BAGGAGE CLAIM
9. “After Yang”/”Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore”/”The Worst Person In The World”
I
I’m constantly upstaged by my dog, and I’m okay with it. They warned us at the very beginning that his breed only needed to be coddled for the first couple of months. “After that, he will run the house,” the man said, reiterating how intelligent they can be. And, more importantly, how mischievous. He was a little over a month old when he first scoped out his new kingdom. He slept in my bed until he was four months old, at which point the warm but stern people at the vet politely asked us to cut that out. He would grow too attached. He started sleeping on his own soon after. Almost every night for the first week after the eviction notice, one would hear a faint patter of tiny claws going up and down the hallway, sometimes stopping at a bedroom door at random and knocking. Very little whimpering. After a point, no whimpering at all.
Almost two years later, he has no grand ambitions of running the house. Or he doesn’t seem to. He is, however, atrociously intelligent. Almost respectable. Hence, I’m okay with the upstaging. Everyone in the house has their own dynamic with him. He’s fair and just. He sees his family members as very direct cause-and-effect operational tools. He loves everyone in different ways. Our mother will speak to him in the typical baby babble reserved for infants and pets. And he obliges. Since he is neither, I speak to him in full sentences. And he listens, with his animated Lady-And-The-Tramp eyes shifting in expression with the inflections. He looks like a man with a lot to say. If he opened his mouth and actual human speech came out one day, I would maybe be shocked for just a split second. As for his eventual speaking voice, I always assumed he would have the same one as Droopy, the stoic basset hound from Tom & Jerry, and/or Porky Pig. So, in a largely unfounded attempt at osmosis, the full sentences I speak to him in are in a bad impression of the former, a possible relative of his from the same ancestor. I’ve done this for over a year now. Every time he walks by a room I’m in, I’ll repeat with fake incredulity/real curiosity, “What is he up to today? What is he doing?” He’ll turn around to acknowledge the questions with his own stoic face and a few wags of his tail. He never reveals his plans.
Naturally, he has featured in a lot of dreams of mine. One recently that is still 4K clear. We went to go watch a movie in a theatre. “We” being him and I. I recognised the theatre. I don’t remember the movie. He had his own seat and he watched the whole thing. He let the other patrons — who somehow knew him personally and called him by his name — pet him and they exchanged niceties. And every once in a while during a scene, he would sigh deeply, like he does in the earthly dimension. The movie ended and then we went home and I woke up. He kept his review to himself. He’s smarter than I am because even though sometimes his eyes will betray his feelings, his POA is top secret. You’ll never catch him slipping, that guy.
II
The thing is this: growing up around adults of a certain generation, I quickly learned that if you were over a certain age, you could act with impunity. If grown-ups were upset, they were allowed bad manners, with little to — often — no recovery time. No detention. No “go to your room”. It could be an aspirational thing for a lot of kids, and I don’t blame that. For me, it always meant the opposite. Bad manners, despite who was exhibiting it, made people uncomfortable, angry, sad, some times all at once. I was kicking and screaming about wanting pizza one time, and the car nonchalantly passed the restaurant by, and I was notified that it was only because I was ill-mannered. That is one of the few lessons I received in the perils of behaving badly for little children, and it has made its way into places. Besides making people uncomfortable, bad manners will cost you things like pizza. The position I was in, I could not afford to act like the people driving the cars. The pizza problem would always have to be solved with tact, no discomfort on the side.
Last year, I turned 25. That’s a grown-up age if I ever saw one. Someone I once regarded as highly important in my life would claim that that was the peak for a girl: all females peak in their overall desirability at 25. So, more doctrines.
The difference from previous years was that I was convinced I was the best version of myself I had ever been (true), and that projecting that best version onto my surroundings was the key to everything (false). My emotional growth graph always had to keep going up. I had to be the best at it. I had to win at being Good. I was on a mission to heal from things, grow three times in size to be the best Bigger Person ever, and keep that up on an incremental chart for the rest of life. The faster, the better. I wrote about it in a caption, promising to be better to myself, and work on not always acting from a reactionary place. I went to therapy a few days before my birthday, all but beaming about feeling better and feeling better about being better. Just be a good person, all the time. No bad manners for as far as you can help it.
Following an extremely raucous birthday party, I settled into the reality of circumstances. The months following this age milestone were some of the darkest I have ever experienced. A few things had been taking a toll, and they all seemingly came to collect at the same time. Or that’s how the brain interprets it. I was unrecognisable to myself at times. I tried to keep up a steady fight with the help of some trusty rituals. But pretty soon I was on autopilot. I kept waiting patiently for my scheme to turn a profit: no matter what, best version onto surroundings, despite the circumstances, always.
It failed spectacularly. And the more it failed, the more I retreated into myself. I promised to be better to myself and I promptly broke it. It was embarrassing, more than anything.
I made no promises this year. Apart from turning off my inner monologue analysis for my birthday month, at the cost of writing about Morbius for you. I had been ill-mannered to myself, so I cost us all that hypothetical pizza. I apologise.
This time when the pre-birthday anxiety hit, I had been expecting it. I was just coming off of a good quarter on the growth chart. So much so that the terrible times I mentioned earlier were beginning to look farther away than they actually were. For the first two months, I would tell anyone who would listen that I’d been completely sober in the new year, save for three days. A lot was changing very quickly, and I fell for that. A complete sucker for rapid change. Healing fast is super enticing, especially for a person like me who takes pride in being resilient. The month I turned 26, though, I begrudgingly made room for the ugly parts of healing. Being bigger is the most honourable thing. I gave myself the modest gift of contraction, for a short while.
III
After Yang is stunning to look at. It’s a lot of other words that get thrown around when it comes to an indie film. Transcendent. Meditative. Poignant. One of the actors involved called it “a poem”. All of those things fit. It is also, for the entirety of its running time, fixated on how an emotionally absent father recognises the value of the android looking after his daughter. It’s a stunning film which is also extremely frustrating in asking to conjure empathy for the protagonist. I watched it by myself in an eerily silent house. I don’t note that to allude that the film is spooky in any way. It’s just really, really quiet and melancholy. The malfunctioning of Yang, the android, is supposed to signal an important teachable moment about life and death for the young child — the only one in the family dealing with immediate grief over his absence. That moment, however, is delayed, by the father attempting to first view him as a real part of his family, literally watching the world through the defunct android’s eyes. He sifts through the memory bank, watching snippets of his daughter and the relationship she shared with someone she considered her brother. There are several layers of allegory there, beyond the human/machine dilemma. Yang is a Chinese android and he was purchased for that trait specifically, since the child is ethnically Chinese herself. So, the father’s slow realisation of Yang being a real person in his Caucasian view of the world translates even more poorly.
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It’s a rare one. But it goes without saying that it’s become hard for me to watch a movie about an emotionally absent man discover the humanity in someone else’s experience. This is no fault of the movie itself. It might even be the point. I was resentful of that middle-aged man gaining perspective at the expense of someone else. I was unreasonably bitter at a Colin Farrell character. In the final scene, he gets teary-eyed watching the last of Yang’s memories. He grew. His arc was complete.
I don’t know how much patience I have in the reserve for mourning someone and it being realised too late. Although I recognise what a strange thing it is to be resentful of someone being remorseful. It feels wrong to even feel it. I reminded myself that it was allowed.
IV
Watching Fantastic Beasts 3, I realised that I had completely forgotten what had second one was about. Possibly the only Harry Potter property I had watched just the one time. I bought the screenplay book, however. Force of habit. Like a large population of the people in my generation, I grew up a self-confessed Potterhead. I had read all the books before I was even 13. And I read them over and over after that. I, like many of you, have watched all the movies countless times. I defend my favourite one still, if anyone asks (it’s Half-Blood Prince). I could confidently do pretty well even in the toughest of Potter quizzes. I have been that person.
I used to genuinely love this series. And this is no different than any of the other accounts you’ve probably read or heard or written yourself. The dwindling of the light that used to burn in my heart for this series has probably been the most concrete proof that even the purest admiration for something can die.
I lived in the United Kingdom for a period of time, and you best believe that I made the pilgrimage to the studios. This was after she had already begun being publicly hateful. The cancellation of Harry Potter had commenced. I spent the whole day there with my family. It is nothing short of glorious. It is engineered to get you to well up at different points of that massive compound. I was a happy person that day.
When the discourse about separating the author from the books was at its peak, I was a staunch believer in the fact that the books and the world could still mean what it meant to the people who loved it dearly. It was indeed possible to isolate her from it. For what it’s worth, I still want to believe that. To even just set a precedent for similar situations that would arise in the future. That would be the right thing to do.
So, I went to watch the new one in the theatre. I sat through the entire thing practically motionless. I recognised a lot of cues to emit emotional responses from the audience. I could barely bring myself to care even a little bit for anything that was going on. This used to be a story about a magizoologist and his trunk full of magical animals at one point. Now there was an election? In Berlin? Something about a goat-like creature who senses vibes? The smallest of crumbs for the much-touted relationship between two men. I left the theatre annoyed and guilty at having wasted people’s time, including my own. During the movie, I found myself Googling the runtime of the thing. I might have stepped outside to take a phone call. I wish I hated it just to be able to really participate in the way pre-teen me would have wanted me to. But this has just run its course. Turns out most things are ephemeral. To coast and bank on the love of the Inner Child means it has to be something worth all the trouble. But alas. Given the choice between easy and right, I picked easy this time.
V
I watched The Worst Person In The World hours before turning 26. I had cried at different points throughout the whole day. I’m not entirely sure now why that was. The birthday eve has always felt like the peak of a crescendo for me. It’s a whole day of what feels like holding my breath, while also trying to hammer down the idea that it is essentially a day filled with lasts. It’s an extension, perhaps, of the thought where there was once a time when your parents picked you up for the last time. A lot of endings are stealth and sudden.
The movie has the most relatable kind of plot, of a young girl in her 20s trying to give her life some purpose, jumping from one field to the next. She knows not what she wants, but only what she doesn’t want. As far as a manufactured viewing experience goes, watching this on the eve of the day I crossed over to the latter half of my twenties is pretty on-the-nose.
The first half of the movie, with my throat closing up for the third or fourth time that day, I watched the protagonist with a sense of sororal appraisal. Misery loves company, and self-pity loves validation. She was just trying to make sense of her reality, one harmless fleeting mistake at a time. She was every woman. I was her (?).
I paused the movie for about an hour, and I rode the wave of the kind of unexpected joy that only comes in the form of something small and something surprising. A shift in perspective in the nick of time. My whole day turned around. I was happier.
When I went back to my spiritual Norwegian sister, I found myself getting increasingly annoyed at her. I was suddenly better, and she just kept getting worse. The harmless mistakes were still relatively harmless, but she made them with the same cavalier attitude that she began the movie with. It was a lot of woe-is-me, the kind of stuff you hope to avoid as you get older. And she did all of it with the naïveté of a child accidentally spilling a glass of water on the dinner table. I judged my erstwhile sister. I knew quite a few like her in my own life.
VI
The most I can say is that I’ve tried my best not to unreasonable in my two and a half decades. I’ve turned it into a source of pride. Now, however, I’m beginning to wonder whether turning being a good person into a winning game was the best idea to begin with. The wins were fleeting and the losses felt grave. Not being empathetic towards fictional characters came with a tinge of a synthetic kind of guilt. The reward of trying to do the right thing, I told myself, would come from approval from my worst critic: me. Lately, the approval is not feeling like it’s enough. The cost of it all is much too high to keep up round the clock.
I turned 26 alone in my room, like last year. I was surrounded with several loved ones on the actual day. But the transition has been an isolating one, in that I feel like I have my hands full with moulding whatever next version of myself to be more sustainable. To ask a little less of myself. Fortunately, there is more room to fail laterally. For now, to emulate someone wiser than me, I keep my plans to myself.
As appeared on May 5, 2022 on https://eyelinematch.substack.com/
