one: absorptions
Dear ones,
Thank you for being here. This is new territory for me, so your support means the world. To be honest, this newsletter came out of frustration. I wanted to write about movies, but my pitches were either declined or unanswered. Rather than internalize the rejection as a sign to quit writing forever (lol), I decided, high off the new year energy, to do something different.
I want the Loose Pleasures newsletter to be a space of exchange. Of feelings, thoughts, obsessions, questions. This first letter goes over my intentions for the project. Then, starting in February, each letter will focus on one movie. Don’t expect a yay or nay rating, though. I’m less interested in writing straight reviews, and more interested in exploring the movie-watching experience. Are there scenes you can’t get out of your head?
On a whim two summers ago I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey at the Arclight Hollywood in 70mm. The theater conjured a plasmic energy. While watching I felt held by an indecipherable force indifferent to my swells of awe and hesitation. Not unlike astronaut Frank Poole spiraling deeper into the vast nothingness of space. Or the blinking images of David Bowman, frozen and cringing at the impossible sights and sounds of the vortex. During the sequence, “Jupiter and the Infinite Beyond,” colors and shapes dislocate our perception of place and time. At one point stringy, translucent forms stretched across the expanse of black, reminding of jellyfish and the bends of waves. I tasted salt in my mouth. Brushed star matter from my fro. The spectacle confused my senses: theater melted into space, and space transformed into the sea. I write sea and space and theater, but nothing was stable. Geographies, memories, scenes, my body—we emptied out and into each other, the dark of the auditorium suspending reality’s limits.
I thought about this reaction a lot while reading Norah Lange’s People in the Room, translated by Charlotte Whittle. The novel follows the unnamed narrator, a sheltered teenager in Buenos Aires. She’s consumed with watching, through the window, three women in the house across the street from her family’s home. The women spend the evenings sitting in their living room, attended by cigarettes and wine. The narrator shuffles and fans their faces like tarot cards. In their woeful eyes she spies criminality, tortured romances, suicide, ghostly obsessions. Everything and nothing happens. Unfamiliar with the world beyond her family’s house on Calle Juramento, the narrator uses the window as a screen; onto it she projects the deep seas raging in her heart. Hannah LeClair describes her infatuation as “a total confusion between the observer and the object of scrutiny; an identification so intense with the people she is watching that it is as if they absorb her or she absorbs them…”
The young narrator’s watching resembles my own movie viewing. The screen absorbing you and you absorbing the screen. The “Jupiter and the Infinite Beyond” sequence absorbed me. I saw the movie two years ago, and still cannot forget how my body spilled in a rush to join the gelatinous bells, how the auditorium shifted into an ancient frontier. Upon leaving the wet of the theater, I walked sideways, as if the screen slurped me up and spat me out, revised and shining.
Like a possession. Cinema can mount you, a viewer under its enthralling touch, and scream through your eyes. For Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel, that intimacy is achieved through sound:
“The space you see on the screen is an illusion. You understand? An optical illusion that’s called ‘perspective.’ But the space occupied by the sound is real. The sound waves touch the viewer.”
I found the quote confounding, at first. I have mixed emotions about perspective in theory and practice, but to call it an illusion seemed harsh. Did that mean my own perspective was illusionary? Maybe. No. Yes. In Martel’s films, perspective isn’t legible. You are plunged into scenes attuned to sounds and images normally relegated to the background or ignored. Her narratives ripple away from “the center” in pursuit of detours and fugues, inviting us to see with our ears and hear with our hands—in other words, shaking us from the doldrums of passive viewing. When I think of the opening sequence of La Ciénaga, I hear a looping collage of bird-and-cicada drone, foreboding thunder, tinkling ice before the frictional meeting of metal and concrete. I see her characters dragging their chairs, a strange procession, heads cut off, drinks in hand, the camera trailing their torsos. Martel wants us to question the dominance of sight, and why it is exalted as the purest way to experience the world. There are other paths of relation. The sound is real. It touches you, the viewer, watching beyond the screen.
You never know if they are real or not, the three women watched by Lange’s devoted protagonist. We are locked in her gothic perspective. Made voyeurs. The lives of others becoming our barbed entertainment. Though, People in the Room complicates which lives we are viewing: the three sisters or the narrator’s feverish neuroses? I doubt their encounters happen as she remembers. Their conversations could be occurring in the volatile recesses of her imagination. I don’t doubt the change triggered by her repeated exposure to the three faces. In a similar manner, I can be touched by the real, unreal, and everything between. A touch rewiring energetic circuits.
I absorbed the Jupiter sequence for my own riddles. The screen can be a plaything. And I can possess too. “The ocean is many things, of course,” writes Amina Cain, “one of them a screen, something we watch from the beach while absentmindedly projecting our thoughts upon it.” When absorbing, I no longer watch, I am submerged in a sea of my own desires. Without meaning to, I’ll superimpose my memories and anxieties and fantasies unto the faces and gestures and locations. A chaotic montage of wanting. I will pursue a song or look, convinced (the reason why escaping me) there is a message to discover with enough repetitions.
For months after seeing Days of Heaven, I would loop Linda’s gravelly voice, daydreaming, conjuring her angular, down-turned face wearing mine, “I could be a mud doctor, checking out the Earth, underneath,” writing the lines ad nauseum in my diary. I wanted to go underneath. The underrealm. A journey into the lost and untranslatable parts of ourselves and our conditions. Is this what Terence Malick or Linda Manz meant when they included the line? Who knows. I know I began putting my ear to the soil, waiting. For the underneath to speak all I will fail to grasp.
This newsletter is an attempt to locate the why of the absorptions through the how (to paraphrase Toni Morrison). I must confess, as I grow older, I am skeptical of the ability to locate a concrete why—though sometimes it’s hard to dislodge myself from the myth that efficiency and perseverance is all it takes, that if I can expertly and patiently crack the code, my deep lake of secrets will be revealed. But the why never goes away. With these letters, I hope to uncover new ways of seeing and relating.
Jupiter, Martel’s sound waves, Linda—they all break the glass between us. This break can happen in the comfort of your own room, too. Just you and the screen, sharing the dark. In contrast to the spectacles of a theater, home viewing invites a quieter intimacy. If a detail burrows under my skin, I can rewind and pause to my heart’s desire. A quote from Durga Chew-Bose springs to mind, “Have you ever felt dumb from having noticed a detail? And by dumb, I mean altered, a little woozy, wild. Impatient, even.”
Have you?
Until next month.
With gratitude,
Allison
MENTIONS
People in the Room by Norah Lange, translated by Charlotte Whittle
“Siete notas sobre cine,” (unfortunately, this video interview with Lucrecia Martel isn't available online. Here is another interview with Martel, where she discusses her approach to sound.)
RECS
Third Horizon Film Festival (Miami, FL)
PLAYLIST
The Middle of the World — Nicholas Britell
Clair de Lune, No. 3 — Isao Tomita
I’m Not In Love — Kelsey Lu
if you enjoyed this letter from LP, please share <3