Cure

to the isolated, isolation seems an indubitable certainty; they are bewitched on pain of losing their existence, not to perceive how mediated their isolation is.

— adorno

it’s been close to two years now, and it still feels unreal. i walk through the days trying to be the person other people think i am — the reliable one, the one who has things under control. the truth is i’m winging every minute of it. grief doesn’t go anywhere; it just hides when life gets demanding. the moment things go quiet, it surfaces. it doesn’t end. it just stays, with the volume turned down most of the day, and turned up the second the day stops asking anything of you.

the count stopped being useful around month nine. somewhere in the second year, it stops being a date you’re keeping and starts being a texture you live in. you measure it now in the things that no longer require effort to bear: a song that used to lock you up, a route past the place you used to meet, a notification that no longer needs to be feared because the thread is finally still.

what i couldn’t do, in most of this stretch, was write directly about it. i had things to say. i couldn’t say them. i’d open a note and close it again. i’d start a paragraph and find that the next sentence wasn’t there. when you’re inside a thing, the thing is too close to your face to look at. you have to put something else in front of it and look at that instead.

so i went to the cinema. at my desk, alone, lights off. one film, one logged sentence, sleep. the sentence was always shorter than the feeling, but the sentence was at least somewhere outside me. it was on a server. it was a thing other people could read.

reading those one-liners back now, i can see what was happening. they aren’t really about the films. they’re about what was happening to me, said sideways, with the films as cover. this piece is going to be about looking sideways. about what stays in the room when you can’t speak directly to it. and about the year as i actually lived it — not in the way the films arranged it, but in the way they refused to.

cure (1997)#

kiyoshi kurosawa made a film about a serial killer who hypnotizes ordinary people into violence by asking simple questions until something inside them comes undone. you never see the moment of breaking. you only see the after. a husband who stabs his wife and can’t say why. a doctor who turns on his patient and stops mid-sentence, looking at his own hands like they belong to someone else.

i wrote this on letterboxd while watching it:

cure is about the loss of self through connection. it’s not just about hypnosis. it’s about how easily a person’s core identity can dissolve under the influence of another. how fascination or attachment can turn hypnotic, consuming, disturbing. even destructive. intimacy without control. love, obsession, and manipulation all push the same limit. how much of yourself can you give up before you stop being you?

i had a long answer at the time. i don’t think it was a question i was asking the film. i think it was a question the film was asking me, and the film already knew.

what kurosawa knows that nobody around me knew was that the dissolution doesn’t feel like dissolution while it’s happening. it feels like clarity. it feels like everything is finally making sense. the husband doesn’t experience the moment of breaking. he experiences the moment of decision. of course — it had to be this. you only realize what you gave up after you’ve stopped being able to give any more, and by then the room you were giving in is no longer there to walk back to.

people talk about heartbreak as if it happens at the end. it doesn’t. it happens in the middle, gradually, while you can’t see it. by the time you name it, the work is already done. you spend the months after looking for what’s missing, and what’s missing has been gone for longer than you knew.

the middle stretch#

three films from the long flat months where nothing dramatic happens, where you wake up and go to work and eat something and the entire day plays like an unwatched movie on a screen you can’t quite see.

funeral parade of roses (matsumoto, 1969). i logged it as: disorienting, tender, and deeply lonely. hypnotic editing and surreal inserts blur reality and memory. simply refuses closure.

closure was the thing i kept asking other people for, in different words, while not asking the person i actually wanted to ask. matsumoto’s film is built out of refusals — to settle into a genre, to stay in one timeline, to let a character finish what they started. you finish the film grateful for the refusal. you can sit with someone for ninety minutes who never tells you what to think.

chime (kurosawa again, 2024). i logged: frustration inducing by design. how everything ever is. alienated dreadful experiences. mundane intrusions. i love how unexplained my life is.

i wrote the last line as a joke and then realized i meant it.

scherzo (shiokawa and tomatsu, 2021). a feature-length film about a man who wakes each morning with no memory of his past. i wrote: i love building up my hopes, even though nothing comes of it, it’s such fun to live in suspense.

i wasn’t talking about the film. i was talking about the days i spent waiting to see if she’d reply. the days are quiet in a particular way. the phone is heavier than it should be. the food doesn’t taste of anything. you keep checking the message thread to see if anything new has arrived in the last fourteen seconds, even though you know it hasn’t, because you’d have heard the notification.

somewhere in the middle of this stretch i deleted things. photos. chat logs. screenshots of conversations that meant something. i did it on a bad night. i did it because i was angry, and because anger feels like clarity in the moment. a year later, the future me who wanted those things back didn’t get a vote on the night the past me was angry. your worst hours have authority over your best ones, because your worst hours act, and your best ones only watch.

if you’re going through this — don’t touch the archive. wait a year. delete with intent if you must, never with anger.

hiroshima mon amour (1959)#

a woman and a man, neither named, in a city neither was born in. they have an affair across two days. she tells him about her first love — a german soldier in occupied france, killed at the moment of liberation. resnais structures the film so that her grief for the dead soldier and her affection for the living man cannot be told apart. the two relationships pass through each other like superimposed exposures of the same negative.

i quoted some of it on the page:

i meet you. i remember you. who are you? you’re destroying me. you’re good for me.

look at that sentence. you’re destroying me. you’re good for me. resnais doesn’t argue. he hands you the contradiction and waits.

anyone who has been re-contacted by someone they had finally finished missing knows the texture. the message arriving after months of silence. the meeting that takes hours of texting to plan and then doesn’t happen. the meeting that does happen, that ends the way you knew it would, that costs more than you’re willing to admit afterward. and then the long quiet stretch where you work back to where you had already been. you’re destroying me. you’re good for me. you agree to the second clause because the first is too embarrassing to say out loud.

the film is set in a city erased twice. once by a bomb. once by being filmed about. you saw nothing in hiroshima, the man tells her, and he’s right. you saw a film about it. you saw what someone wanted you to see. that’s also what a relationship becomes after it ends — a film about it, watchable indefinitely, immune to revision.

i thought, the first time the pattern repeated, that it was a circumstance — bad timing, bad weeks, both of us trying. by the third or fourth time, it was clear it was a script. the message would arrive after silence. i would answer. we would meet or fail to meet. there would be a few days of warmth, and then a withdrawal that always looked like surprise but couldn’t have been surprising. it was choreography. neither of us was choosing it. neither of us was stopping it.

the last time the message arrived was earlier this year. i read it. i didn’t reply.

i won’t pretend i know if that was the right call. what i know is that the silence that came back was the silence she had asked for in the first place. you can give someone what they asked for. you can’t always tell, while you’re doing it, whether you’re keeping a promise or breaking one. it’s been a couple of months now. the thread is still. that’s the thing that has changed in the second year — not that i miss her less, but that the cycle has finally stopped pulling me back into the room.

suzhou river (2000)#

lou ye made a film in 90s shanghai about a courier who falls for a woman who may be the reincarnation of his lost love, or may just be a woman who happens to look like her. the film never resolves the question. the point is that it doesn’t matter. to love someone is, at some level, to mistake them for the version you carry of them.

what i wrote:

i don’t believe in mermaids… but then i saw her… she’s the mermaid.

that’s the whole review. i have nothing to add to it. i don’t think any future version of me will have anything to add to it.

what’s true about the film, though, is that the courier’s love is for someone who isn’t there. he carries a portrait of the dead woman in his head, and the new woman has to either match the portrait or be rejected. she matches it. she might even be it. the film doesn’t say. you walk away from it suspecting that real and imagined are not opposed categories when it comes to who you love. the imagined one is the one you spend time with after the real one is gone. the imagined one is the one who answers you when you talk to the ceiling.

a girl, she is 100% (1983)#

naoto yamakawa adapted murakami’s short story into a black-and-white film a few minutes long. a man passes the perfect girl on a street in harajuku one april morning. he doesn’t approach her. he tells himself, instead, a fable: an eighteen-year-old boy and a sixteen-year-old girl meet, recognize each other, and decide that if they’re really meant for each other, fate will bring them back together. they part. fourteen years later they pass on the street again. neither of them recognizes the other. the glow has dimmed. they walk on.

i wrote three syllables on the page:

couldn’t be me.

i meant it as a joke. it isn’t a joke.

the murakami fairy tale is the version of love where you let chance decide. you don’t grasp. you don’t reach. you don’t insist. you trust that what’s meant for you will come back of its own accord, and what isn’t won’t, and either way you’ll know.

couldn’t be me. i grasped. i reached. i insisted. when she said come back, i said yes — twice, three times, a fourth time in a message i wouldn’t send today. there was no patient ledger of fate keeping score. there was just me, choosing to be the one who showed up, choosing to be the one who didn’t walk past.

the fable is, in its way, a story about regret. the man in harajuku doesn’t approach the perfect girl, and you spend the rest of the film wishing he had. yamakawa lets you sit inside the wish for a few minutes before reminding you that it was always going to be a wish.

la chimera (2023)#

alice rohrwacher’s film follows a british former archaeologist named arthur, in 1980s italy, who has come out of prison to find that the woman he loved — beniamina — is gone. her mother insists she’ll return. arthur knows she won’t. he goes back to robbing etruscan tombs with his old gang. he has visions of her near gravesites. the film calls these visions chimere, chimeras — the unattainable obsessions that pull a person.

what i wrote:

i am in the grip of something, and cannot free myself.

that’s the most direct sentence i wrote on letterboxd all year. it isn’t really a film review. it’s a description.

arthur knows it too. the chimera is what gives him purpose and what destroys him. without the obsession, he’d be a man with no work, no country, no past worth tending. with it, he’s a man pulled by something dead toward more dead things — going underground, opening tombs, looking for an artifact that will turn out, in the final scene, to be a way back to her. the film ends with arthur sealed inside a collapsed tunnel, and the last vision he has is of beniamina, and you can’t tell if this is grace or punishment, and rohrwacher refuses to tell you.

i watched it in january. i was still writing messages to someone who no longer answered. the film is a long argument that obsession is a form of devotion that survives the death of the object. that you can love someone past their leaving. that the love doesn’t end when they go. it just stops being recognizable as love. it becomes a chimera. it pulls you underground.

look back (2024)#

kiyotaka oshiyama adapted a tatsuki fujimoto manga about two girls who make manga together. fujino is the social one with raw talent. kyomoto is the shut-in with technical genius. they collaborate. they get serialized. then kyomoto leaves to go to art school by herself, and at art school she is killed in a violent attack. fujino, consumed by guilt, comes to believe that her own work — the inspiration she gave kyomoto — was what led kyomoto to that school, to that hallway, to that day.

the film does a thing with time: a scrap of paper travels backward into an alternate timeline where fujino chose sports instead of art, and kyomoto stayed home and drew alone and lived. in that timeline they don’t meet. but kyomoto, in her empty room, has cut out a comic-strip fujino made of her years before, and pinned it to the wall. across the timeline gap, the film insists, the two of them know each other. fujino, in our timeline, finds the comic strip and understands.

what i wrote:

i loved you as who i am, which is difficult to explain.

that’s kyomoto’s line, in spirit. i loved you in the only way i know how to love anything, which is to make a thing about it. the manga that kyomoto kept on the wall is the proof. the proof isn’t that you were loved; the proof is that the loving took the shape it took.

this is the part of the piece i can’t get around. i’m not writing this because i think it’ll fix anything. i’m writing it because writing is the shape my loving takes. i can’t not make a thing of it. when the person is no longer reachable, the thing i’d make for them goes on getting made. it goes onto the wall in some empty room neither of us is sitting in. that’s what look back is about, finally — not the loss, but the way the work outlives the relationship that produced it.

i loved you as who i am. which is to say: i loved you in the way someone who writes loves. i couldn’t have done it any other way without ceasing to be the person you knew.

cathedrals#

the line that’s been sitting with me longest came from osamu dazai’s no longer human. she sent it to me — back when we were still sending each other things — and the version i kept was the more literary translation: what uneasiness lies in being loved. in the rougher rendering it’s what a mess it is to be fallen for. same observation, different vault.

what i wrote back to her was something like: the cathedrals of melancholy are not necessarily demolished if you can replace the vulgar form with the literary form. the grief isn’t destroyed. it’s dressed differently — housed in a cathedral instead of a back alley. the melancholy remains, sublimated. reframing heartbreak in literary terms does not cure it. but it surely contains it.

that’s what writing about films instead of writing about her did, and is doing now. it didn’t cure anything. but here’s another thing about the word cure that the kurosawa title leans on without saying. cure can mean to heal, but it can also mean to preserve — still alive in language about meat and tobacco and leather. to cure something is to treat it so it lasts. salt, smoke, time. the cured thing is no longer the living thing. but it is still here, in a form you can keep.

that’s what i think i’ve done with this year. i have not been cured of it in the healing sense. the thing is still there — quieter now than it was, but still there — and it surfaces in the moments between other things. but i have, in the preservation sense, cured the year — taken what couldn’t be left in raw form, and put it through enough salt and smoke and time to be keepable. these films are the salt. these sentences are the smoke.

i’m under no illusion that i’ve made it through. the container is also the proof of what’s being contained. the deleted photos are proof too — proof that the cathedral has holes in it, that some of what i meant to keep didn’t survive my own worst nights. fine. cathedrals have holes. they are still cathedrals.

what i did, somewhere along the way, was settle into a rule i didn’t know i was forming: people who contribute nothing don’t get to keep contributing nothing. it sounds harsher than it is. it isn’t a thing you announce. you just notice, after a while, that the door has been shut long enough that you don’t reach for the handle anymore. the two-plus-year cycle is finally over. this time, i can tell.

what’s left in its place, i can’t quite define. it isn’t relief. it isn’t recovery. it isn’t the absence of grief — the grief is still there, just quieter. the closest word i have for the current state is undefined. defined emptiness aches in a specific shape; undefined emptiness just is. i’d rather have the undefined version. you can write inside it. you can watch films inside it. you can be the reliable guy with less acting behind it, because there’s less to perform around.

what i can say is that i watched these films, and that i wrote down what i felt while watching them, and that what i wrote was always about something else, and that the something else is finally beginning to be quieter. december is seven months out. i’ll watch more films before december. if you’re reading this, the cathedral is finished enough to live in.

that’s the only kind of progress i’m willing to claim.