★★★★★
[First Watch]
I don't want you to be okay. I mean, I do, it just rips my guts out.
Copies of copies of copies, becoming less becoming less as we remember. You are not remembering a person, you are remembering your memory of the person. In this, you lose details but you are also creating something new in your mind. Your perception of someone has a life of it's own, they react differently in your mind than because they are based on a slice of time. You are painting a still life of a subject that you looked at for a minute, and hour, a year, but looking away and painting it from memory. When you paint, you are are painting only the surface, only as you remember it, and only at that moment.
At the same time, you will meet new people who will fill the roles of important people in your life, maybe the role of one of your parents or your first lover, and eventually these people become their own, real, person to you so that when they leave, new relationships will fill their role. It continues on and on.
Does that feel terrible? Yep. Okay, good.
You research your symptoms and find out thay you're dying. You go to the doctor and sometimes they tell you that there isn't anything wrong and send you on your way and sometimes they send you to get tests or see a specialist. Is it because there is nothing wrong with you, or that maybe that there is and they don't see it. It may be that you are dying in the same way everyone else is, one day at a time with one foot in front of the other. You can't be diagnosed with mortality. The end is built into the beginning, we spend our entire lives dying. The room doesn't care, either.
As a creative, you try to translate something deep that you feel inside and bring it outward. It is a vulnerable and crushing process, and facing an audience is sometimes the death of this little fire. It is hard not to absorb the criticisms of those who don't understand or diminish your work. If the thinking behind it is taken to be too surface-level, you are dismissed as being simple. If it is too convoluted, you will be written off as pretentious and empty. If you are writing for an audience, you need to walk this very fine line of being easily digestable but still communicating something powerful in a way that is widely relatable but not too vague. Needing any outside approval will contort your expression but avoiding criticism will hinder your growth. Creating is necessary, but also impossible.
There is a certain queerness that also impacted me. The merging of his identity with Ellen the cleaning lady. When he is referred to as Ellen, as she, as pretty. There is a huge, monstrous cloud over you when you don't live as you are, and that is when you truly waste your life. When Olive wants him to admit that he abandoned her to be homosexual, is there truth in that? Is it terrible because we know that it is false, or is it terrible because it is true and we don't accept it? Will she refuse to forgive him because he can't accept himself?
The lyrics of these two songs kept rising to the surface of my mind while watching. I have no idea why, particularly, I just felt it.
Radiohead - Fitter, Happier
A good memory. Still cries at a good film. Still kisses with saliva. No longer empty and frantic. Like a cat. Tied to a stick. That's driven into froze winter shit.
David Bowie - Five Years
We've got five years, my brain hurts a lot. Five years, that's all we've got.