35 Shots of Rum

By: Claire Denis (French)

A family drama that focuses on blood ties and household relations, this film is mellow compared to our reading of Oscar Wao for the week. Lionel a widower has realized that Josephine has grown up and will eventually leave him. The real life emotion of having someone leave your side after being your sole companion for so long is relatable. I know my parents had a similar feeling when I left for college. This situation speaks to many in different ways.  It’s a movie of moving on and the shifting of structure. For example, Lionel dancing with the restaurant owner, the passion is obvious. Gabrielle is heartbroken. Josephine and Noe light up the dance floor as well. Afterwards everyone’s relationships have been altered with just one scene. Lionel realizes he has freedom from Gabrielle. Freedom is a recurring theme. It is especially reminded to us in the footage of the trains. We are shown trains at day and trains at night. Josephine and Lionel both ride in the trains. Lionel is a train driver which speaks to his life (stuck) in that situation, not being able to choose what he wants. There is a big difference between riding the train and driving the train. Trains made me think of Oscar and his attempted suicide.  The train was a deciding factor for him as well. Freedom to let go of everything burdening his life or to stick it out. He chose to jump but the golden mongoose had another fate for him. I think freedom is a big part of the Brief Wondrous Life.. too. Everyone in that book has the chance at freedom and to break the curse but they are continually creating more trouble for themselves and choosing the wrong path. Their relationships (like this movie) are about family. Daughters and sons and mother’s and father’s.  Except Josephine and Lionel have a much stronger relationship to each other then Beli and her children or with her own mother.

Both Claire Denis and Junot Diaz have the ability to create characters we care for. The emotions in both this movie and the book have the power to be both leading and misleading. We see that in Oscar Wao with his relationship with girls in his life, his mother Beli was blind sided by the Gangster, and Lola broke up with a boy that she later reflected, really loved her.  The power of creating compelling characters is a real art. Junot and Denis have styles that can help writers with their form. Junot has the ability to make light of dark situations without taking away their meaning and Denis has the talent of creating powerful characters. I can understand why the book and movie were chosen together.  Being able to write about family relations is directly related to what I’m writing.  In fact my writing could use some laughing points like Diaz has or simple but strong dynamics like Denis’s movie.

My project is finally finished. It’s different from what I’ve made before. I’m not sure if I’ve ever tackled a social justice issue before, but this was one close to home. Until being in college, I had never before heard so many stories of sexual assault from other females. They all seemed to have their own horror story; being danced on without consent, taken, drunk, into another room at a party, catcalled while on a run, stalked, unwanted hands on inner thighs… and worse. 

A rage comes up in me. I feel rage that these sorts of situations have become “the norm” for women to experience. And it’s most often the women who are blamed for someone else making the decision to sexually assault them. Women are being blamed instead of men being educated on this subject. Boys need to be taught how to respectfully treat girls. I also feel frustration at how unaware men are to this issue, to the injustices women face. Good dudes, who’d never harm a woman, are still extremely unfamiliar to the issues of sexual assault. So many guys unsure what feminism actually means. It’s still treated like a dirty word; many women even shy away from the term. 

A week or so after I’d been at Evergreen I went into the woods at night with two new friends I’d made, both guys. They had only shown me kindness since I’d known them, but as we went deeper into the woods, I became increasingly afraid that they might do something to me. I eventually voiced that I wanted to head back, because of a fear of the dark. They walked me back and apologized, wishing I’d feel better. We still are friends, and they’re very lovely people, but that night in the woods I was almost convinced something terrible was going to happen. My situation had provoked fear: I was in the dark woods, alone, with two guys I didn’t really know, who could overpower me if they wanted to. I’d heard about situations like that, and they all ended badly. 

After that night, I was interested in the fact that’d I’d become so afraid of two perfectly good dudes. I decided to make a film about it. I realized that if something bad had happened, I might’ve been blamed for even putting myself in such a situation. “You shouldn’t have been with two guys alone. You should’ve been more aware of your surroundings.” It was “to be expected”. I could’ve been blamed for the decisions of two other people to harm me. Victim blaming is a huge issue. Thankfully nothing bad happened, not even close, but the whole experience made me think. I’m not so sure I would’ve made the film if that experience didn’t occur.

What a fucking week… It’s been brilliant, crazy, chaotic, and scary. I’ve had my fair share of ups and downs this week. Yesterday I began my first film as an actor and wrecked my car shortly after. I worked the late shift every night and woke up at the crack of dawn. I made some new connections but I forgot where my heart ought to be. I miss my baby sister. She’s already grown so much. 5 weeks old. I think I’m falling in love and I’m remembering what it’s like to love and be loved. Couscous is delicious. I need a goddamn nap…

When I was kid my buddy Kyler and I would go off romping in the woods around Hansen Elementary School with straight sticks for swords and curved sticks for bows, hooking rubber band chains around each end of the stick, and we would pretend we were warriors and survivors straight out of Tolkien, renegades traversing the land. Hordes of bad guys would come charging at us and we’d fend them off with arrows and sword blows and then we’d wander through the trees looking for a post-battle meal of some poor slain animal.

I always had it in my mind that it was an impossibility, pure fantasy that I loved to imagine and play out in my mind, but probably would never attempt, probably didn’t even want to. Survival like that always sounded romantic and rugged, but lonely, which is what I feared the most, being stranded somewhere alone without the warmth and camaraderie of another human. 

“I wouldn’t care,” Kyler said. He had no qualms, no reservation in imagining a life without friends or family. I always got the sense that he didn’t much care about his home life, a thought that made my stomach sink. I would have felt terrible if I left my family, terrible for how sad they would be discovering my empty bed, for how lonely I would be wandering through the world alone. 

But Kyler was always defiant, hot-headed, had the me-against-the-world syndrome something fierce. He was growing up without much of a dad – his dad was always away on a fishing boat in Alaska or somewhere, and when he wasn’t, he was drinking – and he hated most of the jarheads and knuckleheads and softies that his mother dated. 

“He was never around when I was a kid!” he blurted out drunkenly one summer night, his words loud and rolling. “And now he is around and he’s still not here!”

We were up in the hills of Capitol Forest, roasting weenies and burgers over a fire-pit filled with beer cans and empty liquor bottles. We all laughed at him, and somebody yelled out “daddy issues!” and we all laughed some more. 

Later that night we threw logs and decomposing stumps on the roof of his Subaru and drove through the trees whooping and hollering into the night. We rolled over bumps and into divots and through deep, muck. He popped the car over an especially rowdy bump in the road and the biggest log on the roof bounced high and slammed down onto the wagon’s trunk lid. The window shattered and glass cascaded down into the trunk and everyone shouted “shit!” and “goddamn!”, and in the morning while everyone rubbed their heads and remembered, Kyler laughed manically and sipped a morning beer and raised his arms to the valley rolling towards the west. 

He’s got a kid now, if you can believe it. A little boy that I haven’t met yet. Little trouble maker probably. No doubt Kyler will be a better dad than his was. Another young man learning how not to be. 

This week’s seminar was great! I loved that we got passionately engaged with the text. My “personal” project is at a critical stage (I’ll be done with the first draft hopefully at the end of next week), and due to what I am demanding of myself, I end up demanding that of the texts we read. If they don’t overcome my critical faculty (that part of my mind that scours my writing to make it as good as I can), then I end up saying of that text: this is crap! 

So, I criticized Diaz, holding him up to the standard that I hold myself to. During my time at Evergreen there’s always that opinion that surfaces, where someone will balk at artistic standards, saying “Everything is as good as everything else, who are we to judge?”

And who are we to judge? We are students, trying to get better as writers, or communicators, or storytellers, or filmmakers. If we say at the beginning: “There’s no right answer; everything is as good as everything else.” Where will we end up? Will we have learned anything? Will we be better off for spending 10 weeks on 10 films and 10 books?

I don’t think we would be.

So, I criticize. I spend my mornings writing, my afternoons reading, and my evenings feeling anxious–like I left something out, or did something wrong. It’s a version of hell, forcing myself to produce the best I possibly can. And when I encountered Diaz I felt like he wasn’t really trying. I felt like he had taken a bunch of elements that other writers have come up with and done much better (switches of perspective, magic realism, the informative footnote), and he superimposed these over a family drama with a backdrop of immigration and Caribbean politics–and then he called it good.

To me, it wasn’t good enough. And maybe that’s a better statement than simply saying “it’s crap!”

It’s not good enough… nothing is good enough! Every morning I reach into the page and try to make a mess that’s correctable in an interesting way. I record my writing and play it back to myself, to make sure every syllable, every word, every sentence is in the right place, that they all sound right, read right, make the right kind of sense. Nothing is good enough and it never will be, but every now and then there are these sentences or passages or scenes that stand apart from me and my anxiety and my ambition–and I feel: that’s the right one, the right way done, thanks God for distracting me enough to get that out.

Michelangelo said that genius is infinite patience. I think genius is a profound sensitivity wed to a profound sense of dissatisfaction. A sensitivity to what is there, in life, in people, in things–and a sense of dissatisfaction with how it’s already been thought about, recorded, edited, presented.

What pisses me off the most about works of art is when I get the sense that the writer is satisfied with himself, herself. There shouldn’t be any of that left over, by the time the work reaches its audience–all that ego and that limpness needs to be put in place–to serve the work–to add something new to the conversation of culture.

Words to live by: