Being Harrowed by Films in 2016
‘The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as an example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.’
- Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time
In 2016 I watched a lot of films. I’d say this past year I saw the equivalent of at least one a week, and likely watched far more in total. I also put a significant amount of time into being aware of what films were released, and whether they were interesting. In total I invested a lot of time in cinema — and I do not regret a second of it. I mean I watched some stinkers this year — Pete’s Dragon, Batman VS Superman, High Rise — but even the time I spent being bored, baffled and angry at movies this year is time I do not regret spending. Why was this?
Obviously I believe the answer rests in the quotation above, otherwise I wouldn’t have included it. In line with Tarkovsky I believe the time I spend with film feels worthwhile, because with every film I know about — and every film I see — I gain another chance — and another space — to reflect, to change and to grow. But while Tarkovsky’s words are poetic, they are also impersonal. What, I wonder, does being ploughed (*snort*) and harrowed mean? What does it (*giggle*) feel like?
There are many potential answers to this question. But here, on the cusp of fresh, new year, it seems appropriate to seek an answer from films newly-released in 2016. Well, looking back over the films of the past year, I find that, while the films of 2016 were the source of many reflections, two above all taught me about myself: Anomalisa and Arrival.
Anomalisa is a stop-motion animated film about depression, or rather, one specific facet of the depressive experience. Michael Stone (David Thewlis) is a middle-aged, married, white man and the headline speaker at a customer service conference. He meets a younger woman (Lisa Hesselman, voiced by Jennifer Jason Leigh) and becomes immediately obsessed with her. This obsession dies as fast as it develops (indeed, Stone kills it himself) and its loss drives him frantic. He spends the penultimate act flailing at the world, before finally returning to the steady misery he began with. Boo-hoo, sob, sob. Sad white man. Except that…well, yeah. He is.
The most thorough artistic work on depression I have yet encountered are Allie Brosh’s comics Adventures in Depression & Depression Part Two. Together they cover the whole spectrum of the condition, its entrance and its exit, in achingly precise images and prose. Anomalisa in comparison examines only one stage, the one Brosh depicts at the beginning of Depression Part Two with this perfect image. The result is that Anomalisa is less a movie about the experience of depression, more about the behavioural consequences of being depressed, and, more specifically, about how depressed men behave.
The way Anomalisa communicates Stone’s mindset is its defining quirk. Every single character in the film, other than Michael and Lisa, is modelled with the same face and voiced by the same actor (Tom Noonan). This inspires horror: not the convulsive terror of immediate danger, nor the creeping unease of developing threat, but a horror of a different kind. The world of Anomalisa is repulsive. It is not sickening — the sensation is not that strong. It just feels constantly wrong, a sensation that, as the minutes pass, blurs into a persistent distance. Everything is far away, too far to connect with. And then Michael meets Lisa, a person who is close, a person he can actually see.
Michael Stone’s desperate obsession with Lisa, futile as it is (because he is not truly connecting with another human, but clinging to her like she’s flotsam; her worth to him ends the moment she ceases to serve his need, which is of course inevitable), self-destructive as it is (because having a way out from horror disappear is like seeing the sun wink out), was therefore understandable, especially at the time I saw it. When I watched Anomalisa my own world felt as drained of hue as Michael Stone’s. The thought of doing just about anything summoned a squirm-twist sense of protest, like the one nerve endings raise if you bite down on metal. My world too held no vibrancy. That’s how I was when I watched Anomalisa, and in this film set within horrifying sameness I saw the world as I knew it. And something broke.
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To see your world unexpectedly represented in the work of others is a shattering experience. Inclusion is a shock. Proof of not being alone in the way you engage with the world, that you are in a subset rather than an aberrance, is a surprise. It also transforms the nature of that experience. If you feel a way that no-one else in your immediate life seems to feel, then your understanding of your own feelings becomes a monologue, a feedback loop in which your opinions and self-understandings revolve around and around, feeding on each other and shitting out the same tired words. To see yourself in film changes that monologue into dialogue. Anomalisa then both told me I was not alone, and offered fresh insight into my own mindset: insight, and warning.
There is an essay (entitled Men Dump Their Anger Into Women) a friend of mine passed to me that has relevance here. This essay talks about how men who do not perform the work of dealing with their emotions, their grief and their anger, often go on to abuse the kindness of their female friends and family and dump massive emotional labour upon their shoulders. Since reading it, I have tried to be more aware of the emotional labour I ask of those close to me. This attempted awareness, keeping the subject closer in my thoughts, has made it all the clearer how selfish Michael Stone is. In a way, it’s hard to see how he could not be. His depression is inherently selfish: he literally sees himself as the only individual left in the world. So, disconnection works both ways. As the world recedes from you, so you turn in on yourself. When my world lost its colour, I stopped caring about it so much. But then I watched Michael Stone destroy even the momentary beauty he had found in Lisa through his own petty selfishness. I feel even now the echoed gut-wrench of horror that moment inspired. That was a harrowing.
I am akin to Michael Stone. Sometimes it will take too much to engage with the world. But I cannot, must not, stop. My brain may distance the world from me, but I will do all I can to not turn my back on it as well.
Anomalisa connected, and harrowed. Arrival also connected, but through comparison rather than by representation. Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) was not a potential me in the way Michael Stone was. She was instead a fellow traveller.
This difference is in part a function of the films’ differing foci. Anomalisa is about being in a world turned sepia. Arrival is about being in two worlds: one present and gradually alien, the other distant, bright and full of warmth and loss. I connected with Anomalisa the way I did because its world was like my world. I connected with Arrival not because I saw my world within it, but because in it Dr. Banks makes a choice that, in the moment of its articulation, I realised I too was making in my life.
Arrival is a complicated film to discuss fully, because it contributes to several conversations which refuse to intertwine. In conversation of craft, both the design of images in Arrival and the timing of their use is excellent. The film knows just when to drop a camera trick, like tilting a wall into a floor, so it dislocates the audience without breaking the film’s grasp upon them. Arrival also adds more fuel to the conversation about why clever, competent writers and directors continue to make conceptually vapid science fiction (compared with the prose works the films are based on), and whether this is a limitation imposed by Hollywood or by film itself. Finally, Arrival’s fusion of two distinct cinematic languages — realist, problem-focussed genre blockbuster and Malick-esque art-movie — would make a perfect centrepoint for a discussion of the difference in competencies of these storytelling forms. Yes, Arrival sparks many conversations. But the way in which it ploughs the soul is disconnected from all of them, and requires far less explanation than Anomalisa did. Through all the skills of camera and actor, Arrival makes the audience feel intimately both the joy and the pain Dr. Banks takes from knowing her daughter. Then it has her state, through one, shattering choice, that the joy is worth the pain. And I, stumbling from the theatre, believed it. Believed it, and applied its logic to a choice I also faced.
In 2016 I encountered a source of startling amounts of happiness and pain. Joy enough to blare out of me like bonfire heat. Pain enough to crumple me like a car in a compactor. It’s all very young and dramatic, and so throws into question why I do not cut myself loose. I mean, these emotions are exhausting. They are disruptive. They force their way into my thoughts and my speech and my writing. They are stress multipliers. But still, you give me the choice between feeling this way and retreating, to a state free from concern, true, but also free of solace, delight, beauty and yeah, fear, jealousy and misery, and I would choose again to feel because feeling is always better than not. Of course, life would be better with less pain (though the idea of a painless life actually sends a shiver down my spine).[1] Happiness has more than enough hues to colour a life satisfactorily. But that’s not the hand 2016 dealt me. I got pain and joy intermingled, as did Dr. Banks. Dr. Banks chose to accept it, and through her choosing, articulated that I also was making a choice. Having that understanding in turn gave me ownership of the joy and the pain. It made them mine, and thus, something I could manage and control. In this way, Arrival cultivated my soul.
This then is how the film of 2016 ploughed and harrowed me. Anomalisa cut through the scab over my empathy and shocked my feelings awake once again. Arrival walked with me through the storm my feelings had become. Each connected and reshaped me. Each did so primarily through the clarity with which they captured, conveyed and contextualised the feelings of imaginary people. They were clear, and in being about experiences I too was having, they brought clarity to my own life. They each helped me see myself properly. That is how they harrowed, and ploughed.
Which I think helps me understand that Tarkovsky quotation a little better. The language he uses, specifically the key term ‘harrowing’, previously always carried connotations of making us in the audience feel sad. It felt at times like it reduced art to a knife, winkling sorrow from our hearts. But after Anomalisa and Arrival I see things differently. You can harrow with community. You can plough with a held hand. All that truly matters is that, when the lights come up once more, it feels like your self is reoriented, once more, towards the direction of the good.
[1] I don’t experience physical or emotional pain on a constantly debilitating basis. It is also not the everlasting backdrop to my life. Therefore, this statement comes with privilege behind it — pain is rarer for me than it is for others. This may make me less concerned about its impact upon me.
