Between lions and Ken
I’ve not been feeling so great lately – despondent, low on inspiration, heavy on “okay but who cares”. Little bouts of depression like this seep into everything, into different coloured moods, into the bones. I’ve also been unwell for the last five weeks, it’s raining forever and the news is especially horrible and frightening. It has undermined the Summer of Phoebe.
The anhedonia is new although I’m familiar with feeling blank and listless, with a kind of muffled hysteria scrabbling to break free so that it can least translate itself into activity. The failure to absorb what I see and what I experience is a novel turn, and an unsettling one. I’ve been able to look, and watch, but thinking properly or creating has been beyond me. The perimeters of my perception have become hardened walls; the membrane between my brain and the world has calcified, the osmosis has gone, leaving malaise in its place. There are at least a hundred reasons why this is, and I have to wait for it to go away.
In the absence of being able to interest myself enough in a writing topic, here’s some things I’ve been doing which should have cheered me up but haven’t:
1) A lion escaped from Berlin Zoo and there were numerous reported sightings of the lion hoofing around the city, only for sheepish authorities to say a day later that what people saw was probably a wild boar. Now. If I, after a series of administrative errors and some catastrophic decision-making on the part of the relevant bodies, found myself in charge of a zoo, and there were multiple reports of a lion knocking about, I think the first thing I would do is count my lions. If Berlin Zoo really has such a great number of lions, enough that you’re not sure whether or not one is missing, then they should be obliged to redistribute their lions. Under normal circumstances, the thought of the zookeepers asking each other if any of them know how many lions they’re meant to have would have kept me in great form for at least a day. I would have enjoyed making a list of suggestions for keeping track of and filing your lions (Query: can you put a collar on a lion without disturbing its fundamental dignity? I think you could, but only if you let the lion choose the colour). I would have captioned that stock image of a lion looking pleased with itself with the Camus quote about how to deal with an unfree world (“the only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion”) and sent it to people whose jobs make them low on tolerance for receiving pictures of lions in the middle of the day. I would have wasted a lot of time trying to find out if it really is possible to get a lion to look pleased with itself, or whether, in universal terms, the human brain is really so babyish and so utterly alone that it cannot possibly conceptualise the emotional landscape of another creature without projecting its own modes onto it. I would have liked bickering with my boyfriend about why Sisyphus “doesn’t just stop after the first time the rock rolls down the hill”.
2 & 3) Under normal circumstances, the terrific live music I’ve seen over the past few weeks would also have elevated the baseline of my mood, as would the fun day out with my buddies to see Barbenheimer. I enjoyed the films, less so the more I think about them and the more I see what other people have to say about them – contrarianism on my part, obviously. I have been thinking (or at least trying to) about the confident assertion that Barbie is an advert for the dolls. I’m not convinced this holds up, but I have been thinking (trying to) about Pauline Kael’s observation that Top Gun was not, as was claimed, an advert for the US Navy, but was more of an advert for itself. That’s more apt I think – Barbie, if it advertised anything, advertised the brands that had partnered with Mattel for a go at the glorious pink marketing funnel. I wasn’t convinced by the feminism it advertised either, but then I didn’t have to be. This was feminism as laid out by HR, a stylistic framework of vocabulary and correct interpersonal behaviour that obscures the material struggles facing women and again, how could it be anything else? It would be crass beyond all measure to try to address anything more sobering. Greta Gerwig is a brilliant director, someone I admire, and someone I can do a pretty good impression of (please cf. prior list of suggestions for Greta Gerwig biopics; my favourite remains Gerwig’s Pinochet) and I would like to think that this was at least partly the point she was making. The politics of Barbie are simple-minded and muddled, but that’s not to make them palatable for a young audience – it is to make them palatable and comprehensible to dollies and (the implication is) to otherwise politically disengaged women trying to connect with their daughters.
I’m not especially looking forward to a yearly toy film, but I think I look forward even less to a tranche of mid-level superficially nourishing films; Oppenheimer, in common with everything Christopher Nolan has ever made, becomes more shallow and less interesting the more I think about it. I would, however, be interested in how far you can stretch the idea that you can get people to think they are watching a careful subtle portrait of how hubris inflects genius to produce monstrosity simply by filming in black and white. I don’t want to see Chanel and Chevrolet ads directed by brilliant auteurs, I want to see knotty and nearly impossible to film texts directed by idiots. I want to see Michael Bay’s Finnegans Wake. Even the thought of Michael Bay’s Finnegans Wake is heartening because it means that even while my capacity for joy has temporarily gone, I am still capable of desire.
NEXT: How I cured myself, and how if you sign up for my workshops for the discounted price of 5,000 GBP you can too.*
* This is, of course, a joke. It actually costs 10,000 GBP