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Turning Red (2022) dir. Domee Shi // Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) dir. Daniels

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okay so i’m re-listening to les mis and i’ve gotten to a little fall of rain (éponine’s death) and i started thinking. how would you do rain onstage, for theatres or productions that couldn’t? (keep in mind i have not actually seen les mis done onstage) and THEN i thought about what if the rain isn’t rain.

éponine is the only one who comments on the rain, and right before she does, marius says that her blood is “everywhere”

so i’m thinking, and bear with me here, marius feels the back of her head (her wound) and head wounds bleed a lot, especially a fatal one. so he lifts his hand to look at the blood, commenting “oh god, it’s everywhere” a few droplets fall onto éponine’s cheek/face/wherever and she’s so out of it that she misconstrues her own blood as rain.

éponine responds to this with (paraphrased) “don’t worry marius, i’m not in pain” and then (verbatim) “a little fall of rain can hardly hurt me now.”

the other things she says about the rain are “[it] will make the flowers grow” “[it] will wash away what’s passed” and “the rain that brings [marius] here is heaven blessed” which with the last one could be that her wound/her blood bringing him to her side.

marius says nothing about it, until he’s reassuring her as their lyrics overlap à la les mis, sounding as if he’s comforting her with her own words.

and then i had to sit down for a minute.

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Pop culture reduces It’s a Wonderful Life to that last half hour, and thinks the whole thing is about this guy traveling to an alternate universe where he doesn’t exist and a little girl saying, “Every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings.” A hokey, sugary fantasy. A light and fluffy story fit for Hallmark movies.

But this reading completely glosses over the fact that George Bailey is actively suicidal. He’s not just standing there moping about, “My friends don’t like me,” like some characters do in shows that try to adapt this conceit to other settings. George’s life has been destroyed. He’s bankrupt and facing prison. The lifetime of struggle we’ve been watching for the last two hours has accomplished nothing but this crushing defeat, and he honestly believes that the best thing he can do is kill himself because he’s worth more dead than alive. He would have thrown himself from a bridge had an actual angel from heaven not intervened at the last possible moment.

That’s dark. The banker villain that pop culture reduces to a cartoon purposely drove a man to the brink of suicide, which only a miracle pulled him back from. And then George Bailey goes even deeper into despair. He not only believes that his future’s not worth living, but that his past wasn’t worth living. He thinks that every suffering he endured, every piece of good that he tried to do was not only pointless, but actively harmful, and he and the world would be better off if he had never existed at all.

This is the context that leads to the famed alternate universe of a million pastiches, and it’s absolutely vital to understanding the world that George finds. It’s there to specifically show him that his despondent views about his effect on the universe are wrong. His bum ear kept him from serving his country in the war–but the act that gave him that injury was what allowed his brother to grow up to become a war hero. His fight against Potter’s domination of the town felt like useless tiny battles in a war that could never be won–but it turns out that even the act of fighting was enough to save the town from falling into hopeless slavery. He thought that if it weren’t for him, his wife would have married Sam Wainwright and had a life of ease and luxury as a millionaire’s wife, instead of suffering a painful life of penny-pinching with him. Finding out that she’d have been a spinster isn’t, “Ha ha, she’d have been pathetic without you.” It’s showing him that she never loved Wainwright enough to marry him, and that George’s existence didn’t stop her from having a happier life, but saved her from having a sadder one. Everywhere he turns, he finds out that his existence wasn’t a mistake, that his struggles and sufferings did accomplish something, that his painful existence wasn’t a tragedy but a gift to the people around him.

Only when he realizes this does he get to come back home in wild joy over the gift of his existence. The scenes of hope and joy and love only exist because of the two hours of struggle and despair that came before. Even Zuzu’s saccharine line about bells and angel wings exists, not as a sugary proverb, but as a climax to Clarence’s story–showing that even George’s despair had good effect, and that his newfound thankfulness for life causes not only earthly, but heavenly joy.

If this movie has light and hope, it’s not because it exists in some fantasy world where everything is sunshine and rainbows, but because it fights tooth and nail to scrape every bit of hope it can from our all too dark and painful world. The light here exists, not because it ignores the dark, but because the dark makes light more precious and meaningful. The light exists in defiance of the dark, the hope in defiance of despair, and there is nothing saccharine about that. It’s just about as realistic as it gets.

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Oh

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eleven

by Archibald MacLeish

And summer mornings the mute child, rebellious, Stupid, hating the words, the meanings, hating The Think now, Think, the O but Think! would leave On tip-toe the three chairs on the verandah And crossing tree by tree the empty lawn Push back the shed door and upon the sill Stand pressing out the sunlight from his eyes And enter and with outstretched fingers feel The grind-stone and behind it the bare wall And turn and in the corner on the cool Hard earth sit listening. And one by one, Out of the dazzled shadow in the room The shapes would gather, the brown plowshare, spades, Mattocks, the polished helves of picks, a scythe Hung from the rafters, shovels, slender tines Glinting across the curve of sickles — shapes Older than men were, the wise tools, the iron Friendly with earth. And sit there quiet breathing The harsh dry smell of withered bulbs, the faint Odor of dung, the silence. And outside Beyond the half-shut door the blind leaves And the corn moving. And at noon would come Up from the garden, his hard crooked hands Gentle with earth, his knees still earth-stained, smelling Of sun, of summer, the old gardener, like A priest, like an interpreter, and bend Over his baskets. And they would not speak: They would say nothing. And the child would sit there Happy as though he had no name, as though He had been no one: like a leaf, a stem, Like a root growing —

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i am so tired of watching what i say

because you don’t

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hi, port in the storm

it’s me, a turbulent ship

that is out to sea

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there are things that anger me.

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i am thinking about You. why would you do such a thing. why. i am filled with righteous anger and i hate you. i’ve known you since we were seven. i wasn’t your friend until we were fourteen. it’s a funny thing, how i’ve never really thought to hate you before now. but you hurt my friend. and yeah, you’re my friend too. but i need to stand by her side.

you will never see this. you will never know. maybe you’ll have a really clever apology and everyone will go back to being friends.

but i am writing this down to remember.

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since im on a roll about tragedies:

i am sick to death of fourth wall breaks that are funny. i want fourth wall breaks that make me want to cry.

give me hamlet looking up during his monologue to see the audience and plead with them for help. give me orpheus, on the road back up from the underworld begging us to make sure eurydice is there, to tell him she is safe. give me orpheus turning when the audience stays silent.

give me someone, bloody and full of tears monologuing to the camera when the narrative has wound itself so tight that they can't escape it anymore.

"youre just watching me. help me. im dying and im rotting and im losing myself and you wont do a thing."

i want the tragedy to be the performance. i want the tragedy to be, truly, in the eyes of the beholder.

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hi. this is a tumblr. i was silly and a little bit stupid with the making of this tumblr. my friend knows what i mean. but here i am to catalogue my thoughts. i am influenced by the tumblr of my friend. this is a disjointed ramble. anyways she has gone to bed (good bed is good sleep >>) so here i am. i am going to do the same thing she does and tag this with her name. maybe she will see it in the morning. i have a french project due but i have procrastinated. it’s due at 8am tomorrow when my teacher starts marking them. i fear that i will have to get up early and work on it in the wee hours of the morning. wow this has turned out long. hello again. goodbye.