Windows on the World

I’m not going to go into too much analysis of what these various dialogues mean – otherwise this post will go on forever (and anyway, i don’t have any genuine desire to pick away at them)

How about getting this advice from a friend:

Valerie has figured out how to make her existence an insult to your dignity – that way, you loathe yourself for hating her, and she can keep debasing you and enjoy your paralysis. The only thing you have to learn is that hating her is neither fatal or foul. It’s normal….. and amusing. And you’re going to win.

Go lie down for a few hours. I would.

And then you might have an omniscient voice-over come into your head:

He (Paul) turned into devotion the vengeance he wished to inflict and which made her (Sylvia) quiver when she defied him. Their affair would have been so different had he stood up to her mean-spirited pleasure. She hated him both for ignoring her insufficiency and for seeing it too well. She loved him for the same reasons: she gloated in his admiration and felt “redeemable” by his concern and exertion. She’d finally met someone for whom all “this” wasn’t easy.

All of “this” isn’t easy. Who said life as a French fag smoking intellectual would be easy? It’s meant to be complicated, contorted by complex thought. That’s a French intellectuals job. To be carrying the burden of yours, mine, the worlds, thought on his skinny little shoulders.

Skinny shouldered wimp Paul gets stuck into Esther, the girl he’s wanted to finish with (for 10 years!)

I can’t go out with a girl if i don’t know how it will end. Love affairs are meant to end. They always end. It’s not my fault, it’s universal.

I carry the burden of your responsibility. It’s too heavy. I’m trapped. I’m becoming a loser. If i screw up my life I’ll never forgive you. I wish we’d won, but we’re losing. I’m drained. You can’t help me”

Poor sad self-pitying Esther:

You were, and still are, in my faith, my hope, and in my love….Your absence falls asleep against my spirit.

Her face is bloated with crying her eyes out for her lost Paul.

While Paul is pre-occupied with his other 2 “affairs”. Nutty Valerie scares him:

You see yourself in me. Because you admire me. I’m flattered. You see yourself in me, so you want to destroy me and be the original. You want to tame me. Or else you’d be kind. To please me. To keep me.

Back to that Voice-over again (Voice-Over knows best):

Paul is mistaken. Val doesn’t need kindness. Her lack of tenderness is not hard to explain. It’s simply a question of Valerie’s nature. As Kundera wrote: “Tenderness is the fear of adulthood”. Valerie fears nothing of the sort, having no childhood nostalgia. A child wholly integrated into the adult world, she is furious that anyone else can stake claim to childhood.

Makes me want to read Kundera novels again. Just so i could have a bit of fun trying think into his way of thinking. So the above could mean that: tenderness is a lack of independence, a childish need to be dependent (on mother), a sentimental clinging onto nostalgia for childhood, when life was safer, when living was sweeter (not my experience at all) But i don’t totally go along with it; “tenderness” doesn’t have to be a negative expression, “a “fear of”; it can be close to something kinder – like compassion.

Paul is getting as troubled by Valerie as he is sick of Esther:

You’re the sad one. You want connections and ties. You want to enter my mind and me to enter yours. That’s because you’re sad. And because I’m happy. I love you as an object. I found you pretty. I wanted to reach out, to touch you, to grab you.

Sounds pretty self-serving Paul. He is. They all are. And despite all the sophisticated thought and convoluted self-analysis,  Paul is immature:

There’s one pleasure I’ll always feel, even when I’m depressed, or in a rut, or when i can’t move. It’ll never change. It’s the surprise when i stick my hand in the panties of a girl i don’t know. It scares me each times. It’s always different. And it’s so strange. But it’s the moment when i feel alive. Some people say it’s always the same. That a pussy’s a pussy. But each girl is so incredibly different down there. When you tell people they say, “Just get used to it. Grow up” Some people frown and say, “I hope there’s more to your life than that!” But that’s my greatest pleasure, when i realise life’s worth living even if it’s unbearable. It’s not Heidegger climbing some fucking mountain. No, it’s the girls face, it’s your fear as you pull back the elastic, her belly…..you see? There’s nothing better in life.

He’d probably have a less neurotically interesting life if he stuck his head into Heidegger rather than sticking his hands down girlies panties. His “sex life” contaminates his thought life. No, I’ll reverse that: it’s his thought life that contaminates his sex life.

Esther can’t get over “losing” Paul:

What kind of love do you have? What kind of love can come to a halt? I want you to love me to death, forever!.

There’s a Voice Over at the end, making a final judgment:

For 10 years, Esther filled a role – which had existed before her and would exist after. This (Paul’s) involuntary cynicism seemed to destroy 10 years of memories. He loved only himself. Tho he was no longer with her, he carried her within himself indelibly. He would always be, “Paul who’d been 10 years with Esther” The old Paul was dead. He did not live for naught.

Which seems to be putting a gloss on, a way of extracting a judicious verdict on what we’ve been watching for the last 3 hours. “He did not live for naught” is either a hopeless translation or a some kind of grandiose summing up, neat – but ludicrous.

The statement that rings truest is: “He loved only himself”.

That judgement sums this film up perfectly.

Thought it might be an idea to include some of the dialogue from L’ennui in a separate post. Then i can take my film reviewer hat off and put my “analysis” hat on.

We’ve got philosopher Martin, who’s up to his eyebrows in heady abstraction:

“A man without sublimation is pathetic, a lunatic with a tyrannical penis, and a tiny brain“

He’s saying at the beginning. But that’s before he’s met the exasperatingly elusive obscure object of desire Cecelia.

He can’t talk to Cecelia because she doesn’t know – or like – to talk in his funny abstract way about things. She hasn’t read Lacan or Freud. So he dumps his angsty (psycho) analysis onto the head of his ex-wife:

“She’s totally uninteresting. I’m trying to get rid of her. She bores me. I have no contact with her. Or rather only physical contact. She is so basic. She has no conversation. When she speaks she sounds silent. Her only means of expression is sexual. I find her cunt more expressive than her mouth. Yet, oddly, she is not sensual, she’s only frenetic and avid. When she kisses her lips are flaccid, cold, inert, but her cunt is hard-hitting, domineering. She is unstoppable. She goes at me, goes at herself, to make me come, make herself come, to the last spasm“

Her way of making love does come across as “frenetic and avid” in the film. Like she’s programmed to go into automatic thrusting and gyrating mode with her thighs, pumping her cunt out around his cock like an animated sex-doll.

He wants to get soulfully inside her soul. But it seems like she doesn’t have one:

“Sometimes she seems vacuous and opaque like an object. I bring her to life by making her suffer, by tormenting her. She is making me a sadist because she bores me“

He got her running around his flat in the noddy performing inane requests; to manipulative her like an object; and also to see how far he could push her out of her automatic “thingness”, into a reaction, a feeling, some evidence of life existing  – behind her opaqueness  – from within her soul.

“The more i take her the less i own her. Making love so often uses up the energy i’d need to possess her”

Personally I think he would have been better off sublimating the energy of his desire elsewhere – and not bothering to possess her, cus there’s nothing much about her to own. But then we wouldn’t have had a film to watch. So the fascination becomes in seeing how tyrannised by his cock he becomes, how shrunk his brainy brain becomes (to the size of a tiny pea in a pea-shooter!) And how much jealousy and lunacy get sprung from the loins of  his neurotic, philosophic personality.

He’s constantly riling her, prodding and provoking her, trying to get at and get in to where she might be – truly and really be – inside. But he’s getting nowhere, she seems literally “mindless”:

“What am i meant to say?. I’ve nothing to say. I haven’t thought. You see beds not what people are like. I don’t see the detail. I only see if people are nice or not”.

What you gonna do Martin? Give up, i would. “Nice” isn’t for you. “Nice is meaningless”. You want more than nice – you want meaning:

“My mind is empty. Cecelia’s escaping me. I can’t possess her. My spirit’s empty because reality escapes me“

To possess her you’d have to become like her, to be her “reality”. And her reality seems to be blank, bland, banal, boring – an ennui. At the core of her soul is the boredom you are trying to escape from.

“Are you ever bored?” says Martin. “Sometimes, yes”

“What do you feel?” says Martin. “Boredom”

“What is this boredom?” says Martin. “Boredom is boredom”.

“It’s much more than that” says Martin.

It is Martin. Well, your kind of boredom is. It’s existential ennui. It’s the inescapable emptiness inside the heart of things. It’s the desire that enflames your soul with the energy of despair. It’s all those questions and the wanting to know, that you have to know exists – as understanding – inside your heady head head. It’s the dreadful realisation that: the bigger your cock gets, the tinier your brain becomes.

Does boredom brings “being” into existence?. Not for Cecelia:

“If someone never considers something, that thing doesn’t exist. To me, religion doesn’t exist. Religion is boring“

So best not to be “considering” boredom. Best not to think about it. Then it won’t exist. It will go away, vanish; disappear into the emptiness where it belongs. And then you can get on and do non-boring things like fucking your brains out (literally) whenever you want, with whoever you want.

Which means Cecelia can fuck Martin. Then she can go fuck Momo (who’s younger – and seems more “fun” than “dull” head-fucky Martin) Which of course Martin gets – understandably – quite upset about:

“You’re like a hungry beast, you’re his, you’re mine, our semen mixes in your belly. You’re a whore“

I guess it had to come down to that in the end. That’s she’s a “whore”. Just cus she enjoys some mindless sex. And likes orgasms. And isn’t all dull and boring about it – making it “mean” something more than it actually is. Fucking is fucking. “Boredom is boredom”. Eggs is eggs.

Martin tries to kill himself.

“I tried to die really. Now i believe one mustn’t die of despair, but feed off one’s despair. Not die of it, but live off it. Live at any price“.

But he survives. To live on. Live off his despair. And maybe even enjoy it. Go on Martin! Cus now maybe you’ve also realised what despair was all along: just boredom fipped upside down!

Ok, I’m taking my Analysts hat off now (it was hurting my ears)