The Science of Sleep

How many movies do we actually end up rewatching? There are movies I think are utter masterpieces I've seen only once. Movies I truly love, I've probably only seen between two and four times. It's really only the lighter fare (Super Troopers, Dazed and Confused, The Warriors, etc.) that I've given the once every 4-6 week treatment to, and then for finite periods of time. No matter how much you might have changed since your last viewing, sometimes, there just doesn't seem to be a point to spending another two hours immersed in a world you've already visited.

SM hadn't seen Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep before, so when it was playing at the Gene Siskel Film Center last week, we decided to take advantage. I adore Michel Gondry's imagination and visual creations, but it hadn't been one of the movies I'd really put a lot of thought into rewatching. The first and last time I'd seen it, I'd come away both defensive and disappointed. Gondry's music videos and general DIY arts approach to filmmaking has been influential for me ever since I saw the White Stripes' "Fell in Love with a Girl video" in 2001. I was floored when Eternal Sunshine came out in 2004, and bought the Criterion Collection of his short videos as soon as I could. Needless to say, with his body of work in mind combined with my intense crush on star Gael Garcia Bernal, expectations were high when Science of Sleep came out in 2006. Instead of having those expectations met, however, I left the theater unable to explain what I'd just seen. I thought it was muddled and disorganized in spite of its incredible set design and animation techniques, which I'd seen as its only redeeming element. I answered my doubts with a dismissive familiarity with Gondry's work: "what else did I really expect? With such a creative mind as his, it's hard to have so many ideas, such an expansive vision, and keep it cohesive and in check." I went into this second viewing excited to enter his world again, but didn't expect much from the movie itself.

This time, I was truly impressed. Instead of fighting through my own expectations, I was able to watch the film with a much more discerning eye. There was so much reality going on just under the surface that did a lot to support the whole premise, so many details I hadn't caught before that make each choice much more intentional than I had given it credit for.

The film opens with French-Mexican Stephane Miroux (Bernal) moving to Paris to be with his mother after his father dies of cancer in Mexico. He moves into his childhood room in his mother's former apartment in a building she owns, and starts a job she sets up for him. He is a creative type and likes to draw, invent, and make things with his hands, a hobby he has had since he was a child (he turns off the light switch from his bed with an elaborate pulley system attached to a mallet). The job turns out to be much less fulfilling than he'd expected, and he is continually stymied by his inadequate French. Things quickly get a lot more interesting, though, when he meets his neighbor, Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), from across the hall as she's moving in. She originally thinks he is part of the moving crew when he ends up helping (and hurting) her moving efforts and getting himself hurt in the process, and invites him in to have her attractive friend, Zoe, tend his wound. While Stephanie is attracted to him, he is initially attracted to Zoe, creating a bit of a triangle. After he gets to know Stephanie a bit more and sees her creative pursuits, though, he begins to change his mind.

The variable that takes the movie on a loop is the surrealistic elements of the film. From the beginning, we are treated to the view from inside Stephane's head. In his mind he has his own television show, complete with cardboard sets, on which he is the host, cooking up the ingredients of his day into dreamy concoctions that lead to DIY-style fantasy sequences about his father and his new surroundings as he sleeps. As the film progresses, though, those fantasies blend with reality to calamitous results. Just as things are getting friendly with Stephanie, he nakedly sleepwalks across the hall and slips a dream-written note under her door, in which he spouts a lot of nonsense but manages to close with asking for Zoe's number. The crux of the ensuing misunderstanding is here, but the viewer doesn't realize it yet: unbeknownst to Stephane, Stephanie read the note before he realized his mistake and retrieved it from under her door. As he falls for Stephanie and tries to spend more time with her, we realize that she saw the note as a sign that he's not interested in her and that they are just friends, so she rebuffs his advances. Stephane's dreamworld continues to unknowingly muddle his reality, and he becomes more and more confused and heartbroken as the movie unfolds, ultimately spoiling the chance he does get with Stephanie because he is so wrapped up in his own head.

What I hadn't realized before is how much goes into muddling the viewer's sense of reality right along with Stephane's. Often in surrealistic films, the viewer is above it all, aware of what is real and what isn't, even if the characters aren't. This is usually done by spending close to equal amount of time in both the real and fantastical world. In The Science of Sleep, we know that Stephane is spending too much time in his dreamworld, but we don't really realize how much time we're not spending in the real world either. Only snatches of the real world are visible, and noticing them the second time around really grounded the movie for me and put Stephane's detachment from reality in perspective. We see Stephanie's setup to getting angry and frustrated in small snatches that only amount to a few minutes of screen time. We see Stephane's coworkers annoyed that he hasn't been reliable at work for another few measly minutes sprinkled throughout. We see Stephane's mother argue with her boyfriend for only a few seconds before she ends up moving back into the apartment she shared with her son long ago. These glimpses are enough reality on second viewing to make Stephane's situation bigger than he is, and it gives the film more depth.

Another layer of complexity I hadn't noticed before was language. The first time I saw the film, I attributed the muddled dialogue to English being Gondry's second language. Now I see that the distinctive ESL flavor to the script underscores Stephane's state of mind, both in his life as a transplant from Mexico who recently lost his father, and from his perch between reality and his dreamworld. Throughout the film he pushes the boundaries of his French with everyone he meets and is forced to settle for their common second language, English. Even with his mother, he can understand her French, but he would much prefer to express himself to her in English. In his conversations with Stephanie, both of them take thought to find the right English words to express the inner monologues that no doubt take place in their own first languages. (It seemed as if the actors improvised a lot of their conversation, which expertly added to this effect.) Stephane's limitations with language make his way into his dreams as well: he speaks to his father in Spanish and English, and his French coworkers' fantastical counterparts speak in a mush-mouthed mockery of French. Stephane is disoriented both literally and figuratively, and his dreams take the concept and run with it.

Overall, I liked this movie much more than I had the first time. Without the constraints of expectations and with the freedom to let go of the plot and notice the details, I was able to really appreciate all of the layers that Michel Gondry was able to employ to support his vision. I was also able to appreciate how impressive it is to write and present a film that is utterly and unforgivingly of the moment and in the head of the narrator, something I've really begun to appreciate after reading Proust. (Some Proustian ideas of love are in here too, but that could be a whole other pretentious blog post.) We are not omniscient in this film; we are tied to Stephane in a way that limits our scope, and we are only given hints of the objective situation. Of course all of the visual aspects, the animation and the characters' tactile sensibilities were still amazing and on par with what I love about Gondry's work. But this time I was able to walk away confident that the movie was impressive beyond my presumptions. It's a film I look forward to rewatching.

Reluctant Symbology

Back when I first read Catcher in the Rye, it genuinely irked me that my English teacher harped on and on about symbols. Between the red hunting hat and those ducks, I just didn't buy that a writer would go through and plant all that crud for us to pore over the text and ferret out. As I got older, I started to appreciate that there are some writers out there who would do such a thing. However, throughout all of the films I studied in college, some of my skepticism surely remained. That said, I have to hand it to my high school English teachers: they sure beat that ferreting habit into me.

Just last week I went to a screening of Terrance Mallick's Badlands with a few friends. Last year we'd endured a Kurosawa series at the Gene Siskel Film Center together, and this year we'd contrived to setup our own Mallick series, only to find that the Music Box had already done it for us. Anyway, we saw Badlands and then headed to a barbecue together (first of the season!).

Fresh from the theater, the movie was, of course, on our minds. I prefaced my contribution to the group critique with a caveat: "I hate when people look for meaning and symbolism in works of art, especially film. You can just make up some bullshit, and as long as you run with it, carry it through to the paper's conclusion, you can pass. But..." I hesitated before submitting my question. "Do you think there's any significance in her father being a sign painter?" Before others could fully form their own arguments, I involuntarily began forming the answer to my own question, the clues coalescing into a college paper as I arranged the condiments onto my medium grilled hamburger. Fortunately, I suppose, DS saved me by offering up a tidbit Mallick's biographical history, that he was an aspiring academic, a Rhodes Scholar, before he was a filmmaker, in philosophy no less, so my search for significance beyond the screen and the text was most likely not in vain.

So here's my theory: of course it's significant that Holly's father is a sign painter. Whether he leads her on the right path or not, he serves as sole guider for a character who doesn't show any agency of her own until a brief and minute act of independence and self preservation near the end. the signs he paints are never shown to be direct commands, rather they are tableaus or brand names, passive declarations of what is and what should be in your life. Similarly, while he may have had questionable tactics, he sure had a lot of influence on how Holly lived her life, setting up rules and consequences that were outward manifestations of how he believed life should be, always demonstrative and never really explained by a man of few words.

[Spoiler alert] After Kit kills him, Kit's philosophy takes control over Holly in the place of her father. She comments on his behavior but still fails to act independently from him or even squirm under his guiding hand. But while her father had a demonstrative style of control in the form of figurative signposts (your dog has been shot: wrong way), Kit had a more passive, leash-like hold over her. Her life with Kit surprisingly holds no signs. For somewhat of a road trip movie, there is a noteworthy dearth of signage (not even highway names or exit signs): the only sign I remember seeing is one for Texaco at a gas station after she's already separated from him. For much of the movie they aren't even on roads.

DS made a point of insisting that this is not a film about morality, and I agree. There is a reason Holly's father is not portrayed as saintly or even good. As I said, his methods have something to be desired, but furthermore it's important to note that it's not clear where he was attempting to guide Holly to. My point is more to emphasize the fact that she was being guided at all. I may even go as far as saying there's a bit of a bildungsroman hidden in here, the apex of which is her decision to stop fleeing and submit to being apprehended by the police. It was actually somewhat of a relief for me to see her show some agency for once in the film. It's a small climax, but I think it's there nonetheless.

Part of me very much enjoys watching movies and other media with a critical eye. If you were to ask me, though, it's how it all comes together collaboratively and technically that I find exciting. I would argue that this also extends to the details of how exactly the idea/writing is portrayed onscreen, and so I don't completely ignore the craftsmanship of the writing. But when it comes to all those symbols, imagining someone painstakingly seeding that trail for the viewer to follow, another part of me just doesn't buy it. There are so many other things to worry about than tracing the movements of a red hat throughout a story, right? Luckily for whatever writer or director is out there ahead of me on the trail, though, I find myself seeing the signs, taking the bait again and again, and following them down. When I see Days of Heaven tomorrow as a part of this series, I suppose I'll have to see it with new eyes. I've gushed over the cinematography before, so I guess I'll have my eyes peeled for the next set of symbols Mallick throws my way. I might even write about it here. But I'll have you know, I won't be very happy about it.

Long Live the '90s!

I remember turning to my brother during a late season episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and questioning what could possibly be pulled from the '90s and mocked like the '60s and '70s. Wow, have I eaten my words. Looking at Will, Hilary, and Ashley's hair styles and clothing now, they're obviously recognizable relics from that era. The main theme's song and the graphic design also immediately take me back to circa 1992, when I used to skip around the house with my family and recite the rap, complete with that last head twirl he gives before he knocks on the Banks' front door.

Of course, as with every passing decade, we have a lot to look back and laugh at. But we've gotten a lot of good stuff from the '90s too. One of the things I really miss about that time was that shows like Fresh Prince and The Cosby Show (check out those sweaters) could even be on and popular. They were especially important to me as a black girl who grew up in Minneapolis and went to a pretty affluent school to see black people who talked like I did, did their homework just like me, and had relatively stable family lives as I did at the time. However, I'm hard pressed to find such a message on primetime television today.

Nowadays, when we're not mocking the pop culture of the decade, we're often celebrating freedom from its tyranny of political correctness. I remember textbooks and classroom posters of multicultural groups of friends: there were always two white kids, a black kid, an Asian, or at least someone of an indeterminate, poly-ethnic brown, and maybe a kid in a wheelchair. I even laughed at the idealistic inclusiveness back then. On the other hand, though, as I've grown older, I realize that my friends are of all different races. While some black people I know are unsettled by my Facebook photos with my white friends, they really have no clue how much effort I've put into including many different levels of diversity in my life.

It's not like I go out looking for new and diverse friends (in fact, new people are one of the things I am most dubious about, and I often dread having to meet them). Rather, I have found it quite natural for me to be in the company of different types of people, and I am actually interested in how we all differ. I like to be aware of those diverse presences around me, because, honestly, it really weirds me out to be in an inverse situation. Both to be outnumbered and to outnumber to the point of exclusion makes me incredibly uneasy, whether it's blacks and whites, women and men, Christians and atheists. Even being a witness to it gives an eerie layer to whatever I'm watching.

I guess I can understand the feeling of liberation from PC pressure. I certainly get annoyed at overboard attempts myself. But sometimes I think people dismiss it because they think we're done, we did our part. Many people of myriad backgrounds fought hard to be able to portray a stable, middle class black family on television, and that it was popular was a boon. Done. But I'd wager that many others who had never met one of those families let the possibility of the existence of others like them enter their minds and were better off for it. And probably still others, like me, became that much more comfortable with themselves and maybe even made it their mission to get to know lots of different kinds of people. Why does that have to stop, especially now when the anonymity of the internet and the divisiveness of our political landscape reveals that there are multitudes of closed minds out there? The closest thing we're getting now is having a completely opposite effect, with atrocious and embarrassing works from the likes of Tyler Perry.

A lot of those textbooks we used to have looked so laughably forced, and the friend groups formed on TV had so many easily identifiable token characters. But hopefully there are people out there for whom those situations were real life, and they'll create something feels a lot more natural and real. I think there are network television shows like that out there now, like "Community" and "Parks and Recreation." (Not to mention shows like "The Wire" and "Treme" -- of course cable is producing quality, diverse work) Fortunately, there are others out there who grew up in the '90s who will soon be in charge of creating the media that's pouring out into the world.