Two Films

Posted on May 15, 2007 in Film Reflections Stigma

I popped Magnolia into the tape deck last night for another viewing and a sing-along with the music of [[Aimee Mann]]. (“Now that I’ve met you/Would you object to/Never seeing each other again?”) The best way to watch this movie is to just follow along with the music, which features opiate orchestral segments as well as selections from [[Supertramp]]. Several stories come together at once, but the theme of the film is the One Big Coincidence that we all exist in. (If you’ve seen this, no spoilers please. You know what I am talking about.)

When you look at an ensemble piece, you might ask “which one of these people is most like me?” I find that for myself there’s pieces of me scattered all over — though I must protest that any characterization of me as having the morals of Frank T.J. Mackey (played to the hilt by [[Tom Cruise]]) is in error. The first time I viewed the movie, I related to the story of Quiz Kid Donnie Smith (played by [[William Macy]]). As I moved through life and subsequent viewings, the cop ([[John C. Reilly]]) and the nurse ([[Phillip Seymour Hoffman]]) contained flecks of my character. The beauty of Magnolia and the One Big Coincidence is that we can find ourselves in others if we dispense with an irrevocable sense of individuality. The wonder is that we retain identities for ourselves. Was this an issue before the age of psychoanalysis and novels, I wonder?

The mailbox will soon bring new things to watch, but I want to comment on [[Roman Polanski|Roman Polanski’s]] Repulsion, the tale of a mentally disturbed woman with a decided aversion to sex. It’s another film that the frightened can relate to, though I have to say that it seems to be more of an outsider’s view of what mental illness leads to rather than the real thing. Still, I was moved by the fear that governed [[Catherine Deneuve|Catherine Deneuve’s]] relations with men and solitude. Many hallucinations pepper this film and you have to watch hard to determine what parts are real.

In our time, a director picking up the same story might create an interesting character by fusing her with Claudia from Magnolia. DeNeuve’s actions become more explicable in the context of child abuse. Polanski, however, answers no questions, gives no early history: He just scares us to death.

We have here a relic of an age where the function of the mentally ill was to create an Other, an antagonist, not to give us insight into the nature of the faces we wear and the personalities that those visages conceal. On the edges of this archetype, Polanski dredges a tractable monster from the swamp of stigma.

[tags]film,stigma,mental illness,film noire,movies,identity[/tags]