Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay
On leaving and returning (to NYC)
Around two months ago I went on a journey. I went to Copenhagen, I went to Budapest and I went to Berlin. I visited old friends and family and then I returned to New York City refreshed, and affirming the old adage:
The best way to enjoy New York is to leave it for a while.
You forget what was driving you crazy about it. You are exhilarated by your new experiences. When you come back you are ready to dive into the soup once again, and what a beautiful soup it is. While I was away I felt that I could move anywhere. I imagined my home in Copenhagen—I’d convince myself that I love biking even though I don’t—though Copenhagen is the type of place I could learn to love it. In Budapest I reveled in the language, being immersed in Hungarian lit up parts of my brain I’d forgotten about. Maybe I could move there for a few months and really get into it. In Berlin I walked 17 miles and had European McDonalds. German felt natural in my mouth. I wished for more time. And then somewhere on the crowded and dirty Airtrain back from JFK all I could think about how glad I was to be back. How happy I was for the series of choices I made to put down roots and to stay.
Our lives are made up of so many choices and moments. The most important, in my experience, have been my choices to leave or to stay. I will admit, for a long time I was the transient one. I was never in the United States for long stretches of summer. Between Hungary and summer camp and various European sojourns my friends didn’t know when they would see me. After high school I moved to Austria, leaving numerous people and relationships behind or putting them on pause. After my year there I was on the move. To college. To Home. To college and back again. For about three years I was the one who left. I couldn’t and wouldn’t prioritize others over my life, my opportunities. When would I get these kinds of chances again?
In May of 2022 I made a choice to stay. All the work I usually put into moving around and finding myself, I’d put into growing roots instead. New York was the place I could envision myself being—yes—Berlin with its socialized healthcare and freelance artist support would always stay on my radar. Of course I’d always have my panicked backup plans. But what happens to us when we decide to stay—when we decide that we are no longer transient? I had been one who left—now I would be someone who stayed.
And staying New York, at least for me, involves going to the movies a lot.
Past Lives—This movie was a festival darling and had a lot of hype to live up to. This was a good movie. This was a beautiful movie. I think our current moment is starved for good cinema and overly lauds movies that meet a certain standard. I am not sure I would see Past Lives again. I don’t think this movie will become a classic.
I left this movie in hysterical tears wondering about all of the different paths my life could have taken and all the choices I had made throughout everything to end up in the here and now. When a Korean immigrant reconnects with her childhood sweetheart she feels herself mourning the past and the present that she could have had. This movie shook me to my core. The main character struggles with genuine attraction to previous possibilities while understanding that the life she leads is the one that she wants, and is the life that she chose. Any choice we make as people closes certain doors and opens others. That is the nature of being alive. It is also heartbreaking. We can salvage bits and pieces—the ephemera from our alternative lives. I have some—a piano I practice sometimes, a friendship with an ex, a plethora of knick knacks in various boxes, earrings...
This movie examines fate and the ways we narrativize ourselves—what happens when the life we lead does not match the story we've told ourselves? Do we gravitate towards what we think we should have or what we DO have? What if we have or soon must leave something behind? The film does dialogue badly, but it does well to refuse clear answers. Often in life we just have to muddle through the best we can.
Possession— Andrzej Żuławski’s 1981 film was an acting triumph for Isabelle Adjani, its lead actress, and a critical flop at the time of its release. This makes sense—Adjani is ethereally beautiful to an almost unnerving degree—what she does with herself psychologically and physically over the course of this film is excruciating (she reportedly attempted suicide after filming wrapped due to the stress of the role). The movie is also pretty campy.
In West Germany, a husband returns from a bizarre espionage expedition to find that his wife wants a divorce. She is tender, she is hysterical, she does not understand why she feels this way. The experience of divorce is horrible—did he ever really know his spouse? What is she actually going through? He imagines that she has taken a lover, for whom she abandons their shared apartment and her child, and in some ways this is true, but something else far worse brews beneath the surface.
The film itself is quite odd. The pacing is off—one moment, it runs so fast that one can barely follow—then slows to a snail’s pace—the nothingness is excruciating. The plot is often unclear. Most horror movies use suspenseful music to build tension, but this movie almost abandons music entirely, filling the theater with sounds of breathing and silence, only broken by occasional bursts of 80s anthems. What is going ON here?
Well, perhaps camp, but also a way to make sense of division and alienation—the sociopolitical division of east and west Germany—the division of divorce—the transformation of oneself into a duplicate ideal that lacks a soul (To say that Andrzej Zulawski did not like the Soviet Socialist regime in the Eastern Bloc is an understatement. He also didn’t like his own divorce which also inspired the movie). It’s hard to say more without revealing the central horror of the film and spoiling it entirely, but one can walk away with a sense that there is always something unknowable out there, and what we leave, we can never expect to be exactly the same when we return. Cities, people, relationships, all transform with time, distance and politics, often into something unfamiliar and dark, and yet still recognizable as a mutation of our own.
Other updates:
I threatened to get that hat and I actually own it now because I found a girl wearing it at a party and made her tell me where she got it!
The Summer Issue of the magazine I edit is online! You all should subscribe.
I’m trying to get less precious with this newsletter so that you all can actually receive it in your inboxes instead of me hoarding drafts on my computer, but from my long silence you all can see how well that is going.