January 1, 2023

A loud noise over my headphones makes me pause the movie I'm watching. People are howling in the distance, and I hear a giddy 'happy new year' from the neighbouring rooftop. I'm almost startled it's midnight. I walk to the window and see a sky lit with fireworks. It's a beautiful night, but I can't take my thoughts away from the movie. The worst person in the world. 

The first scene of the movie was a bored Julie standing in a doctor's smock in the middle of an anatomy class. She looks bored; like she would give anything to be out of there. And out she goes. She picks psychology next, and then photography. It seems she can't decide what she wants to do with her life. She's a dabbler. She falls in love with Aksel; it is the kind of love that changes a person. Over the next couple years they build a relationship akin to family, and even though it is fraught with disagreements, they're happy. They're in love. 

Until she meets Eivind. Eivind makes her want to press the pause button. Just for a few moments, and have a taste of another life, where everyone else ceases to exist, and she can escape. It's not Eivind himself, but the idea of him and all the unknown possibility he holds that draws her in like a moth to a bright flame. I must admit, it is not an unfamiliar idea. I've often sought escapes and distractions myself. They come in different forms: people, places, things. But I always have to come back to reality and see that nothing and noone around me has changed in the span of time that it took me to dream of this different version of life. There's always an unasked "What if I changed course, turned my life in an entirely different direction?" looming over the distant horizon. For Julie, coming back to reality takes the shape of breaking up with Aksel. He stares in disbelief. 

"Are you yourself right now? Do you realise what you're destroying?", he asks. The answer comes clearly to Julie: "Of course", she says, "That's why it's so hard." 

I paused the movie then, to think about that. It took me back to the previous day, to a conversation I had with my friend. We were talking about things we had done which were probably huge mistakes, but somehow still worth it after all. I confessed to having felt that way recently. 

I'd been thinking about that conversation more and more, and by some strange coincidence I saw it mirrored in that scene. It gave me a sense of relief, most of all. So it's not the worst or most abnormal thing then, to step back and question the situation I've worked myself into, and realise that familiarity doesn't mean contentment. Seeing this panoply of my own thoughts mirrored in a movie was an unexpected comfort. Sometimes we're so driven in our relentless search for a sense of belonging; we seek it in the movies we watch, the songs we listen to, the books we read, and the people we meet. It's a rare reward to find it. That a fictional character in a movie has the ability to strike a chord and resonate with us is a wondrous experience. 

Over the rest of the movie, we follow Julie over big and small events. We see some of her coarsest, basest thoughts, and her reactions to people and events invoke horror and disgust. In the circus of her mind she looks down at herself and sees the body of an old woman, with skin that has lost the luster of youth and dissolved into formless wrinkles. A newborn suckles at her sagging breast as the faces of all the people in her life float around, looking on at the unsightly vision. 

But I think that that's the point. Every powerful emotion we feel has a darker and revolting side to it. Our deepest fears assume ugly shapes in our minds, and our simplest desires are uncannily close to revulsion. We never dare to speak them aloud, even to ourselves. Elif Batuman writes in Either/Or, "Love wasn't a slumber party with your best friend. Love was dangerous, violent, with an element of something repulsive; attraction had a permeable border with repulsion. Love had death in it, and madness. To try to escape those things was immature and anti-novelistic." While that is true about love, I believe it is true for all of our strongest feelings.  

Anyway, circling into a cycle of overthinking triggered by scenes from a movie or lines from a book is not unlike me. But It's one of the great things about being in your twenties, that you're so susceptible! I may only be floundering here, but I think the more I read and watch and listen, the more my capacity to feel increases. That's the biggest magic trick.