jesus, You Know, most simply through the ambiguous address of the prayers themselves. To whom are they addressed? Jesus, or a divine being, most directly—this is the basic mode of address in any prayer. Yet the supplicants in Jesus, You Know also direct their prayers towards the camera; although most of them look slightly offscreen while speaking (only one churchgoer directly, and unnervingly, returns the camera's gaze), the camera is nonetheless the only “presence” in the church during all of these individuals' monologues. So the camera and a divine presence are equated, but of course the audience and the camera are equated in any act of cinematic spectatorship; this is what Christian Metz termed “primary identification” in The Imaginary Signifier, the idea that the cinematic spectator regularly identifies with the disembodied camera as a distinct and sensing entity in itself. Yet if the spectator in the case of Jesus, You Know identifies with the disembodied camera through primary identification, we also identify with the “character” of Jesus Himself, whose perspective as addressee we inhabit during the onscreen supplications. This form of identification—our alliance with the perspective of not only the disembodied camera apparatus but with a distinct character's point of view—is termed by Metz “secondary identification.” The simultaneous coexistence of a primary and secondary mode of identification in Jesus, You Know—a coexistence which is usually considered incredibly improbable in the cinema (a character as the camera)—further refutes our unshakeable faith in the presence of a distinct and omnipotent receptive deity.

The prayers, then, are directed not only to a divine presence, not only to the camera, but resultantly to the cinematic audience as well, asserting us as a divine and omniscient force. The supplicants' mode of address collapses into a spectatorial triumvirate of identification. Yet we must add one more overarching addressee to this already-complex system: Ulrich Seidl himself, who controls and observes their prayers, who (given his penchant for “staging” documentary material) perhaps had a hand in articulating the prayers themselves. It is he who, in editing these prayers together and infusing them with cutaways, truncating them, extending them, forming juxtapositional commentaries, receives and responds to their prayers. Regardless of the opening words with which I began this presentation, Jesus Christ is not the master of this film; Ulrich Seidl is.

The most definite manner in which we may notice Seidl's authorial predominance is, of course, through the rigid, unchanging, almost dogmatic aesthetic of the film. The camera does not move once during the entire documentary. Almost every composition observes the supplicants, choirs, or religious iconography from a frontally direct perspective, meticulously creating a symmetrical design that suffocates, dwarfs, and oppresses the onscreen subject. Most takes are very lengthy, with some single-shot supplications taking up over five minutes of screen time.

Why this draconic self-imposed aesthetic stricture? This kind of slow, cold, resolutely balanced style has often been equated with an inquiry into human despair or spiritual doubt in the history of the so-called “art cinema”; we may think of Carl Theodor Dreyer's austere philosophical penetration in Gertrud (1964), Stanley Kubrick's bemused observations of societies going to hell in A Clockwork Orange (1971) or Eyes Wide Shut (1999), or Carlos Reygadas' compassionate yet distanced analyses of individuals tormented by a lack of faith in Japon (2002) or Silent Light (2007). (Indeed, Reygadas is likely the most spiritually rigorous filmmaker working today.) Such aesthetics equate the magisterial control of the auteur with the omniscient bird's-eye perspective of a divine being; they embody, to be overly aphoristic, symmetry-as-spirituality.

The equation of such an aesthetic with cinematic spirituality is somewhat ironic, given Jean-Louis Baudry's assertion that it was precisely the cinema's multi-perspectivalism that inaugurated, for the first time, a transcendental spectator in the visual arts. In “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” Baudry argues that, following the Cartesian perspectivalism that dominated the paintings of the Italian Renaissance—a perspective that grants a linear viewpoint of a closed-off insular compositional space, in which the dominant objects or subjects in the painting are placed most conspicuously in the center of the canvas (or frame)—the cinema made possible a shattering of the rules of spatiotemporal cohesiveness within which traditional human vision operates. This sudden ability to jump through time and space through a mere edit—to flash back decades through a dissolve, to leap to a different continent through a jump cut—established a spectator who could see “through” the supreme omniscience of a divine being. Bazin similarly cites the cinema's “new” three-dimensional perspective as the fullest articulation of more traditional spiritual expression in the visual arts. It would seem, then, that a truly transcendental spectator is achieved through a seamless interrelation of disparate perspectives and temporal sequences.

Strange, then, that Jesus, You Know—which consists entirely of lengthy static shots, conveyed in absolute temporal linearity—equates the cinematic spectator with Jesus Himself, a direct result of equating the spectator with the camera. The film constantly and disturbingly questions whatever faith we may have had in a divine presence, yet it simultaneously posits us, the audience, as that divine presence in listening to, addressing, and responding to its subjects' onscreen prayers. Though our perspective is unrelentingly confined to a bleak, static aesthetic, we are nonetheless offered the opportunity (by the videocamera directly, and by Seidl indirectly) to unwaveringly confront individuals' religious, moral, and existential angst. If we are unsettled by our inability to mollify their unease, we are consequently reminded of the inability for any omniscient divine entity (should one exist) to directly affect the lives of human individuals, and perhaps we are similarly reminded of the essential distance between the cinematic spectator and the filmic text. Indeed, the disjunction between presence and absence that is so often conceived as the crux of the cinema's effect on its audience—the seemingly incontrovertible visual reality of the images we see, juxtaposed with our unflagging awareness that we are simply watching three-dimensional images splayed upon a two-dimensional plane—is likewise the duality that leads one to question his or her religious faith. One may be convinced of a transcendental force, or at least wholly committed to believing in the possibility of such a presence, but the complete lack of tangible and visual evidence of such a deity may lead to severe doubt and existential alienation—the predominating themes, in fact, of Jesus, You Know.

Given all of this, it may seem like Jesus, You Know is a cold, inhumane, condescending, postmodern conundrum that does not take the prayers of its subjects seriously. Such accusations are not off-base, but ultimately, despite its agnosticism, I think the documentary exhibits a compassionate empathy for its subjects' crises. I would like to close my paper with an example of this reserved, melancholy compassion. The last individual we see onscreen in an elderly woman who has voiced her fears regarding an irregular heartbeat and an overwhelming lethargy; she tells Jesus, the camera, and the audience that she feels that her time is near at hand. In the second last scene, she addresses this emotionally devastating prayer to a deceased uncle:

When I die, maybe there will be somebody with me. It helps when someone is with you. Just being by yourself, that's hard—though you have to pass away by yourself, anyway. Maybe you are already waiting for me. Maybe I really will go to some pleasant, eternal world when I die. I wonder if my father has a pleasant life now. I don't know. But I hope so and pray for him.

Our sympathies, of course, lie entirely with this individual during her prayer, and we desire more adamantly than we have throughout the entire preceding film that Seidl give us some proof that these prayers are not in vain, that some divine being is listening. We suspect, perhaps, that the film will end on a bleak note of despair and doubt, since these are the emotional wavelengths of Seidl's aesthetic and of the bewildering conflux of spectatorial modes within which we've been operating. But Seidl does offer us an allegorical alleviation of our fears, albeit an enigmatic one open to polarized interpretation. For one of the few moments in the movie, the camera journeys outside of a church, to the home of the woman we've just observed with such aggrieved concern. This leap from the film's typical religious space to the private domicile makes us aware of the staginess of this reenactment, of the fact that (characteristic of Seidl's genre-bending deconstructionism) we are no longer in the realm of the documentary. In a static long shot, this woman—Waltraute Bartel is her name—slowly approaches her open screen door from within her apartment, as we observe her distantly from outside. A dog barks and passes across the frame. Waltraute swiftly brushes aside a flowing white curtain drifting in the breeze. She steps outside, halts, and stares directly at the camera, only for a moment. And we cut, immediately, jarringly, to another performance by a church choir—tellingly, the hymn they perform is “Hallelujah.” We are asked to draw the implicit correlations between these three cinematic spaces and surmise that Waltraute has indeed passed on.

This ending—a symbolic and fictional conclusion fabricated by Seidl (indeed, Miss Bartel is, in reality, still quite alive)—is undoubtedly problematic. Most troublesome to me is Seidl's sudden intrusion as a distinct authorial agent, the belated introduction of an entirely new cinematic plane of fiction, allegory, and ambiguous visual symbolism (although, again, such blurring of boundaries is typical of Seidl). And of course we may draw from this conclusion a brutally hopeless interpretation: that Waltraute's prayers have not been answered, that her death was sudden and solitary. Yet the tranquility of this scene, its brevity and its swiftness, and Waltraute's sudden perspectival agency in confronting the camera's gaze (which she had not done in her previous monologues)—not to mention the decision to end the film with a performance of “Hallelujah”—suggests to me that her prayers have been answered (either by Jesus or by Seidl—in any case, by some omniscient force). I believe, perhaps because I so firmly want to believe, that an attentive deity has indeed allowed her a swift and painless passing into a new world. The uncertainty that lingers over this interpretation echoes the uncertainty we feel over Jesus, You Know as a whole—an agnosticism over the presence of a divine force, over the mode of spectatorial identification we inhabit, over the effects achieved by Seidl's rigid, symmetrical, yet still somehow transcendental aesthetic. The movie confronts, embraces, and maintains that overwhelming doubt. That may have been its benevolent mission all along.

Mother. Somewhere.

Quick thoughts about two 2010 releases that I was eagerly anticipating (although I missed the first one when it was initially released in theaters, way back in March):

The delirious South Korean crime thriller/comedy/psychodrama Mother, directed by Bong Joon-ho (The Host, Memories of Murder), is striking in its genre-bending unpredictability, but unfortunately it's less successful at evoking audience sympathy for its two main characters. The movie is about the murder of a young girl in a seemingly tranquil small town (you know, the kind of place where murder is unimaginable yet, when it happens, is latched on to with scandal-hungry sordidness). The main suspect is a mentally-challenged twenty-something man who was last seen drunkenly pursuing the soon-to-be-victim; a golf ball was even found next to her corpse with his name written upon it. Following his imprisonment and the mishandling of the case by a detective and a defense attorney (the first man is sincere and kindly, but has no choice but to close the case; the lawyer is surreally self-indulgent and sleazy, advising his clients in the Lynchian VIP-room of a restaurant), the man's eerily dedicated mother decides to pursue her own investigation. Convinced of her son's innocence, she uncovers what appears to be a torrid plot revolving around the victim's sexual promiscuity and incriminating photos on a missing cell phone.

Repeatedly, we are reminded that mother and son literally slept together—though he's an adult, they continue to share a twin-sized mattress on the floor of their home. They may figuratively sleep together as well: incest is suggested, but never clearly exposited. Broadly, the movie is about the horrific lengths that a mother will go to to protect her son, ultimately (perhaps) deluding and damning herself in the process. Thus, without giving anything away, the movie's most shocking scene: denying the obvious, committing unspeakable acts in order to protect a lie.

Although I haven't seen Bong's critically-acclaimed Memories of Murder, I found his monster movie The Host (2007) to be one of the cleverest takeoffs on Hollywood cliché over the last decade. In a year that also included 28 Weeks Later and Hot Fuzz, The Host may have been the best of all three at smuggling an embittered mockery of American brashness and bombast into the trappings of a rote genre picture. (In The Host, the American military steps in to help destroy the river monster that they created in the first place, by dumping some toxic chemicals into Seoul's waterways; predictably, in trying to eradicate the beast, the US Army ends up destroying the city and killing much of the civilian populace in the process.) The Host never really asks us to take its premise all that seriously, which is maybe why I find its political outrage so subversive and amusing.

But we really should take Mother seriously: the movie features characters who are meant to resemble real people, and the lengths that they go to to protect themselves and one another instill irrevocable psychological damage. At times, the movie is successful at evoking the fraught relationship between mother and son, and at making us fully experience the trauma undergone by the titular character—the reappearance of a small case for acupuncture needles towards the end of the film, for example, speaks volumes about what has been lost by and discovered about both mother and son. But at other times, Bong's deftness at manipulating genre and creating gorgeous stylistic tricks (the flashback to one character's perception of the murder is astoundingly, nightmarishly beautiful) obscure what is at stake emotionally. The images of dancing which open and close the film are meant to convey the main character's desperate attempt to free her soul of the violent burdens with which it is now laden, but they come off as little more than clever bookends. Also, some of the small-town characters embroiled in the central web of sex and lies receive a level of absurd mockery that's a little too close to the Coen Brothers. But these are slight detractors from a unique, beautiful, and striking film that abounds in intriguing manipulations of style, genre, narrative, and theme.



Meanwhile, Sofia Coppola's recently-released Somewhere, which won the Golden Lion at last year's Venice Film Festival, fares a little less well. I absolutely consider myself a fan of the director's: I was put off a bit by Lost in Translation's shades of condescension and insularity, but both The Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette are sublime, painful immersions in longing and uncertainty. Somewhere is as gorgeous as any of her films to date (it's filmed by Harris Savides, one of the best cinematographers working today), but its expressions of aimlessness and emptiness often reflect negatively upon the movie itself. The story of a successful (but, one senses, quickly-fading) movie star who involuntarily becomes reacquainted with his young daughter, Somewhere follows a very distinct narrative pattern: a first act of almost-silent, dreary wandering; a sweet middle portion observing the growing intimacy between father and daughter; and a surprisingly overt final portion in which the main character realizes his hollowness and tries to rediscover himself.

Somewhere is worth watching for the naturalistic performances of Stephen Dorff (perfectly cast) and Elle Fanning, in particular their interaction with each other. With seeming effortlessness, they portray a precise relationship: there is fondness, closeness, to begin with, but as the movie progresses the familial bond becomes stronger, more unbreakable, in shaded ways. Coppola has often excelled at conveying these little moments between human beings, hinting at their intimacy but hesitant to spell it out for us, apparently respecting her characters too much to intrude upon their most private moments. It's especially impressive here, maybe because, for almost the entire movie, we are immersed in the private sphere that only these two characters share with each other.

But the insularity and condescension that I sensed in Lost in Translation resurface here (to an extent), and for the first time I think the label of “aimless” is a detractor for a Sofia Coppola movie. I have to give away a slight spoiler here: essentially, the last third of the movie consists of this world-famous movie star realizing that the glitz and glamour of Hollywood are suffocating a shell of a man who doesn't know himself. In order to find himself again, he simply begins driving, as far away as possible, and the movie ends hopefully (but ambiguously) with him parking at the side of the road, the cornfields of some Midwestern state in the distance, and simply walking. The idea, of course, is that this despondent movie star finds himself by abandoning his celebrity and becoming, again, one of the “common folk.” Beyond how cliched and naïve this idea is, it also seems downright pandering—that one can find solace in the folksy rolling plains of flyover country, where people are good and down-to-earth and have their shit together. This is especially weird since, for some of the film, Coppola's point is that these idolized movie stars experience the mundaneness and glum routine and slight identity crises that we all go through—that we're not so different after all. This itself is an obvious point, but well-conveyed by the half-seedy, half-privileged hotel in which the main character and other Hollywood celebs reside. (A cameo by Benicio del Toro would seem unbearably pretentious if it didn't take place in an elevator that was covered in a layer of its own fluorescent filth.) That Somewhere tries to convey this we-are-all-the-same idea, then negates it by marking the main character's epiphany by abandoning one lifestyle and fleeing for another, betrays the movie's (and maybe Coppola's) ideological confusion. All of her movies so far are about privileged people, and one shouldn't fault her for making movies about her own upbringing and the lifestyle she has experienced; but only Lost in Translation and Somewhere, in my opinion, foolishly suggest an innate rift between a life of privilege and the lives of the “common folk.”

In addition to this questionable attitude towards celebrity and normalcy, Somewhere is often adrift in its own uncertainty and aimlessness, to a detriment. Again, all of Coppola's movies are about this aimlessness to an extent, but before Somewhere they had still seemed centered around a fairly consistent central theme or unifying idea (sexual longing and repression, geographical displacement, conjunctions between disparate historical eras, and so on). In Somewhere, we know so little about the relationship between father and daughter as it had existed before the movie started that sometimes we simply have to take the movie's word that they need an emotional reconciliation. Briefly, during a (temporary?) farewell late in the movie, the main character of Johnny Marco apologizes to his daughter for not having been around during her childhood; without this line of dialogue, we would have had no inkling of the role that he had played earlier in her life. This evasive approach is, of course, intentional, but Coppola could have included some snippets of dialogue, some telling actions, some tiny behaviors and allusions which could have alluded to Johnny's earlier absence—especially since Coppola has often conveyed these slight, suggestive moments so perfectly.

This is true, too, of Johnny's emotional breakdown late in the film, which culminates in a drunken, tearful telephone call to his ex-wife (and his daughter's mother). During this call, he claims that he is not even a person—that he's nothing. Of course we infer that these feelings of insignificance stem from his awareness of his failure as a father, but the extent of this emotional collapse had been dismissed throughout almost the entire movie up to this point. At worst, we conclude that it's a sudden third-act gimmick in order to make possible the movie's ambiguous ending; at best, we assume that Coppola's intended approach of subtlety, evasion, suggestion, and implicitness has backfired, to the point where we suddenly realize we don't know the main character at all. (Maybe that's the point, but it doesn't work for such a focused character study.) I love movies that coast along on suggestion and allusion, but they must still offer something (in character, in theme, in style) to latch on to. Somewhere offers this to a certain extent, but maybe, unfortunately, less successfully than The Virgin Suicides or Marie Antoinette.

Three New Films (And a Tragedy)

Over the last week or so, the fact that I suddenly had a small amount of disposable income to my name, as well as a few days off, meant that I got to catch up on three recent theatrical releases which are all top contenders on “best film of the year” lists. None of them, in my opinion, come close to actually being the best film of the year. I know I have a hefty amount of catching-up to do in terms of seeing the year's most critically-heralded films (I haven't yet seen White Material, Carlos, Dogtooth, or Mother, all of which I imagine could skyrocket to the top of my list), and a number of the prospective bests have yet to receive a wide or limited release, at least in Minneapolis (Blue Valentine, The Illusionist, and Another Year among them). But a number of titans on critics' best-of lists in 2010 have left me uniformly lukewarm (or worse). The Social Network is solid and intelligent, but I wonder if it's telling us anything that any astute individual with a Facebook page didn't already know. Inception raises the bar pretty high for what summer entertainment can offer, but beyond its kinetic style and high-concept gimmickry, there's nothing there, and the movie's emotional center is almost completely hollow (save for a few scenes between Leonardio DiCaprio's and Marion Cotillard's characters). And The Kids Are All Right is the worst of the lot, an astonishingly dull melodrama of entitlement that offers absolutely nothing of visual or cinematic interest to alleviate the characters' fatuous, self-involved crises.

All of this is to say that, as it currently stands, my tentative “best of” list would be seriously unimpressive. Winter's Bone stands head-and-shoulders above the rest, an immersive and intense study of a young woman's violent thrust into an insular world that never approaches condescension or slum glamour. A Prophet and The Ghost Writer would follow—two movies that could also be considered 2009 releases, depending on the specific date of release you're using. And the fourth, Shutter Island, would already be a movie that I've defended vociferously but that I still never expected would stand so high on a best-of-the-year-list—it's about as exciting and playful as you can make a rote genre picture, but it is still a rote genre picture. A few notches down from there would be The Human Centipede: First Sequence, and although I do have some kind of masochistic respect for this Euro-horror shock movie, I'd still feel uncomfortable commending it so enthusiastically.

All of this is not to say that 2010 has been a weak year for movies: as always seems to happen, the best movies of the year—the most exciting and original, the ones that come in underneath the radar and that really stand out during awards season—usually seem to pop up after the calendar year has already ended. What this does mean is that the most popular candidates you've seen on best-of lists don't actually, really, seem to offer that much ingenuity, generally speaking. Does this hold true, too, for three recent heralded movies—Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan, David O. Russell's The Fighter, and Danny Boyle's 127 Hours?

I was most disappointed by Black Swan, to my own admitted surprise—it was probably also the movie I was looking forward to most eagerly this winter. There are definitely things to recommend in the movie, most notably Natalie Portman's performance, which takes the plot's cliched character typologies and imbues them with real emotion, pathos, and pain. And a few of Aronofsky's jump cuts are effective shockers, and there's a hallucinogenic scene in which one character repeatedly stabs herself in the face that lives up to the movie's nightmarish premise. But for the most part, that premise is wholly unfulfilled. Black Swan is supposed to be a totally insane hallucination rising out of the main character's psychosexual desires, self-destructive ambition, and severe mental instability. So why does the whole thing seem so one-note, so predictable? It's not some stubborn sense of critical arrogance that makes me say I knew what was going to happen in practically every scene of the movie (or, not just that, anyway). The movie's pseudo-shocking sequences of bodily mutilation, its metaphorical doubling of Swan Lake's plot with Black Swan's own (Portman is the white swan! Kunis is the black swan, get it?!), the numerous scenes overloaded with reflections off of glass and mirrors behaving in unusual ways—the heavy-handedness of these stunts are worse than merely unsurprising, they seem to give the impression that Aronofsky has no faith in his audience to pick up on his themes, and therefore bludgeons us with them, without creativity or sophistication. Black Swan is able to achieve an air of the epic and the macabre, but even during its grandiose finale, the trajectory seems more schematic and self-congratulatory than inspired. The entire thing is spelled out for you in one line of dialogue, during which the ballet company's smarmy director, Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel), summarizes the storyline of Swan Lake; that synopsis, transplanted into the world of Black Swan, is about all the movie has going on conceptually.

Over the last several weeks, bloggers and Internet critics have been writing about what may be Aronofsky's most celebrated movie, Requiem for a Dream, in a series of 102 posts commemorating the movie's tenth anniversary. Not all of the posts have been positive, though. John Lingan, for example, on his blog Busy Being Born, writes about how shaken and awestruck he was when he first saw the movie at 15 years old. Now, seeing the movie again ten years later, Lingan writes that he's “embarrassed because Requiem for a Dream is such an overwrought, self-satisfied, and juvenile film, and it appealed to me precisely because I shared all those qualities when I saw it... Requiem for a Dream, with its easy cynicism...and unremitting bleakness, is just the thing to make a person feel like they've lived a little and hardened in the process, particularly if that person hasn't really lived at all.” These are pretty harsh words—there are good things about Requiem for a Dream, and I don't think it's only identified with by bored suburbanite teenagers who want to feel badass—but in a way I think the general idea also applies to Black Swan. The movie, we're supposed to feel, is demented and phantasmagoric and nightmarishly lustful; if Black Swan is all of these things, it is so only in the most juvenile, simplistic, and self-satisfied ways. And if it's trying to be a horror movie (you know, one of those high-pedigree award-garnering horror movies), Black Swan absolutely needs to abandon the fathomable and comprehensible for at least some of its running time—but it never does, in an attempt to remain palatable to the crowd that wants to tiptoe towards the edge of their comfort zone but never really step past it.

Black Swan, at first glance, is a non-generic head trip that actually abides by the narrative and thematic patterns that we're used to; David O. Russell's The Fighter, on the other hand, is at first glance a totally generic underdog boxing story, but much of it is distinguished by aesthetic ingenuity and tricks of audience address that make the movie anything but stale. This is remarkable, considering how much the movie has in it that really should seem dreadfully cliché: it's the underdog story of Micky Ward, a boxer born and raised in Lowell, Massachusetts, who has to contend not only with a mostly-indifferent sports media but also with a larger-than-life mother and brother who care more about remaining in the spotlight than about young Micky's success. His brother Dickie was an aspiring boxer at one point in his life, whose main claim to fame was knocking down Sugar Ray Leonard in 1978 (many boxing fans say Leonard merely slipped). Now, Dickie is a bug-eyed crack addict living vicariously through his younger brother—he's the subject of an HBO documentary (a thought-provoking film-within-the-film) about the dangers of drug addiction. Micky's mother, meanwhile, is an overbearing matriarch still grasping at Dickie's one-time success, apparently unaware that her younger son has a greater chance at attaining the welterweight title.

It's telling that Mark Wahlberg is forced to underplay in this movie; Christian Bale and Melissa Leo, as Dickie and his mother, give such grandiose, showboating performances that no one else is really given the chance for speechy, Oscar-baiting thespian moments. These are the kinds of performances I usually detest: the kind that equate tears and the wordiness of speeches and the sordidness of the character with immersive personification. Here, though, Leo and Bale really do inhabit these characters, and the actorly moments remain integrated to what is going on in the characters' heads and lives. For example, during the scene in which Dickie, now imprisoned for a plethora of charges, bombastically hosts a showing of the HBO documentary about his crack addiction in the prison cafeteria, Bale's wildly hyperbolic performance gives way to shame and rueful anger, and we realize that the overacting he offers throughout much of the film parallels Dickie Ward's efforts to convince himself and the world that he is still relevant. Later, when Leo's character intervenes between Micky and Dickie as they fight (verbally and physically) on the day of Dickie's release, Leo's embodiment of the crass Boston-matriarch stereotype softens into a portrayal of a mother torn between two sons—one cyclonic and narcissistic, who uses his personal troubles as an avenue for public performance; one timid and sensitive, who channels his feelings of aggression, inferiority, and neglect into his performance in the ring. There are better and quieter performances than both Bale's and Leo's this year, even though the two of them (or at least one) will almost certainly win an Oscar, but at least they are indeed portrayals rather than opulent shams.

Russell, the director of I Heart Huckabees and Three Kings, here tones down most of his auteurist touches, taking a backseat to the gigantic performances and the by-the-numbers script by Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy, and Eric Johnson. But Russell still visualizes the story intelligently, stylishly, and excitingly. The oft-mobile camera is as athletic as the fighters onscreen, and the seemingly effortless blend of production design, set design, costuming, and cinematography evokes a naturalistically seedy, rundown setting. Russell uses the filming of the HBO documentary within the film as a comment on his own film's fictionalization of reality, and even as a self-criticism of his crew's intrusion into and evocation of Lowell, Massachusetts. And a brutal scene of Dickie's delusional withdrawal in prison superimposes multimedia imagery of Dickie's win against Sugar Ray Leonard as well as him sparring with younger Micky in their front yard as a way of emphasizing how our conceptions of ourselves are essentially montages of filmed scenes (and how self-visualization is a sort of addiction in itself).

Aside from these more attention-grabbing moments, Russell is surprisingly skillful at getting the most out of this cliched underdog story. So much of this should reek with mustiness, especially Amy Adams's character (a bartender—or “MTV girl,” as Micky's sisters call her—perceived as haughty because she went to college for a couple years) and the climactic boxing match in which Micky puts all of his aggression towards his brother into the ring, fights for Lowell, and goes several unimpressive rounds before knocking out his opponent for the title. (The first two of these ideas are explicitly voiced by Dickie in the film—you know, just in case we didn't get it.) But amazingly, Adams's character remains sweet and effective, and that final match is incredibly exciting (the audience I saw it with responded viscerally). It's unfortunate that The Fighter still abides by cliché so much of the time, but the fact that it manages its cliches so well and is still so invigorating is some kind of compliment for the filmmaking prowess going on here.

In between Black Swan's hollowness and The Fighter's sense of excitement lies Danny Boyle's 127 Hours, a film that's frustrating because half of it is so intense and sophisticated, and the other half is totally self-defeating and counterintuitive. First, the good things: James Franco's performance, first of all, is just the right mixture of shallow self-absorption and ingratiating cavalierness. It's essential to the movie that we identify with the main character, Aron Ralston's, desire to abandon modern society and venture into the canyons near Moab, Utah, but we also need to realize that his deluded self-satisfaction and callousness are what lead him into his dire situation in the first place. (For those who don't know the plot: that situation entails Ralston being pinned between a massive boulder and a canyon wall for more than four days, eventually extricating himself only by cutting off his right arm with a pair of mountaineering pliers.) Boyle has often sought to speak to and for the younger generation (Trainspotting, The Beach), and it's obvious that he intends 127 Hours to be the broad story of an impetuous youthful generation whose steely self-reliance may ultimately leave it stranded, emotionally as well as physically. Franco perfectly embodies that generation here; he's a charming asshole throughout most of the film, even when he's immobilized.

More problematic is Boyle's typically relentless style. The kinetic whiplash aesthetic that we've grown accustomed to through Slumdog Millionaire, Millions, The Beach, and so on is still present in 127 Hours, which may seem ironic given that the movie is largely about stasis, claustrophobia, abandonment, and helpless desperation. Half of the time, this aesthetic is appropriate: the movie nails the euphoric rush of escaping society and immersing oneself in pure nature, for example. Some of its split-second intercuts of the inner workings of digital camcorders, too, make clear the importance that self-mediation and digital technology hold in the lives of young people (and subtly criticize the main character by revealing that, even when he abandons modern society, he never really abandons modern society). In addition, the increasingly surreal overlays of Ralston's memories, premonitions, and hallucinations sometimes seem to burrow in to the very root of this character—in particular, flashbacks to a traumatic breakup and Ralston's apparent indifferent to a girl who loves him work surprisingly well.

But the movie often seems to be working against its central concept. The idea is right there in the title: the movie is supposed to be about the 127 agonizing, grueling, desperate hours Ralston spent anticipating his own death. We should be stranded in that canyon with him; we should feel the cruel march of time with him, and we should be equally hopeless about his chances to survive (even if we know the outcome of this story, Boyle could have at least temporarily persuaded us through style and plotting that Ralston may not survive this experience after all). The main flaw of the movie is ironic: it's simply too entertaining. The movie is only an hour and a half, and it feels like it: it flies by in a kinetic rush, and those 127 hours spent trapped in the canyon feel like little more than a really extreme sport.

The scene in which Ralston amputates his own arm is actually quite successful: Boyle doesn't spare us the grisly, sinew-snapping brutality of the self-mutilation. We are made quite aware of the horrific extremes that Ralston had to go to to save himself, which is only fair. The rest of the movie, though, lets us off easy, as Boyle's naturally invigorating style holds our hand through what should be a grueling experience. An example is the inclusion of Scooby-Doo in the film, thrown in because two girls that Ralston happens to meet in the canyons invite him to a party the following night with a huge inflatable Scooby-Doo: the first time the animated character appears in 127 Hours, it makes sense as a nagging vision of life's fleeting pleasures that are now unavailable to Ralston; the second time Scooby-Doo appears, it turns a horrific, demented sequence into a jokey prank, deflating the scene of the very real idea that Ralston is now facing his own mortality.

There's another huge, overarching problem in 127 Hours: it seems like the movie is supposed to be about how man's arrogant sense of his own superiority over nature can ruthlessly backfire on him. I haven't read the book on which the movie is based—Between a Rock and a Hard Place, written by Ralston himself—but it seems to entail a recognition that his foolhardy tackling of the extremes of nature, his cocky jaunt through a landscape that remains treacherous and indifferent to humanity, could have very easily killed him. The movie acknowledges this at times, too; it beautifully evokes the 15 minutes of sunlight that Ralston is granted each morning, as he stretches his left leg out into the light that cuts through the jagged canyon, his foot and shin basking in the warmth for a mockingly short period of time. It's as though nature is laughing at him for his arrogance: offering him a scant fraction of the light and warmth he could have experienced so easily, had he not thrust himself into this situation. It seems like the frenetic montages that open and close the movie, with modern businessmen and stockbrokers hustling down metropolitan streets in contrast to the solitude that Ralston will soon experience, is meant as a comment on our naïve assumption that humans can master everything that they come in contact with. (These montages are not at all infused into the fabric of the film, though, so they may just be two examples of Boyle's hollow restlessness.)

This criticism of man “dominating” nature is part of what the movie is about; but how does the film end? Of course Ralston survives, amid a victorious musical score (by A.R. Rahman) and swift editing (by Jon Harris) that turns Ralston into a triumphant victim. (That he may be, but by making the climax in this way, the film totally defuses any criticism it may have posed against its main character or against modern people in general.) Furthermore, after this climax, onscreen titles tell us that Ralston continues to climb mountains and explore canyons and now tells all of his loved ones where he is off to, which is a legitimate, true-to-life, and inspiring ending; but by emphasizing the inspirational aspects (the real-life Ralston also appears at the end with his wife and daughter) and eliminating the self-criticizing aspects, the movie leaves us with the idea that human beings really can conquer anything they confront, including nature, despite the billions of years that is has on us. This is totally antithetical to what the movie is at least partially about. 127 Hours tries to tell us that, by stubbornly believing we can trump any harsh landscape around us and, in fact, proving it, humans are practically invincible.

These problems aside, 127 Hours is still intense, exciting (to a fault), and complex. It is certainly better than Boyle's previous film, Slumdog Millionaire, although I'm one of the few people who thinks that most movies made over the last two years are better than Slumdog Millionaire.

Neither Black Swan, The Fighter, nor 127 Hours are great; I would be disappointed to see any of them on my top ten list at the end of the year. Here's hoping that the upcoming end-of-the-year releases will indeed be some of the best of the year, and that some of the highlights that I've missed will trump most of these award-garnering critics'-best-of candidates in terms of creativity, sophistication, complexity, and beauty.



A final note: you may already know about the recent court decision in Tehran that has imprisoned one of international cinema's foremost modern directors. Jafar Panahi—the director of The Circle, Crimson Gold, and Offside, three of the most beautiful, humane, and passionate films made anywhere over the last decade—has been jailed (along with many other Iranian filmmakers, writers, and artists who have commented upon the current state of affairs in their home country) for purported sentiments against the state. (This, despite the fact that Panahi's newest project is only 30 percent shot, and has not yet been edited.) Panahi has been sentenced to six years of imprisonment, accompanied by a ban of twenty years from writing and making films, giving interviews for the press, leaving Iran, or communicating with foreign cultural organizations. For any artist, such a harsh ruling meant to suppress one's personal creative voice would be a travesty; it is especially tragic in the case of Panahi, for it will deprive us of one of modern movies' most sincere and powerful voices.

If you'd like to sign a petition calling for the release of Panahi, here is a link to an online petition that has just been posted by almost twenty international cultural organizations in tandem: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/solidarite-jafar-panahi/. Watching Offside again certainly isn't a poor form of tribute either.

A Face in the Dark

Below is the first chapter of some new fiction I'm working on. It may end up being a long short story or a short novel or something in between—not quite sure yet. Subsequent chapter(s) will be posted before too long.


Chapter one 'an uptown linoleum box'

In the waiting room I stood, stretching my legs after ninety minutes of crooking them up underneath me at jagged angles. The tiled floor was a paisley green, and it clacked with an unsettling echo any time someone's shoe flitted across it. It smelled like a hospital. Like chemicals and like sterilized death. My nostrils puckered from the stench. You could hear oppressive buzzes and hums from every direction: the fatigued breathing of an overworked air conditioner; the muffled broadcasting of a news program on the television suspended, hovering, from the corner of the ceiling, that no one was watching; the steady cyclical movement of wheels of carts being guided through the hallways; the flickerings of fluorescent lights casting a strobe-light illumination onto ailing bodies; distant conversations, hushed worries, solemn and dire diagnoses. Waiting rooms facilitate exactly that: waiting, worrying, mindless prolongation. No respite. Orange plastic folding chairs. The thick air of intense sadness. It's hard to move through it. It feels like a muddy haze.

I paced back and forth, slowly but anxiously. That made it worse. I glanced at the three other people waiting there, careful to avoid their glance. I did not want to connect with them, didn't want to convey a look of pity, a look that said I'm here for you, I know what you're going through. That sympathy would not have alleviated my distress. It would have amplified it, solidified it. If I had seen the same look of pain in their eyes, I would have become aware that my plight was not a cruel affliction meant for me alone, but was a simple and merciless fact of humanity. That pain, that cruelty—I wanted to feel like it was directed at me for some unknown and overwhelming wrong that I had done. To know that it was, in reality, directed at many people at many times as a simple derivation of their being on this earth—that would have been too much to handle. Too cold, too harsh. So I did not look at them with any sort of interest or compassion, I only knew they were there. They did the same thing for me—benevolent antipathy.

It was night, late. Almost midnight. The waiting room was on the fourth floor of the hospital, and the dim yellow glow of streetlights was filtering through the smudgy windows. The hospital was located in a decent part of town, in the business district, protruding from a thicket of towering skyscrapers that housed banking firms, advertising agencies, real estate companies, conglomerates and oligopolies. Near the corner of 92nd and Lexington, far from where we lived. The walk across town had been torturous, each step thudded in my brain, punctuating uncertainty and dread. But the hospital was across the street from where my wife worked, at a consulting firm that served as a last resort for floundering businesses not yet willing to declare bankruptcy. She—Lena—my wife—would leaf through ledgers and profit reports and performance charts, endless sheaths of business minutiae provided by executives and accountants with worry painted on their faces. She would review the information and provide advice for the slow and painful return to financial stability. Sometimes there was no hope of recovery. Ruin was inevitable for some; some of them had no hope of pulling themselves out of debt and failure, and my wife would have the unpleasant obligation of telling anxious businessmen that, yes, perhaps it would be better to declare bankruptcy after all. That there are second chances. Failure is not permanent. She worked late that night. Her eyes were strained and her fingers numb from clutching writing instruments all night. She knew I was at home, probably asleep on the couch already, and that cold, sticky leftover Chinese food was waiting for her in the fridge. She was in the hospital before the end of the night.

The windows in the fourth floor waiting room of the hospital did not look onto a glittering nighttime view of the city, shimmering in the dark. I, we, were surrounded by the nocturnal vibrancy of the city, but out of the windows we could see no headlights swooping down busy streets, no grid-like patterns of fluorescent lights still on in the offices of diligent workers high above, no neon signs or streetlights reflected on black pavement. Instead our view was of a brick wall across a narrow alleyway. Shabby and sickly and depressing, just like the rest of the place. I surmised that the layout of the hospital must have been planned meticulously so that the waiting room would offer us this disheartening view. So I continued to pace and kept my glance down towards my feet, which were now moving of their own accord.

I had, in fact, been asleep on the couch when I got the call. Above the low muttering of the forgettable cop show that I had disinterestedly left on the television, the shrill scream of the phone snapped me awake. I answered groggily, expecting it to be Lena, telling me not to wait up, that it would be another late night. Even when I processed the frenetic sounds of the emergency room filtering over the phone, I still didn't shift into panic mode—half-asleep, I listened but didn't really hear. They said my name, inquiringly, the soft voice of a woman who sounded businesslike but compassionate. “Michael Davenport?” I grunted yes. “We're sorry to say your wife's had an accident.” Half a second later I shook my head vigorously as the words seeped in. All other noise dropped out, my brain hit some selective mute button. I said nothing, waited for her, my bearer of bad news, to continue. She didn't, and I felt obligated to respond. “Yes?,” I said. “She's at Mercer Hospital. Please come right away.” Her words were hurried, and I wondered, much later, how many times she had had to say the same words to people like me that night, and on similar nights beforehand. And innumerable nights afterward. The gravity of what she was saying was starting to take effect on me. Her words came in through the ear, hovered somewhere in my brain for a moment, then plummeted sickeningly to the deepest recesses of my gut as though I swallowed them with a gulp. And there they stayed, expanding, nauseating.

“What happened?,” I said finally, dreading the answer.

“A car accident. Hit and run. I'm very sorry, Mr. Davenport.”

I exhaled somberly, a mix between a sigh and a grunt. I stared off into space but saw nothing. Things seemed at once unreal and viciously hyperreal; I knew I was not dreaming, but everything at once took on an alien and awful demeanor. The quiet sounds of the cop show emanated from the television, but they may as well have been a mysterious transmission from another world, buried in static and emitting a diabolical message. I moved at once, my legs stiffened and I rose from the couch. I could feel my body move but I felt as though I was not controlling it—as though I was on the end of a puppeteer's strings. I mechanically threw on some shoes and a hooded sweatshirt, ratty and unwashed, that I had thrown on our bedroom floor earlier that day. I left.

The night air was cold and bitter, but I welcomed it as soon as I stepped outside. It dulled my sensations. It allowed my terrible dread and horror to commingle with more immediate, physical thoughts—walking briskly, exhaling condensation, shivering with my hands in my pockets. I wondered for a second if I should take the subway to 92nd and Lexington, since the walk would take at least twenty minutes, probably thirty. But the thought of confining myself to that steel coffin of a subway car, with nothing to do but imagine my wife's agony, was too much for me to bear. Besides, in my present state of mind I felt that I could superhumanly outpace a subway car, that my sheer desperation would impel me to cross the city in half the time I normally would. So I picked up the pace and walked uptown. I got to the hospital in a little over twenty minutes. I walked up to the reception desk. The attendant there had the phone crooked between her cheek and her shoulder, and was flipping through a binder briskly. I rudely ignored her current task and said—declaratively, not inquisitively—“Lena Davenport.” She raised her eyes towards me, bore a 'not now' stare directly into my eyes for a half second, then returned her glance to the papers before her. I dug my fingernails into my palms in my pockets. From behind her, another attendant approached the counter and leaned his head towards me. “Who are you looking for?,” he asked. I answered. He said she was still in the emergency room, they were doing all they could, I would have to wait, they would let me know. He told me that she was on the fourth floor; I could take the elevator up, exit and take a right, the waiting room was at the end of the hallway. His eyes were empathetic, but his voice was cold.

Last night was a rare thing: a night when Lena got home before me. At half past five her final consultation was finished—she had finished giving hope to a group of executives whose passions had disintegrated despite all of their diligence. She had reviewed the ledgers and was sincere in her reassurances: with some shrewd financial maneuverings and some corporate backpedaling, there was hope for Consolidated Metropolitan Insurance after all. Consolidated Metropolitan had ascended to a problematic middle plateau in the insurance industry. What had begun as an operation ran out of an escrowed three-story Colonial-style house just north of the city, attended to by six agents who predicated themselves on a neighborly sense of trust and decency, had meteorically grown to become one of the most profitable insurance companies in the northeastern United States. It had become so profitable, in fact, that increasingly, foreign parties who dealt a considerable hand in the New York Stock Exchange had approached CMI with dubious intimations of partnerships that might behoove the company financially—to be more precise, well-dressed and well-mannered stockbrokers, idly discussing the ease with which stock bids may be disguised (or, perhaps, smothered) within the complex logistics of insurance accounting. The six agents who had built Consolidated Metropolitan into a mid-level empire were also wise; they knew the internecine nature of modern finance well, and in addition were astute judges of character (an apt quality for insurers). They knew, then, that the powerful gentlemen from the Morrow & Hemmings Company who ushered them into the city's most prestigious penthouse bars, nonchalantly sliding crystal glasses of expensive aged brandy across red oak tables, were proposing financial felonies that could not only place CMI's investors and clients in destitution (of more than a merely monetary sort), but could also misrepresent the company's financial holdings so irreparably that there could eventually be, in place of actual money, only a gaping scribbled-upon ledger page of distorted numbers and meaningless dollar signs. So CMI initially resisted the advances of Morrow & Hemmings, and even operated under the stubborn and outdated assumption that its obligations were to the people who had purchased policies under them. But inevitably the wisdom of CMI's board members commingled with a clear-eyed and realistic truth: the company was failing, primarily because, unlike the majority of equally powerful insurance companies who dominated the Eastern metropolises, CMI could not rely upon its allegiances with federal banking institutions and top-level financiers to bolster its earnings through misappropriation and “creative” investments. And as often happens, wisdom ultimately leans in favor of self-preservation; the end—survival—is shrewdly ascertained to justify the means; and the arrival of a clever financial panacea, deus ex machina like, is grasped in favor of impending ruin. But CMI's temporary solution to its dire financial straits caught up with itself less than a year later. The snake had coiled around itself and was chomping feverishly at its own tail. The company's year-end reports listed premium revenues from the previous three quarters which, any perspicacious accountant could tell you, were actually loans extended by CMI's pecuniary bedfellows—loans that now needed repayment. Furthermore, stockbroking advice proffered by Morrow & Hemmings as doubtlessly profitable (for some at Morrow & Hemmings claimed to have an uncanny prescience in regard to certain economic developments) turned out to be remarkably foolhardy, deepening the hole that Consolidated Metropolitan Insurance had flung itself into. The symbiotic relationship between CMI and Morrow & Hemmings had morphed into a parasitic one; the latter made a small killing on investment fees. Lena Davenport of Perpetua Financial Consulting waited upon the board members of CMI patiently and with open ears. She heard their story of victimization (and slight, intermittent, yet shameful self-reproach) sympathetically, and her sympathy was sincere. This same story had been told, with hardly any variation, throughout the year by several other similarly exploited corporations—its pattern of meteoric success, tragic overconfidence, and weary resignation had taken on the vagaries of cliche—but every time it was told to Lena by the people who had found themselves immersed in it, it assumed a new sense of tragedy, and struck her with a whole new wave of ghastly horror. Their meeting was supposed to have ended at 4:30. It was extended an hour. The level of desperate but impassioned diligence among them all steamrolled until it was too intense to be interrupted.

It was winter, so the sky was a dark gray by the time Lena stepped outside—the dourest moments before dusk. She got coffee from the Starbucks next door—her habit that I loved, she never drank coffee in the morning, only at night, never decaf. She was energized by the meeting she had just had, and the burgeoning optimism of the six board members was infectious. She called me, expecting me to be home, hoping to tell me that we were going out for dinner tonight, for once we would have time for a long, lazy night, glasses of wine drunk as slowly as we wanted, a long drunken walk afterwards, not sleeping til two in the morning, clothes left on the floor. But I wasn't home. It had been a long day for me, too. There had recently been a rash of burglaries on the Upper East Side. The targets were remarkable only in their mundaneness: no jewelry stores or bank vaults, mostly department stores and pawn shops and convenience stores. But this glut of seemingly spontaneous robberies appeared to be the work of the same individual, judging from the fact that, in each instance, the poor soul stuck behind the cash register was found dead, felled by a point-blank gunshot to the head. Same weapon, judging from the bullets' striations. The murders struck me more deeply than I had anticipated they would, especially since I had handled about a half-dozen similar robberies-gone-wrong during my three years as a plainclothesman. But these were different. Security videos at two of the sites (the only two, out of five, that had functioning security cameras that actually detailed a comprehensive view of the location) displayed that, in fact, nothing had gone wrong with these particular robberies. A man of average height, in each of these two instances, had apparently targeted locations that were clear of all customers: at 8:48pm, mere minutes before closing, a trendy clothing store whose walls were lined with full-length mirrors had been struck; and, four days later, a pawnshop fortified with rusty metallic grating and dusty black walls witnessed its owner's death at 10:10am, barely after the front doors had been unlocked. The culprit wore a dark ski mask and thick winter gloves. The cashiers were compliant in each case, wasting no time, handing over the cash instantaneously; yet each time, this man unhesitatingly fired at them only a moment after receiving the money, then brusquely stormed out the front door, thrusting the cash impatiently into his pocket. The amount of money was insubstantial in each case, particularly with the pawnshop, which had not yet made a single sale. One could only conclude, then, that money was not the motivation; burglary may have been a secondary boon, it may even have been carried out from a sense of grim and absurd obligation, but the real impetus here, it seemed clear, was to take lives. This is what haunted me. Robbery was a rational crime—tragic, foolish, but rational, a means to an end, a shortcut to survival. Human. Explicable. But petty amounts of cash accompanying cold brutality could not be explained by human necessity, by cause-and-effect patterns. It made no sense. Something more evasive, more troubling, was at play.

I was wholly wrapped up in the investigation until 10:30 last night. I didn't even listen to Lena's message until half past eight; when I called her, she had already had pizza delivered and was reading a trashy thriller. She said she understood, that there would be half of a cold leftover pizza waiting for me at home, and that she would struggle to stay awake until I came back. Her voice sounded soothing, tired, tender, and painfully sweet. I ached to be home. “I love you, Mike. See you soon,” she said. “Love you. I'll be home as soon I can,” I promised. I hung up; I went back to poring over a list of every Springfield .45 ACP pistol that had been purchased in the city over the last two years. I felt schizophrenic, my head ached. An outdated map was crumpled at the corner of my desk, scribbled with notations where the murders had taken place. I rubbed my eyes, pushing roughly, forcing myself to feel a tinge of pain. I concentrated on the patterns, trying to discern some sinister method, until a pulsating ache directly between my eyes became debilitating.

I did not return home until almost midnight. Lena hadn't been able to stay awake; her head was arched backwards over the edge of the couch, her mouth formed a small open ring and she snored gently, the paperback she had been reading was still resting lightly between the thumb and index finger of her left hand. For a moment I hated myself for being unable to come home at a reasonable time, unable to be with her that night. But she looked so calm, so untroubled, lying there that I was also comforted by the sight. Seeing her sleeping on the couch singlehandedly upturned the foul, morbid mood that the night's work had put me in, and I smiled wearily. I kissed her lightly but didn't wake her. I knew she liked sleeping on the couch every once in a while, and as much as I wanted to talk to her—say anything to her, even a single thing—it felt inhumane to rouse her awake. I sat on the other end of the couch, resting her feet in my lap. I fell asleep there too, in what felt like less than a minute. Two hours later I felt her hand on my shoulder, shaking me awake; half-asleep, I felt her lips on mine and I smiled. I was sweaty and my neck was sore, but mostly I felt a disoriented, dreamy happiness. Wordlessly, we stumbled to the bedroom and collapsed on top of the covers. My tie had been loosened but it still sagged, disheveled, around my neck. Her arm rested lightly across my back, and I quietly relished the feeling of it rising and falling with each breath. We fell asleep again, quickly, after eyeing each other for a few quiet minutes.

I always awoke earlier than Lena, usually around five-thirty. I liked to stop at a diner halfway to the precinct, around 70th and Virginia, sip two cups of coffee and pick at a greasy pile of eggs while I read the Times. (Newspapers give you such a comforting and misleading sense of certainty; they contain no ambiguity—the world, it seems, is explained within.) I was hurrying out of the front door a little after six, when Lena was still stretching herself awake, having been awoken by the pounding of steaming shower water. I leaned over her as I tightened my tie, she was spread out lazily on the bed. Kissed the back of her neck and leaned my lips close to her ear. “Bye. Have a good day.” She smiled and arched her head backwards, towards mine. “You too. Love you.” I kissed her then on the lips for the last time, first briefly, then a long and surreptitious kiss, as though I knew I had to make it count. “Me too. Let's go out tonight.” She mumbled an assent and collapsed back into her pillow. I left.

In the hospital eighteen hours later, I was dragging my shoes roughly over the tile floor of the waiting room. At first I didn't realize how despondently I was shuffling my feet as I walked; then it became an experiment, seeing how little I could raise my step as I moved. I lifted my glance towards the view out of the fingerprint-smeared window, but the scene that greeted me was the same as before—a wall of brick, black rusted fire escapes, unlit windows. Five minutes later I heard steps approaching and then coming to a halt a few feet behind me, but I still didn't turn around. It wasn't until a husky, tired voice said “Mr. Davenport?” that I did an about-face and stepped wearily towards a short woman draped in a white coat with frizzy, unkempt hair, banded together hastily into a ponytail.

“Yes?”

I came up close to her, and then she took a few steps towards an empty hallway, distancing us from the other people in the waiting room. She gently touched my arm as she stepped away, gesturing that I should walk with her. A few steps into the drab, pale hallway, she continued, lowering her voice to an ached whisper.

“Did the reception desk tell you at all what happened?”

“Kind of. Not really. They said it was a car accident, a hit and run.”

She nodded. “Your wife was struck by a car directly outside of the hospital. She was rushed in immediately. Lena”—she said her name as she exhaled protractedly—“unfortunately sustained severe internal damage during the accident. We've been operating for hours to relieve the bleeding. Mr. Davenport, we've done all we could, but her injuries were simply too severe. She passed a few minutes ago. I'm so sorry.”

She said some other things, reassurances, mouth open and sounds emitted they fluttered past my ear. I became aware of myself standing rigid unmoving. My bones had become petrified. I looked at her and through her at a pale wall of whiteblue tile. Her fiftyeight words from a moment ago replayed overandover again endlessly on a broken loop in my brain. The needle was skipping and the crackle was painful, fiftyeight words telling me my wife was dead the doctor touched my arm fingernails through fabric saying maybe I should have a seat was I okay?. No images of Lena were projected by the flicker of my brain, light on the inside of my eyelids. No montage of memories, only fiftyeight words on a loop and the visual accompaniment of nauseating carcinogenic electric lights in a hospital hallway that was pale whiteblue smudged insulated with death. I didn't want a seat but my knees bent and my legs moved backwards. My back touched the wall and I leant against it. I didn't cry but I wanted to. There was too much pain in and behind my eyes for the saltwater to formulate. Let's go out tonight. The marionette pulling my strings must have been furious because he jerked all of them at the same time with one fistclenched tug, so rough and unexpected that I really think my skin should have soared upwards and my innards should have suspended there confused just because they didn't want to flop upon the dirty floor. The doctor said something again, not once but a couple times I don't know how many. Eventually the words became sequential and made a certain bland sense. “Is there anything you'd like to say to her? You can have a moment.”

After I nodded yes, I didn't know what I wanted to say to Lena or what my goodbye would sound like because there were too many jagged words tumbling around upstairs. The doctor ushered me through three hallways, all pale whiteblue, until we came to two thick-swinging grayish doors that declared emergency and that word seemed more alien yet somehow more appropriate to me now than it ever had before. The room was empty when we entered. It was saturated with a sick, dense, and noxious green color that I had never seen before, I suppose because no one so close to me had ever died before, so unexpectedly. I hope you have never seen that color before. It manifests itself only at such times. A body was lying prostrate on the emergency room table. A sheet covered it now as we entered but I could clearly make out the contours of my wife lying underneath it, and I could barely stand to look at it. The white of the linen sheet draped over her was astoundingly bright, contrasted with the sickening and muggy green that hovered throughout the rest of the room. The actuality of her death started to come to me now, the physicality of it, its tangibility. I had to cover my mouth with the back of my sweaty arm, whether to keep myself from exclaiming painfully or from throwing up, I don't know. The doctor looked from Lena to me, and back again, and shuffled carefully backwards towards the door. “I'll give you a minute,” she said, and stepped outside of the room. I was somehow able to lift my left foot, move it forward a couple of feet, and set it down again, even though something immense and inextricable suddenly seemed chained to my legs. I repeated the same motion with my right foot, then the left again, until I was standing next to Lena's body. I couldn't take my eyes from the peaks and valleys where her face came up to the sheet underneath; I still, out of stubborn desperation, expected it to stir slightly, to move somehow. I waited for minutes, but it didn't. I said some words to her quietly, within myself—I don't know what the words were now, and maybe I didn't know then. They just uttered themselves instead of me conceiving of them. She heard them. I held out my hand towards her and left it hovering over her right arm. I wondered if I should feel her skin, through the fabric, one last time, simply as a parting touch, but after debating this for long and painful moments I harshly told myself that she wasn't here anymore, that this body before me, shrouded in white, was not where my wife was now. I pulled back my hand decisively. My last touch of her, I reminded myself, would be the kiss I had given her the previous morning, when she was still mostly asleep; and this thought comforted me slightly, slightly.

How did I see her now, my wife? No distinct memories came flooding back to me. I saw a vivid still image of her instead, a snapshot that came to me from some unknown repository of images. In this fantasy that came to me now, she was walking through a path in the forest that had recently experienced its first snowfall of the year. There was a white and crisp dusting of wetness and coldness on the ground, though the messily forged trail was mixed with gray slush and dark mud from the feet of unknown hikers. The black skeletal spires of the trees poked through the thin snow and reached upwards into the gray sky; they had lost their leaves already, so it was only the black limbs of bark that spread out, weblike, in all directions. This was an image of winter that I loved and found beautiful, though it was gray and cold and wet; this was the quiet scenery that comforted me when I was young. In the scene that played out now in my mind, Lena was walking about twenty feet in front of me, and I was happy simply to trail behind her, to take in her movements and relish them. I knew she was smiling though I could only see her black hair swinging rhythmically behind her. I didn't know where these woods were, and I know I never could have been there with Lena (we had found it increasingly difficult to leave the city over the last several years), so this scene came to me like a hallucination, or better yet, a flash-forward—I was somehow convinced that this very image was one I had yet to experience in an impossible future. At the same time that this wistful certainty comforted me, it also struck me with a wretched immediacy that Lena was no longer available to me. We couldn't whisk ourselves away to some hidden refuge now, if we wanted. My refuge now would be solitary. It was a strange comfort that this blissful illusion came to me now instead of a memory or, even worse, overwhelming blackness, a void; but the image also seemed to mock me, as though reminding me that every time I would see Lena from now on, it would be an illusion.

I don't know how long I stood by Lena's body in the emergency room, hands clammy at my sides, wanting to touch her but being unable to bring myself to do so, and walking behind her on a snowy trail that didn't exist. It felt like half an eternity, but it couldn't have been very long. The doctor came back in as quietly as possible, and it sounded like she tiptoed up to me in a few swift steps. She lightly placed her hand on my shoulder and asked if I needed anything, I suppose as a way of suggesting that it was time for me to leave Lena. I told her no, I didn't need anything. She ushered me to a desk that was down two hallways on the fourth floor, where I was given a small sheath of paperwork to fill out. I was given a blue plastic Bic pen and it was suggested that I fill out the papers in a nearby waiting room. The papers were affixed to a clipboard that sat heavily on my lap. A smattering of black lines and characters stared back at me from the whiteness. It took me an inordinately long time to complete the paperwork that had been given to me, since I had to struggle with each new shape to decipher what the characters were supposed to mean. They were wholly abstract, they meant nothing to me—the curves of an S, the right angles of an E, I couldn't care less what the designs were supposed to denote. But somehow eventually I filled out the forms. The insurance policy. Death certificate. Pamphlets about funeral services, cemeteries and graves. Even now it seemed ludicrous to me that these papers were being held in my hands—what did I have to do with them?

I completed the forms and returned them to the nurse at the desk, who was typing away frantically. She raised her eyes disinterestedly to me, and then, remembering who I was, and what had happened, her harried demeanor softened and she gave me one of those sympathetic half-smiles that I had already received several times that night. She cursorily checked over the information on the paperwork, thanked me and said there was nothing else I needed to do, I could go home if I wished. I nodded and smiled, it was all I could bring myself to do. But I didn't want to go home, and even though the heavy pale greenness of the hospital was beginning to suffocate and sicken me, I didn't particularly want to go anywhere. My feet moved of their own accord, but I simply did an about-face and roamed aimlessly down a nearby hallway. What was one to do? Where was one to go upon departing from a hospital in which one's wife has just died? Any answer seemed paltry and ridiculous. I just walked.

Eventually I found myself at a bank of windows that looked out over Lexington Avenue. It had gotten late, about half past one in the morning, without me even realizing it; time, for a bizarre interval, had both dragged on interminably and rushed past me in a blur. The sidewalk four stories below, however, had begun to take on renewed life with the barhoppers and drinkers who were stumbling through swinging glass doors as closing time approached. Taxis began to congregate at curbsides, blocks of yellow that seemed to organize themselves according to some pre-arranged plan, like automatons. I stared at the life below, blankly. I wondered whether I should simply wander around outside, busy my thoughts with the immediate and physical task of moving my legs, just to do something. The cold air would do me good; I could quite conceivably simply walk the time away for several hours, start work early, five in the morning, occupy my time and my thoughts. I was about to turn away and stumble down the staircase to the exit doors. I raised my head and took in the towering building that was directly across the street from the hospital. It was now mostly dark, save for a few rectangles of dim light emanating from the offices of overachieving workers. I glanced at these few remaining occupied offices and wondered about the people inside—did they care about the job that had them working until the early hours of the morning, did they have someone at home who was either struggling to stay awake for them or had given in to sleep and would see them tomorrow? It was only then that I realized, with a mixture of self-reproach and painful longing, that it was the office building in which Lena had worked—Perpetua Financial Consulting was located on the eighth floor. I counted eight rows up from the revolving doors at street level, and tried to determine which darkened office was Lena's. I thought back, with stinging preciseness, to the times that I had visited her at work, and seemed to remember that her office was located approximately halfway down the hallway that faced Lexington Avenue. I remembered her office number: 817D. I skimmed over the row of dark windows until I landed upon where I thought her office was.

I felt a slight and confused surprise when I realized that the lights were still on in this office approximately in the middle of the bank of windows. Lena's office. Surprise, then astonishment.

There was a man in the office. He was standing as I was: only inches away from the window, facing outward, hands in pockets, legs spread slightly. He was casting his gaze out at the world, and it seemed to me he was overseeing it tyrannically. In that moment, it didn't even occur to me to question his being in Lena's office so late—the illogic didn't occur to me. I was struck only by the power of the sight, by the harshness of his presence.

Only a few seconds after taking in this dark vision did I realize, with a debilitating shudder, that he was returning my stare. As my head was inclined upwards, taking him in, his was arched downwards, his stare penetrating through the two banks of windows and burrowing directly into my eyes. Did I imagine this? This cruelest of coincidences? The longer I questioned this occurrence and realized the absurdity of it, the longer I took in the vision across the street from me, and the more incontrovertible was its actuality, the more irrefutable was its presence. And worst of all—worse than his being in Lena's office, worse than his inextricable stare returning mine, worse than this image following my wife's death like the cruelest questionmark—was the man's face, which I now could not avert my glance from.

I saw this face. A horrible face. Like nothing I had ever seen before.