Mental 📸: After Yang, John Franklin Bardin, Mailer, The Trap

They’ve been doing work on the apartment above mine, which has made sleep a little rough. I’m trying to look at it is a meditative practice to see if I can hold a thought in my head while trying to work in a construction zone. Fingers crossed they wrap up whatever they’re doing this afternoon.

A portrait inside my head:

🎬After Yang (2021)

I adored Kogonda’s Columbus, which I’d first seen at the Brattle and recently rewatched, so I was really excited to see this one. It has plenty of big ideas, though I wish it’d had more if it’s going to take that tack. Still, Kogonda is a master of the little moments, and it’s the little moments that make it. My favorite scene might be when Mika wakes up to get a glass of water and interrupts her father watching Yang’s memories, which was beautifully executed.  

🎬The Trap (2007)
Adam Curtis’s stuff is always fascinating. I love the idea of investigating how our conceptions of freedom have led to important social outcomes. The film paints with incredibly broad strokes, and it’s easy to quibble over a million details—both historical and conceptual. Still, it’s provocative, and works for a popular audience rarely if ever take on this type of important approach.  

On a personal level, it felt very characteristic of the intellectual climate of its time, which for me lines up with undergrad and my first experiences reading topics covered in the film like Isaiah Berlin, game theory, US foreign policy in Iraq, etc. As strange as it might sound about a film like The Trap, it had a certain nostalgic value for me.

📚The Deadly Percheron by John Franklin Bardin (1946)

I read this weird little book that plays with the potential depth of pulpy noir over the winter. I’ve been thinking a lot about memory recently, and this passage came back to me:

“Memories exist whole in the mind; to put them down in words demands sequence, a sense of time and space, of then and now. But when one remembers an event that belongs to the far past and relates it to another happening that belongs to yesterday, these memories exist together simultaneously—they are both, for a moment, now, not then. And so it had been with me when I stretched out on the bed in my small room, shut my eyes and with the blotting out of sight closed down upon the present, let the lost past seize me and hold me fast. I saw it whole, lived it all again – not in an hour, or even in several minutes, but in a single, incalculable instant….” (35)

📚The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer (1948)

I’m about 25% of the way through it. There’s much more to like here than I expected. Of course the combat scenes are beautifully rendered and illuminating for historical reasons. I would make a similar point about the book’s account of the antisemitism and covert fascism in the US army during WWII. But it’s really the scenes that explore the soldiers’ backstories that resonate with me; I thought the “time machine” chapter on Croft was particularly effective and dark This is my first time reading TNATD, and I’m curious to see where it goes.