The hand of God
Last week I went to the IFC Center to see Paolo Sorrentino’s The Hand of God. It was my third time seeing it; I went because Sorrentino was doing a Q&A after the screening. As a director, he has a particular eye for the fantastic in the everyday, a way of depicting decadence and violence and sumptuousness as both inherent to our humanity but also independent from it, forces working on a field all their own. I’ve been drawn to his work for years, primarily because of its ability to communicate what seems to be a belief in the sublimity of human experience and in the fundamental unknowability of life.
When Sorrentino speaks after the film, he gets at this idea — that there are things that are simply ineffable, questions that cannot be answered. That’s the reason he makes movies, he says. “I made two shows about the Vatican,” he tells the audience, “because that’s a mystery. That’s a whole world I cannot know.”
What strikes me about Sorrentino’s movies is that the way they approach mystery is not by seeking answers but by exploring its contours. How deep does this darkness go? How weird could it get in there? What could happen if we submitted to the fact that we never know why things happen? That we never know what’s going to happen?
Several days later I am sitting at a diner booth, telling my friend A about a dream I had a few days earlier. In the dream, an old friend’s dad is dying, and I have traveled to help and keep him company. In life outside the dream, this friend and I talk regularly but not frequently. I’ve known his dad’s been sick for a few months but haven’t given it much thought. I wake up from the dream and find out later that day that his dad had died that morning.
The dream and the death linger with me for several days. I feel sad for my friend. I can fathom his pain but don’t want to. I feel shaken and strange, unlike myself, like I don’t know how I am supposed to feel. I am overwhelmed by the enduring connection between this friend and me. I keep thinking that if I were my grandmother I’d think the dream was a premonition. I wonder if it was. I decide I don’t really care one way or the other. Over cups of coffee — regular for her, decaf for me — and food — a BLT for her, slice of cake for me — I struggle to explain what happened to A. I tell her the facts like I’m recounting a simple event. When I get to the end of the list, I realize I still don’t know how I feel.
More coffee, waters. People have come and gone since we’ve been sitting here. A tells me about a friend who’s stopped talking to her. I recall a similar situation I’ve been in but don’t recount it. Bringing in another story, I realize in the moment, would invite comparison, make room for speculation about the motivations of each silent treatment and hypotheses about what might have caused it.
I think about all the times I’ve met a friend’s story with “that happened to me, too!” and all the times a friend has done the same for me. It’s validating. We feel in good company. There might even be relief in realizing our place in a larger pattern of human behavior. It’s possible, too, that we want to know how someone behaved in the same situation we’re in now, to see possibilities we might have not imagined for ourselves. If things went for the other person the way we hope they go for us, we want to suck hope out of their story like marrow out of a bone. If things went sideways, we want to know for what exactly we should be bracing. We want to figure out what they might have done to create one outcome or the other. We want to infer causality. We want to know why things happen. We want to evade life’s unknowability. We want relief from what we really know: that we will all suffer for no reason and at random. That sometimes there are no causes, only adequate reactions.