Psychic Palindrome: An Anti-Cinematic Odyssey

[The following essay is derived from some journaling I did recently while confined to a mental health care unit following a suicide attempt. I have cleaned up some parts of the texts and added some new ones even as I have tried to keep most of what I wrote intact.]

I stare down a couple boxes of movies. None of them appeal to me. The few I see that I like, Toy Story among them, feel so irrelevant to my present circumstance that I can’t bare to watch them.

I’m currently locked down in a psychiatric facility following a suicide attempt. There is a way to watch movies that I don’t have any connection to. Sterility is the watchword. Nothing may offend.

I can’t stop thinking about Tenet‘s central premise. Time moving forwards or backwards is as much a matter of perception as anything else. Why just accept time as we understand it? We age and die; linear time is like violence, lines of time like the lines I carved into my arm.

While I tried to kill myself I watched David Cronenberg’s Burroughs odyssey Naked Lunch. It was apt. I wrote a poem on my arm with a knife. What would my idol think?

Tenet still weighs heavily on my mind. The night before I saw it, I sliced my arm up. The night after, I tried to kill myself the same way. Fittingly palindrome-like, a temporal pincer, if you will. In what direction am I moving? Am I inverted?

A group of people are watching Man of Steel in the common area as I write this. I hated that movie. Superman’s chiseled perfection bores me. Zod is dumping too much exposition on the audience.

sidebar: a review of Man of Steel, as seen piecemeal on a psych ward

What led, I wonder, to the decision to include Zack Synder’s Man of Steel among the discs available to watch here? Is it the narrative cohesion? The familiarity and supposed wholesomeness of Superman? Is it his steely strength? His imperviousness? Or is is just a video someone didn’t want anymore?

Whatever the reason, I caught snippets of Man of Steel in the common room. I remember I had seen it once and promptly added it to the list of reasons I hate superhero movies.

In my head I picture the thought processes that went into Man of Steel, and none of them are good. I imagine they are similar thoughts to the ones that led to the film being included — or perhaps simply not excluded — on the ward.

The scenes on Krypton rely too much on a kind of try-hard, shallow concept of grittiness and darkness. I blame Nolan for this trend. Every superhero movie is a wannabe Dark Knight.

The scenes on Earth are a great deal of disaster porn, destruction mistaken for actual stakes. For all the film’s would-be earthy realness, nothing feels more fake than Kevin Costner.

At least Christopher Nolan understood that it’s all bullshit; the director might well have been the Joker of his own franchise. He’s honest enough to admit cinematically that he “just want[s] to watch the world burn.”

Fight scenes are hollow cavities in the film, visible only through the knowledge of its absence. They are negatvie space images, somehow surrounded by more negative space. It’s a feat Brakhage might have only dreamt of, the ultimate gesture of experimental aesthetics. Like Penicillin, its discovery was utterly accidental.

As Zod, Michael Shannon gives the obligatory great-actor-in-a-terrible-superhero-flick performance. It has engulfed nearly ever actor working today besides the three — McKellan, Stewart, Jackman — who fit their roles so perfectly the X-Men they play seem uncannily predestined.

Shannon certainly hams it up, but what do you expect from an actor working opposite Russell Crowe, the worst good actor working today. Not to mention appearing across from the Man of Steel himself, a moniker that might just as easily describe Cavill’s acting in the role. Everyone in this film is a robot. The only way to consider Snyder a talented filmmaker is to imagine he has somehow lost control of his cinematic machines, like a nightmare George Lucas probably had making the prequel trilogy. It’s an attitude reflected in fan fervor over the director’s cut of Justice League. Zack Snyder is a wrangler of automata, and an unskilled one at that.

I suppose there must be a calculated blandness to the films they collect here. Like elevator music, it’s what no one loves or hates. Except asshole cinephile snobs like me. A suicide attempt has not abated my selectiveness. The therapeutic quality of Tetsuo would likely be called into question, although I’d take that man of steel over Clark Kent any day.

After finishing up Naked Lunch, I turned on the only film that seemed right: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, whose uncompromising brutality I find inspiring. What stayed my hand, got me to go to my friends, was my knowledge of how Pasolini’s film ends.

Meanwhile, I’m still thinking about Tenet. The film has latched onto me in ways I didn’t expect while watching it. That I tried to kill myself the next night might have affected that.

But I’ve always been drawn to time. Films about time are among my favorites; any film that played with time gets at least one viewing from me. Play is the operative word: the more loose and freeform, the better. Time, like gender, is best when challenged and reshaped, worst at its most rigid and lawful.

Narnia (that is to say, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe) is not on the TV. Time runs differently in Narnia than in our world, yet it always seems to move forward. Tilda Swinton is the only good part of this movie. But watch Orlando instead, it you want your Tilda Swinton fix plus some time dilation.

The three films that define the incident to me Playtime, Tenet, and Naked Lunch. Friday night, after drinking and cutting, my roommate put me to bed with Playtime in the background (at my request). The next day to cheer myself up I saw Tenet. Then, as I’ve said, I watched Naked Lunch during the attempt itself. A bizarre triptych, if you ask me.

The order of events seems irrelevant. The endpoints (if there are any) are defined by Playtime‘s joyful, surreal odyssey of hypermodernity and Cronenberg’s destabilizing trek through the art of writing. If Playtime is a joyful nightmare, then Naked Lunch is a work of nightmarish joy. Taken together, an emotional pincer maneuver. If the act of writing can be self-destructive, as it is in Naked Lunch, it can also be productive and stabilizing, as it has been during my time here.

I got off the unit today. I’m writing this final section of my beloved keyboard, an entity that knows my fingers better than any pen. I’ve missed it. I’ve missed my friends. I saw snippets of a lot of movies on the unit: two Narnia films, Willy Wonka, Man of Steel, Because of Winn-Dixie, Night at the Museum, and more. And while I may be harsh on the films that played during my time, the truth is that getting away from my favorite cinema was a good thing. It made me appreciate the human-to-human connection. I think too often I disregard the humans in my life over the cinematic works that also populate it.

Maybe that’s the answer to the ward’s eclectic selection. Too much access to my (or anyone’s) usual cinematic routines would drive me to the same place I was that night. I began my stay in the unit longing for films like The Host or The Great Dictator, I ended it glad I was forced to rethink my routine. If, as I believe, film (among other arts) shapes how we think, I needed at least a temporary change in viewing patterns as a way to shift my psychic geometry back towards a joy for life.