"What have you learned?"
That's a question I've started asking myself every time I finish watching a movie. Many movies have nothing to teach, and only seek to provide a momentary diversion on the road to the grave. That's all well and good, but I'm interested in more than trite diversion -- I like movies that give me something to chew on for years.
I've recently become acquainted, too late in life but still early enough, with the cinematic works of Wes Anderson. I've only seen about half of his films so far: The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Moonrise Kingdom, and now The Grand Budapest Hotel.
I can tell you what I learned from the first three.
The Royal Tenenbaums taught me that you can't escape from the influence of home, family, and childhood on your life, no matter how much you might try to convince yourself that you've left it in the past, so you might as well embrace the truth of it.
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou taught me that living in reaction to others ("others" including our past selves) is the most selfish path of all those we might take in life.
Moonrise Kingdom taught me that, as long as we pursue our desires, we can never be lost.
But The Grand Budapest Hotel...oh, where to begin.
Magical realism, as a genre, has always held great appeal for me (and not just Mexican magical realism). But The Grand Budapest Hotel is minimally magical, restraining its most wondrous elements with a subtle framing device that recasts them into mere whims of imaginative fancy. In the genre of magical realism, anything can happen for almost any reason. That is not the case in The Grand Budapest Hotel, where things happen for very concrete and specific reasons, and every event follows logically from each preceding it, but somehow it still feels like anything could happen. I guess what's so exciting and surprising is that "anything" does not happen, and it's bracing, fresh, and wonderful all the same.
But then...going in, I knew I'd like this movie. I knew that it was by Wes Anderson, so it'd be funny and quirky and moving. I knew that it was filled to the brim with stars I love. I knew that the cast and critics were equally in awe of it. I knew from the trailers that I'd find its visual style entrancing. I knew it, and it turned out to be true -- what's left to say?
Well, there is something left to be said, but I have no idea how to say it. There is a grand, unmoving object hovering behind the thing of the movie in my head, a silent spectre that's barely visible, but aches to be more fully known. I want to express my feelings on the movie in the clearest possible terms, but somehow, "I love it" is insufficient!
What a pickle.
I'm listening to the soundtrack as I write this, and it's becoming clear that the score itself has an agenda that may actually be at odds with the on-screen revelations. That's not to say the music doesn't suit the movie -- it does, almost too perfectly -- but it goes beyond. There are secrets hidden in these tracks that might send you down different paths than those of the trains, funiculars, and cable cars the characters travel on.
How can I be nostalgic for something I saw yesterday?
Of course, the movie itself fosters a particular brand of nostalgia, but delights in shattering those feelings almost as soon as they arise. The fog of memory, the reality of history, the freedom of accepting things as they were or were not -- it all comes together to give us a subtle sensation that the past is not quite past.
Enough has been said about the three aspect ratios the movie uses to represent each of its time periods, each meant to evoke a particular period in our shared cinematic consciousness. And this movie is so self-consciously a thing of movies, a Frankenstein's beauty pieced together from the most lovely film moments that Eastern European cinema has ever produced, that it caromes between the associations in our brain and nestles down, quietly and softly, a creature born of nothing and memestuff, to live in our heads and hearts forever.
That's the reason this movie is so special -- I won't be the first to compare it to Nabokov's work, but I'm coming to this point from a different direction. For Nabokov, Lolita was his "love letter to the English language." The Grand Budapest Hotel is Anderson's love letter to the cinema, and all that cinema can do for us. It contains a little bit of every spice in the cabinet of life, and it proportions them just so, and you can't help but feel a sense of loss when it draws to a close and leaves you wishing you had time for just one more taste.
It is one of the finest things in life to see a master at work, and be left speechless. I have nothing more to say.
Monday, March 24, 2014
Tuesday, March 4, 2014
graduating to gratuity
It has been over four months since my last blog post.
In that time, I attempted to write one -- a New Year's Day post. The thesis of that post would have been that 2013 was the best year of my life so far. But two months into 2014, it's already better, so that post is obsolete.
One of my primary goals with this blog has been to develop a stronger understanding of my own motivations, instincts, feelings, and ways of engaging with the world. Impatient for progress, and believing that personal growth occurs most dramatically through adversity, I deliberately put myself in quite a few stressful situations over the past year. I tested my self-control to its limits, and I learned a lot about myself.
I put everything I'd learned together, and came to the conclusion that I had "found" myself, as much as I can ever hope to. The realization was both troubling and freeing.
I reached this epiphany a few days after I wrote my New Year's Day post. I didn't post it right away because I wanted to add a quote from one of my high school yearbooks, and didn't have the book with me when I wrote the post. The quote was a message I had written to myself, in my own yearbook, exhorting me to never lose sight of the things that are important in life.
When I found the yearbook and read that quote late in December, I was moved by its earnestness and positivity. I tried to capture that feeling in the post, and expressed a sincere desire to reattain that attitude. I even wrote that the entire past year's worth of blog posts had been an effort to regain that sort of "joie de vivre." A few days later, I reconsidered, and utterly rejected that conclusion. That is why you never saw that post.
I recognize that I am a fantastically lucky person. With one major exception, I have been given every single advantage a person can have in this place and time. With a little effort, I can acquire, do, or become nearly anything I desire. Nothing is scarce; faced with limitless options, I'm unable to settle on anything. A year ago, that indecision was the root of my discontent. Today, I do not see it as a problem at all.
Up until now, I have been writing in the hopes of unlocking this mystery. Now that I've succeeded, I'm not sure what I will write about. Fascinating as the topic of myself is, I don't have anything else to learn about it. I don't mean to give the impression that I'm less narcissistic than before -- probably the opposite is true -- but I no longer need to ask those questions. I am satisfied.
You probably aren't. This has been a pretty vague post, and though I'm not sorry, I understand if you're frustrated or annoyed. I can't share with you all of the details of my journey into self-knowledge. I could share with you the meaning of life, but if you don't already know it, it would only make you unhappy.
Last year, I had a vision as I went on a walk. A grand vision, with multiple futures laid out for me on various paths, some shining, some murky, all of them long and most of them fascinating. It was a beautiful, romantic image, and it was completely ridiculous. There are no more visions. But neither are there any more walks. One thing is scarce, and that is my time. I won't walk. I will run. Try to keep up!
In that time, I attempted to write one -- a New Year's Day post. The thesis of that post would have been that 2013 was the best year of my life so far. But two months into 2014, it's already better, so that post is obsolete.
One of my primary goals with this blog has been to develop a stronger understanding of my own motivations, instincts, feelings, and ways of engaging with the world. Impatient for progress, and believing that personal growth occurs most dramatically through adversity, I deliberately put myself in quite a few stressful situations over the past year. I tested my self-control to its limits, and I learned a lot about myself.
I put everything I'd learned together, and came to the conclusion that I had "found" myself, as much as I can ever hope to. The realization was both troubling and freeing.
I reached this epiphany a few days after I wrote my New Year's Day post. I didn't post it right away because I wanted to add a quote from one of my high school yearbooks, and didn't have the book with me when I wrote the post. The quote was a message I had written to myself, in my own yearbook, exhorting me to never lose sight of the things that are important in life.
When I found the yearbook and read that quote late in December, I was moved by its earnestness and positivity. I tried to capture that feeling in the post, and expressed a sincere desire to reattain that attitude. I even wrote that the entire past year's worth of blog posts had been an effort to regain that sort of "joie de vivre." A few days later, I reconsidered, and utterly rejected that conclusion. That is why you never saw that post.
I recognize that I am a fantastically lucky person. With one major exception, I have been given every single advantage a person can have in this place and time. With a little effort, I can acquire, do, or become nearly anything I desire. Nothing is scarce; faced with limitless options, I'm unable to settle on anything. A year ago, that indecision was the root of my discontent. Today, I do not see it as a problem at all.
Up until now, I have been writing in the hopes of unlocking this mystery. Now that I've succeeded, I'm not sure what I will write about. Fascinating as the topic of myself is, I don't have anything else to learn about it. I don't mean to give the impression that I'm less narcissistic than before -- probably the opposite is true -- but I no longer need to ask those questions. I am satisfied.
You probably aren't. This has been a pretty vague post, and though I'm not sorry, I understand if you're frustrated or annoyed. I can't share with you all of the details of my journey into self-knowledge. I could share with you the meaning of life, but if you don't already know it, it would only make you unhappy.
Last year, I had a vision as I went on a walk. A grand vision, with multiple futures laid out for me on various paths, some shining, some murky, all of them long and most of them fascinating. It was a beautiful, romantic image, and it was completely ridiculous. There are no more visions. But neither are there any more walks. One thing is scarce, and that is my time. I won't walk. I will run. Try to keep up!
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