an imaginary possession

 

to confer importance.

 

 

 

 

On Aleksey Fyodorovich

“The problem is that while this man is, perhaps, an activist, his status as such is vague and unclear. Though in fact it would be strange in times like ours to demand clarity of men. One thing is, perhaps, fairly beyond doubt: this is a strange man, an oddity, even. But strangeness and oddness are sooner a cause of harm of their possessor than any guarantee of attention, particularly in a time when all are striving to unite the details of existence and to discover at least some kind of general meaning in the universal muddle. For in most cases an oddity is a detail and an isolated instance. Is it not so?”

-Dostoyevsky

The faithful subject matter

 

The gauzy romanticism starts emerging at 1am, justifying its validity by an ensuing craving for coffee. I’d usually go straight into the kitchen, pack the stove-top percolator with fine grinds of annoyingly overpriced Starbucks (and sometimes deservedly priced Davidoffs), and sip joie de vivre at its source – the overpriced part wouldn’t terribly matter at this point.

This time there’s a bridle, and for a combination of unwelcome reasons I’ve decided to go about the way of self-flagellation and say, “I give up coffee for three months.”

I can always decide not to take myself seriously and violate my commitments, because most likely, a cup of sumatra right about this time would do a bit more good than harm to my well-being. And as ostensibly convincing as the doctor seemed with his turgid lectures on the vital importance of water and the fatal effects of coffee addiction – he conveniently concluded that I was addicted – all seriousness dismantles when he responds to my question “but tea’s fine?” with a brittle “oh.. just a little.” To me, that’s saying I’m allowed to drink coffee.

But that’s internal medicine. It failed to convince me once, now twice. So rather than being mentally adolescent and decide to continue on based on that single fact that I’m unconvinced, I thought this time I’d stick with this and attempt to think that a period of de-caffeinating won’t be a bad idea. It’ll clear out my pores, says the doctor. For once I’m kinda’ thankful that there’s no peet’s around, so far no place that earned my loyalty, and that people suck at making foam.

hi, planet

What makes “Rachel Getting Married” so brutal to some people (like me) is the blaring accuracy in its depiction of, let’s say, a bedlam of family members. The subject matter can’t get anymore banal and so does every artist’s nearly compulsive desire to make something notable out of personal pain. Mr. Hitchcock rightly said – along with a slew of the Gallic cineastes – that good ideas rarely make a good movie. But in the case of “Rachel Getting Married”, it almost seems as if the filmmaker set himself up for such potential havoc. There’s a limited number of characters who don’t act upon chains of events. To further problematize things, there’s an eerie display of a considerable diversity of race but the filmmaker decides not to make a big deal out of it. Instead, he gives each face such a comfortable familiarity that even the audience starts thinking the harmony is a normal existence in our life. Nothing’s particularly new in its approach, but the freshness comes from the fact that the filmmaker doesn’t pamper its subject with importance.

The destructiveness of Kym (Anne Hathaway) and the effects it has upon the family are only too revealing. With a premise that can easily slide into a beg for tears, Jonathan Demme explores every corner, nook and cranny of the emotional spectrum. There’s a quiet melody of subtlety that flows through, occasionally accentuated by bursts of movement and noise. It’s more real than real, and Demme’s shrewdness in decision terrifies me with its immediate relevance.

It’s not the premise that haunts me. It’s the way in which an event can shape and alter family behavior towards each other in the most uninvited way. Love easily unmasks itself revealing hate, and the most self-assured person can spur into erratic ruptures of self-pity. It’s within the family that you become the truest ‘you’ (disputable, I know, but let’s carry on), and with that said, it’s a place where certain beasts that lay dormant in you surge up with no warning; it scares both the family and yourself. Kym’s sister, Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt), seems like a classic case of, say, the familial dilemma, where she’s “stuck” with her sister, with only one “right” option, which also happens to be of the polar opposite nature of what she would like to choose instead. She is, in drastic terms, condemned to loving her sister. Such is the case when that sister tends to be every incarnate reason for hate. And of course, the beast in Rachel is, probably like in every human being, the abysmal capacity to hate.

But, she’s family. That, for the entire span of human history, seems to be enough reason for one individual to decide to love another. And perhaps that moment of decision just might be the point of the self’s greatest victory over its own nature. It’s a quiet, un-exhibitionist triumph that stretches its influence to those ‘other’ relationships where such decisions could be avoided due to that vicious thing called distance.

It’s a film that carries you (necessarily sadistically) through sufficient pain along with its characters. All to make love that much more rewarding to respond with.