Splash No. 267 - Open to Feeling
On Friday, I went to the office for the first time in a couple weeks due to having covid. I still had lasting fatigue and the office turned out to be mostly empty, so I headed home early and collapsed onto my couch. I’d spent a lot of time alone in my apartment by this point, and since I’ve been attempting to consume art that moves me, I’ve been watching a lot of movies. For the most part, I’ve been trying to watch some of the classics, like The Godfather and Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957). These films have delivered— offering awe and amazement, but none of them really hit me as hard as the movie I landed on on Friday: Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express (1994).
Wong Kar-wai is a Hong Kong film director who is best known for his 2002 drama In the Mood for Love, which exemplifies his style of filmmaking that plays with angles, colors, and setting with a focus on mood and atmosphere over pretty much anything else. His films have open-ended stories with little exposition, vignettes of the lives of characters that sometimes weave into each other’s lives.
The plot to Chungking Express doesn’t matter much because it’s truly about the characters. In the film, each character is consumed by their emotion, acting in incomprehensible ways that don’t necessarily seem realistic, but somehow feel so human and tender in their own ways. Most of the film covers relatively mundane moments, but they’re captured to feel important.
I was struck by how one of the main characters anthropomorphized the objects in his life while dealing with his breakup — his sopping towel wasn’t just wet from his shower, but it was crying at the loss of his girlfriend; his waning bar of soap wasn’t just being rubbed away, it was losing weight out of distress. He spoke to them lovingly, chiding their emotionality. It was silly and whimsical and touching and so free. Another character regularly breaks into her love interest’s house and spends her time cleaning and redecorating it even though she can barely look him in the eyes. It’s bizarre and so are people, especially when they don’t know how to handle emotions that can’t help but spill out.
I loved these characters because I wanted to be like them — able to let the emotions take over and paint my reality, regardless of how silly they were. Despite my emotionality, I’ve always been reasonable and rational, hedging every desire and feeling in favor of being realistic. I think about how I never let myself believe I could get into any of my dream colleges to avoid the disappointment. Whenever people ask me what my dreams are or what I dreamt of doing when I was younger, I struggle to find an answer. I was the ten-year-old looking up salaries before I answered, “what do you wanna be when you grow up?” I’ve let rationality guide my life for as long as I can remember and it’s served me well but it cannot be everything.
What would it be like if I could let myself recklessly feel? To not only have a crush, but let it consume me, even if it would inevitably lead to disappointment or hurt? What if I could imagine bigger projects that I fall in love with, especially if they’re unlikely to work out? The worst that could come of any of these things is another human experience, even if that experience is crushing. And perhaps some of these things would work out, and I’d suddenly have access to parts of life that I never even considered were possible before. At the very least, it all sounds a lot more freeing.
After watching the film, I imagined what it would be like to take pictures of my friends as we lived lives like the characters in the movies. I bought a used camera that’s small and portable and started reading about editing techniques to make my photos and videos look a little bit like Wong Kar-wai’s films. In order to feel these feelings more fully, I also want to capture these feelings like Kar-wai does. The rational brain tells me how stupid I’ll look lugging my camera around or how my pictures or videos won’t ever hold a candle to his work or how I’ll never actually do it. I want to ignore it.
I want to imagine the most beautiful version of events and become emotionally attached to it and reach for it like my life depends on it. I want to let the sunlight fall perfectly across my life and not be too afraid to take a picture of it. For once.
Drops of the Week
PLAYLIST - headbobbin - a few songs that make me bob my head
FILM - Legally Blonde - obviously I recommend Chungking Express, but I also saw this movie for the first time and it was so good
POEM - "Letter to the Person Who Carved His Initials into the Oldest Living Longleaf Pine in North America" by Matthew Olzmann - Tell me what it’s like to live without/ curiosity, without awe.
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With feeling,
Nikhil