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High overhead, isn’t half of the night sky standing above the sorrow in us, the disquieted garden? Imagine that you are no longer walking through your grief grown wild, no longer looked at the stars through the jagged leaves of the dark tree of pain.

– Rainer Maria Rilke

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facing the modern

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My review of the British Museum exhibition, “South Africa: The Art of a Nation,” published in Apollo magazine, January 2017

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I will teach you my townspeople how to perform a funeral for you have it over a troop of artists ... you have the ground sense necessary

– William Carlos Williams

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Sudden good news Two or three clouds of rock-crystal Hours tall as high tide Crash of white plumes in the night sky … Worlds made of images suspended from spiderweb

- Octavio Paz

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THOUGHTS ON MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE

I recently re-watched Sean Durkin’s disturbing drama, Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011). This film strikes me as a neglected gem: a beautifully crafted treatment of manipulation, madness, and despair. Despite the fact that, for two hours, it only becomes steadily more oppressive and bleak, the use of different narrative strands and seductive cinematography are such that you can't help but become fully absorbed. Elizabeth Olsen, meanwhile, gives us a mesmerizing portrait of psychological disintegration. A few thoughts, then, about how all of this is done.

The subject of the film, who we’ll call Martha – although at times she assumes all the names in the film’s title – escapes from a Manson family-style cult living on a commune in the Catskills, into the apparent safety of her older sister’s care. Here, however, in the serene setting of a lakeside Connecticut home, she finds herself adrift in a world of paranoia, to the extent that reality and hallucination finally become inseparable.

Insanity has long held a special allure for dramatists, because there are few things so darkly fascinating as the notion that we could continue existing in the world without a stable sense of reality. In Shakespeare (notably King Lear), madness is epic. Characters who have lost everything, whether through fate or hubris, loose their minds as well. Conversely, in modern drama, insanity often dramatizes the individual’s fragility and vulnerability to delusion, as in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1947).

Martha Marcy May Marlene gives us something altogether less tangible. As Martha’s different names suggest, madness here is the loss of cohesive identity, or perhaps the realisation of never having found one to begin with. This is subtly conveyed in various aspects of the film, but most notably through its split narrative: from scene to scene, we alternate between present and past. Martha’s gradual disintegration in the comfort of her sister Lucy’s home unfolds simultaneously with the traumatic experiences that brought it about: her time on the commune, where her already confused sense of self was stripped away by indoctrination and ritual violence.

Identity is almost synonymous with memory – the “self” is a psychic object which we construct in our minds by assigning meaning to our experiences, and threading them together into a narrative. Martha cannot face the past, and so is left with nothing to constitute an identity. It is implied that a broken family history is what draws her to the cult in the first place, and Lucy’s attempts to help her fail tragically because Martha cannot bring herself to talk about what she has been through. The persistent flashbacks show the impossibility of trying to dissolve identity altogether. Since Martha is incapable of ordering or even acknowledging past events, they intrude violently into her mind, and deny her a grasp of reality.

Martha’s haunted subjectivity is also diffused into the aesthetic of the film. This is a visually intoxicating piece of work, with a luminous richness of colour and careful framing giving every scene a distinctly uneasy beauty. The scenes at the commune have a bare, unforgiving atmosphere; those at Lucy’s home distant and superficial, with the dark, glassy waters of the lake beside the house coming to represent the unknowable void of Martha’s existence.

There are always cynics who dismiss this as the sensibility of the Instagram generation. And yet, we’ve long known that schizophrenics are capable of disturbingly intense sensory experiences, described by one as “sensations of unreality: illimitable vastness, brilliant light, and the gloss and smoothness of material things.” The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan ascribed this almost hallucinatory state, in which the present appears both hopelessly detached and overwhelming in its pure contingency, to an inability to place events in their context of past and future.

Yet what gives this film a tragic quality is not so much the suffering of Martha, but more it suggestion that, due to the fundamentally irreconcilable needs and motives of human beings, this suffering will never end. The film is cruelly realistic in that, despite being full of torture and misery, there are no villains – only individuals struggling to furnish their own lives with meaning.

 It is clear to us, for instance, that the egalitarian ideals of the brutal cult leader, played by John Hawkes, are a means of manipulating and exploiting the vulnerable young women who find their way to the commune. And yet, even as he drugs and rapes each new convert, there is no doubting that he really does believe what he professes to.

This worldview is neatly contrasted with that of Lucy and her property developer husband, who does his best with the petulant Martha, but ultimately rejects her when it becomes clear that her apathy towards the norms of adulthood is unbreakable. Martha, for her part, seems unwilling to accept that any sort of regeneration is possible among the sterile commodities of her new home. Despite being in a state of absolute emotional and material dependency, she tells her host: “It’s not your fault that you learned to measure success by money and possessions. It’s just not the right way to live.”

By taking this moral stance, Martha is clearly getting at the question of identity: she implies that the way you live is in some fundamental sense equivalent to  who you are. And so, when Martha goes on to say “there are other ways to live,” it is clear that a defining moment in the film has arrived. What are these other ways? Her answer, banal as it is, expresses succinctly the profound hopelessness of her situation: “People should just exist.”

Works cited:

Marguerite  Séchehaye, Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl, cited in Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, Verso, (London:1991), p. 27

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“Every day you play with the light of the universe.”

(Pablo Neruda)

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Two unforgiving summer days: Athens and Catalonia

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The enamelled moon / rode over the long cool world / as we stepped outside to get some air. // Birds from other area codes / sang their Precambrian songs, // the light pulse of the seminary / faded in the wax trees.

David Berman

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The Deluge

(etching & aquatint)

“And one morning all that was burning,

one morning the bonfires

leapt out of the earth

devouring human beings –

and from then on fire,

gunpowder from then on,

and from then on blood.”

Pablo Neruda

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A poem from another season.

These were not better times.

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Who died today

               goodbye

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The eyes roll asleep as if turned by the wind and the lids flutter open slightly like a wing. The world is an iceberg, so much is invisible! and was and is, and yet the form, it may be sleeping too.

Frank O’Hara, “Sleeping on the Wing”

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Published in Poetry London, Autumn 2016

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The sky is a net crammed with shadowy fish.

– Pablo Neruda