Desire, I Wanna Turn Into You
In which I write a post that is not about Caroline Polachek at all
Hello everyone I am back from a (not so) brief hiatus!
Long story short, my parents visited, I went to California, I came back and had writer's block and then I got another job editing a lit mag, and for all those reasons plus laziness I did not have time to write this newsletter.
But now I have a wonderful header image provided by my amazing friend Moe, and time provided by traveling home for a doctor's appointment (don’t worry it's a routine checkup) which happened to coincide with Christ rising from the dead. Hallelujah, hallelujah, Christ has risen indeed (Congregation).
Things have been busy. Last month I and all the friends I brought with me were featured in The Cut’s coverage of The Drift’s launch party. They accused my friends of eating soup at a fête (wrong! It was shrimp scampi!) and roast chicken (wrong again! They were chicken wings) and people on twitter called my friends heathens. But they forgot to mention that I quickly became too anxious and had to leave relatively early, despite having a short piece in the issue. Oh well, sometimes you party hard, other times you have four sips of a $15 low ABV beverage and call it a night.
Since Elon Musk and Substack have beef with one another I can no longer embed tweets into this newsletter, but if you click on a few of these links you can watch people get mad at my friends on the internet.
Other literary goings on
n+1 will be having an issue launch later this month and perhaps I will be there! Perhaps I shall write about it. Their new issue contains writing by Jenny Erpenbeck who is one of my favorite German authors!
I attended the inaugural event of a new reading series called 1239 hosted in a very nice Crown Heights brownstone where I met a number of writers, all very cool, most significantly older than me and thought about talking to the hot young men from a publication that shall not be named in the pages of this newsletter, but couldn't work up the courage. I also ate amazing brisket at a queer Seder in Bushwick where the homemade Haggadah contained Rainer Maria Rilke and Adrienne Rich quotations as well as some really cool depictions of Jews as birds who wear amazing hats.
I met Charlie Kaufman (or more honestly, stood across the bar while my friend spoke/fanboyed to Charlie Kaufman).
Triple Canopy had their symposium, and while I missed a fascinating talk on sperm donation (did you know that you cannot donate sperm if you have tattoos?! Because I did not) I did make it in time to hear Hua Hsu read a monologue alongside a tape player where he openly talked about being a kind of lame kid who really wanted to be cool and who deliberately crafted a persona for himself out of the music he listened to. I was a record store kid who wore knee socks partially because of Lana Del Rey and the Arctic Monkeys song, so I can pass absolutely no judgment on his behavior as a youth. In many ways this struggle for self is what his memoir Stay True was about, and what his many of his pieces in the New Yorker also were about. More of the same I guess, but also—when the same is that beautiful and cleanly put, who cares, give us more! Play us more archival tape footage Hua. I want to hear it (preferably on different speakers so I can make out what the voices are saying through the static of a walkman being played through auditorium speakers).
Emma Gushes About the Movies
I also went to the movies and fell head over heels in love with Claire Denis. I know everyone wants my newsletter to be full of salacious literary gossip but no. Today I want to write about desire in film and how Denis is a filmmaker who knows how to build tension brick by brick. Slowly, deliberately, until nothing happens and yet everything changes.
To give people a sense of how serious I am about this—I have no money and I am going to buy a T-Shirt from IFC with her name on it to accompany the money I am going to spend on a custom baseball cap embroidered with Elena Ferrante’s name. Please let me know if you want me to order you one as well. We can form a club. Why am I doing this you may ask? Well—one because it is a joke that only I (and trust me I’ve asked around) only I will find funny. And two, because I currently think she may be one of the best filmmakers alive today.
I saw her first film Chocolat at Lincoln Center, and then this week it turned out that Claire Denis is having a moment of sorts in NYC and IFC was showing three of her films in an event titled THREE BY DENIS. I saw Beau Travail (and missed White Material because I’m sorry folks, I have a job). Then while researching for this substack post I realized that she had also worked on one of my other favorite movies—Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders, who also made Paris, Texas—another incredible movie that… what can I say… I had an extremely bizarre experience with. If you want me to get more into it I would have to explain philology, and despite getting a degree in German Studies mainly by taking classes about philology I’d have to admit that I don’t really know what philology is.
What Denis excels at is taking a story with a structure most people are familiar with, and then changing the context and the pacing so that it becomes unrecognizable and yet full of moments of epiphany. She choreographs the camera and her actors like a ballet. Her films are obsessed with precision and physical control. Her actors are like springs tightened and tightened until they burst free of their constraints. Their constraints are personal, but also societal.
In Beau Travail the choreography is literal military precision. All the characters with the exception of a few women and some nomads live within a strict structure of a French Army legion stationed in Djibouti. They reflect the societal structures of colonialism. Their masculinity, their every movement is policed and precise and represents their unit as a whole. The story is Billy Budd, Herman Melville’s masterpiece—Benjamin Britten’s devastating opera by the same name provides many of the needle drops. Denis’s camera is the arbiter of desire, their political and personal restrictions the scaffolding of the tragedy that takes place. What passes for love in such a strict structure? How can one win the affections of others? What does it mean to exact revenge upon someone whose only crime is to be beautiful and desired and good?
When I say this movie left me speechless, what I mean is that when my friend and I left the theater we said nothing for a full 10 minutes afterwards and I felt a knot in my stomach that took days to undo. If I say anything else I’ll spoil it.
Chocolat, while it deals with many of the same themes, emphasizes an element of Beau Travail, nostalgia for a time which was actually not very good. Denis’s films have a loose chronology, the chronology of memory. We do not remember things as they happened, we remember them as we understood them at the time. Ilse Aichinger, when questioned about the street names in her story collection Kleist, Moos, Fasane insists that her book is true, that while the street names are misremembered and misquoted, that the landscape of her memory is the text of the book, the mistakes inherent in what one remembers, the rose colored glasses of nostalgia, the brain’s crowning skill, the burial of trauma, leaves behind a marker that while not necessarily physically there, is a representation of the truth.
Literary reference aside, this is exactly what Chocolat does. It reflects a time of harsh colonialism from the view of a little girl (a fairly obvious stand in for Denis, just as the film is a fairly obvious retelling of her early life story), who does not understand colonialism, or her family’s role in perpetuating it. She only feels love for the family’s African servant who takes care of her, and is not aware of the humiliations visited upon him through his service to her. She is not aware of her mother’s desire for him. The viewer understands these things, but the storyteller does not. What the child does not understand is exactly what Denis understands. This ellison works along the grooves of our remembrances. Even if we understand now, we also remember the time before, the innocent time. The viewer is along for the ride.
The structures are dreamlike. Why have an American appear at the beginning of Chocolat for seemingly no reason? (there are many reasons that become clear, but at the beginning, he seems an odd choice). In Beau Travail dance is a constant theme—a physically evocative vision, but not an obvious medium for a story about men in the military exacting revenge. The opening shot of the movie is women dancing (seemingly) alone in a disco. Then we realize that the women are displaying themselves for soldiers and for us. We know the movie is about desire from the first shot, but have no way of understanding the extent to which desire is a corrupting force whose power will go in a completely different direction than anticipated.
When Caroline Polachek said “Desire, I wanna turn into you” what she was actually saying is “I have become death, destroyer of worlds” Desire is power incarnate, and Denis’s films are about our failure to harness it.
Correction: In the Newsletter Blessed Philip Darling Patti I misattributed the name of one of the songs performed. Another friend who was at the event corrected me: New Order played Joy Division—Shadowplay, not Joni Mitchell. Bernard Sumner has a really thick British accent and also mumbles hence the mistake. The corrected version makes a lot more sense.