longform thoughts, first iteration

Last winter I had this idea of making a video essay. I had been watching and rewatching La Jetee, basking in the elevated angst of this black-and-white short film with beautiful images. The text is so dreamy and mysterious, and I like the vibe that the narration in a lot of French New Wave movies adds, less about the plot than the world of emotions in specific discrete moments, like when a boy and a girl share a look at a cafe. Things are simple and romantic. Nothing creates a vibe quite like a video essay; I remember watching News From Home for the first time because everyone makes such a big deal about Chantal Akerman (Ackerman?) and being like oh actually I don’t really need to be analyzing this and paying detailed attention to it, it’s just a beautiful (if a bit boring) experience to watch these clips of hollowed out spaces in New York like how cobblestoned streets look in the morning when nobody is awake except for you. Re: La Jetee, I was trying to pinpoint what exactly about the movie made it so good, maybe the fact that it's a thwarted love story that also deals explicitly with time, memory, all these things that become extra juicy with sadness and emotion when people talk about love. There’s this scene when the man and woman are staring at the cross section of a tree trunk: “They walk. They look at the trunk of a redwood tree covered with historical dates. She pronounces an English name he doesn’t understand. As in a dream, he shows her a point beyond the tree, hears himself say, ‘This is where I come from…’ and falls back, exhausted. Then another wave of Time washes over him. The result of another injection happens.” I didn’t really know what I wanted to make a video essay about, but I had been thinking a lot about feeling trapped. I remember biking home from the Tompkins Square Park farmers market on a Citibike one day in the summer and feeling like a complete idiot. Three sunflowers lay in the basket, and I was wearing a floral wrap sundress that I worried was slipping into an increasingly deconstructed state with every pedal, the stress making me sweat even harder than I already was in the stodgy air. I felt like the kind of person a New Yorker cartoon about millennials makes fun of, such a cliche with my stupid aspirations towards an apartment with plants and cut flowers and of course I was on a Citibike, a symbol of yuppie-ness despite the fact that there are real and pragmatic arguments towards having a Citibike membership as opposed to owning your own bike. The same feeling has various iterations, but I feel that almost every woman knows generally what I’m talking about, the way one day you see that there are aesthetically coherent typologies of women and you’re torn about which type of girl you want to be, as if the way you dress were the defining component of your personality and not some reverse dynamic. In magazines the woman whose personal style is “classic” is depicted in a way that communicates a completely different lifestyle and personality than the woman whose personal style is “edgy." The next evolutionary step is the woman who’s immediately deemed extra cool because she can blend and subvert these different archetypes. Like the girl who’s hot but also reads (Emrata), “hot girls for Bernie,” girls who like Larry David, etc. This also creates the pick me girl, who’s both annoying by virtue of being a pick me girl but is extra annoying to other women because we can see through that shit and it’s infuriating to see men fall for it. Another dimension of the woman-specific incarnation of this feeling is that you’re extremely literate in how to sell yourself; it’s difficult to get to the point where self-presentation is not influenced by imagining yourself being perceived by people generally (not male-specific, although general gaze is influenced by the male gaze). “There had hung the sense of buffering, insulation, she had noticed the absence of an intensity, as if watching a movie, just perceptibly out of focus, that the projectionist refused to fix. And had also gently conned herself into the curious, Rapunzel-like role of a pensive girl somehow, magically, prisoner among the pines and salt fogs of Kinneret, looking for somebody to say hey, let down your hair.” I remember when I was in high school I idolized Lux Lisbon and Effy Stonem, angsty fucked up girls whose innate self-hating “I don’t give a fuck”-ness translated simultaneously alongside being pretty to turn them into the hottest girls around. How did my teen angst turn into this, every self-destructive act born out of genuine misery but its execution riddled with a desire for the action to be attraction-inducing, to be seen and perceived as profound and beautiful. Like a girl from my high school said, “girls never get to be unhinged… i want crazy i don’t want crazy in a black dress” But everyone our age knows more or less what that feels like these days, the beauty of Instagram I guess is now that men are starting to also suffer from this inner split, no longer “Men act and women appear” or “Men look at women; women watch themselves being looked at,” now men are getting dragged into the depths with us. I recently re-read a copy of The Crying of Lot 49 that I’d borrowed from a good friend in college and never returned. It made sense that a book dealing in paranoia and conspiracy was set in California; the unnerving quality of planned suburbia, things brewing under the veneer of sunny idealism, the mythic quality of the state itself. But even as Oedipa chased the muted horn symbol from San Narciso to San Francisco and back I felt that in some ways California was not rife enough with symbols. Recently when I went to SF to go to Outside Lands (maybe it was the acid but) it was intoxicating. People seemed starved for anything vaguely exciting that it was easy to get someone’s attention just by wearing wide-leg pants that weren’t jeans. I walked down Valencia St. and marinated in my arrogance, sure that the men wearing Patagonia quarter-zips with young children were cliches pining for an exciting affair and pitying the athleisure, the light wash denim jackets, the wholly unstylish and unconfident attitudes of all the people in their early 30s I saw in the street. It was freeing, being in a place whose signifiers felt limited to the tech world and therefore easy to discard because they were already circumscribed accordingly, startup hoodies and Apple watches. NYC feels like the opposite, a place drowning in the symbols, youth, trends, and categorization of signifiers into archetypes and degrees of coolness. I’m trying to decide whether and in what ways this only affects people of a certain class. I don’t think that’s true; each class and/or subculture (which you could argue or illustrate has overlap with class) has its own language of symbols, its own character tropes. I think there’s a case to be made that the number of varieties and obsession with categorization accelerates in magnitude as you rise towards the top, especially when you look at the proliferation of downtown types illustrated by a never-ending series of starter packs that categorize ever-more-minutely the people that populate a certain sect of youth/youth-adjacent culture. it makes sense that, given that the way you consume is a mode of identity-differentiation these days, niche exercises in self- and other-identification would run more rampantly, proliferate more quickly as capital grows. These days I feel that I’ve started worrying less about signifiers overly defining how I’m perceived, although that usually starts happening in the winter anyway.. with the cold weather all that matters is that the general presentation comprises good layering of individually good pieces as opposed to when you have nowhere to hide in the summer, all the girls walking around in kitten heels and Reformation dresses such a cliche but also arguably just one of the easiest things to wear in the weather besides a tank top and shorts, in which case your attractiveness becomes the sole differentiating factor in whether you look cool or just basic. Still, a couple months ago two of my friends made fun of me for having a Criterion tote bag, and I still feel stupid and hurt about it. It’s not like I went out of my way to procure this tote bag to broadcast that I’m a film lover, it was just $10 and gigantic, and I wanted to support the company (brand worship is corny, but whatever). It reminded me of the argument Catherine and I had a year ago where she indirectly called me a cliche for having a Criterion subscription but it’s not really anyone’s fault when the things they like are turned into memes, you can like something before it becomes a signifier or even after it has become one and that’s just the dumb world we live in. Regardless, signifiers and their organizations have become nauseating to me, I feel disillusioned by trust fund kids playing an endless game of one-upping each other by colonizing everything about themselves from the superficial (clothing) to the personal and private (books, music, etc.) into chess pieces in a game of who can prove they’re cooler by evolving past the latest iteration of hip signifiers. I just want to be able to name and see things for how they really are, rather than resorting to this increasingly mediated chain of symbols that become shorthand for other symbols that are the shorthand for the original object. I remember when I first started singing the praises of Joan Didion and how cool it was that she was a gifted writer who partied with The Doors. I would tell people, “There’s value to seeing and being able to articulate the way rich people really behave,” but now I’m not so sure, I still think there’s value but I feel a little disappointed with Joan too, there are way more important things to examine than becoming literate in wealth culture…