gaps and omissions
two books, two films, and a play
Saving Agnes
1993, Rachel Cusk, 218 pp.
Cusk in her earliest incarnation is, in a heartening testament to the possibility of artistic evolution, almost nothing like the author we know now. Saving Agnes plants the bulbs of the preoccupation with gender that will blossom in her work just a few years later, but the book mostly concerned with the titular character’s unformed, immature relationship to the world in general. Agnes is religious but embarrassed about it, carrying out her life in a world she doesn’t understand, aching for parenting, mourning the loss of her childhood; she holds her values—socialistic, contrarian—timidly around men who ruthlessly pursue wealth and career ascension and women who do the same with men. Everyone gets hurt by the thing they want until they decide to want something else.
Arlington Park
2006, Rachel Cusk, 248 pp.
A relentless illustration of the identity-erasing (self-effacing?) work of motherhood and wifehood. Terrifying and exhausting. I mean that in a good way. The first character we encounter is convinced that men murder women—slowly, without their noticing—and the rest of the book is dedicated entirely to determining whether she’s right.
Casablanca
1942, dir. Michael Curtiz, 102 min.
I’m not sure whether the country represented by Bogart’s Rick Blaine is recognizable as America anymore.
The Outsider
1981, dir. Béla Tarr, 122 min.
András is a talented violinist suffering the misfortune of having to sell his labor-time in order to live and eat. On top of that, he has to pay child support to his ex-girlfriend, whose baby, everyone in the town knows, is not actually his. When he eventually marries another woman, he finds the relationship as entrapping as the monthly payments. Tarr’s camera is intrusive, pushing up against everybody’s faces, following conversations closely and uncomfortably, but it’s really the sound that establishes the film’s pervasive sense of unease. Everywhere—at the pub, at the club, at someone’s apartment, at the sanitarium where András first works and then at the factory where he gets a different job—is overwhelmingly noisy, busy, loud. And then, in the rooms where András makes promises he can’t keep, it’s so unbelievably quiet that we can hear the reel in the camera whirring. A filmic reproduction of discomfort, of being born in the wrong place at the wrong time.
What We Did Before Our Moth Days
written by Wallace Shawn, dir. André Gregory, Greenwich House Theater
Four characters—a son, a mother, a father, and his mistress—tell the stories of their lives in alternating monologues. They sit in chairs that face the audience, most of the time, and their narratives slip into and past each other. There are gaps and omissions, events that never quite come into focus, and then there is territory trod over and over again, a manifestation of the fragile nature of memory and everything that constitutes it.