Woke up yesterday feeling pretty fucking lousy, and I decided it wasn’t worth trying to exist in the world, so I played hooky from work, slept until noon, and didn’t touch my computer except for checking e-mail a couple times all day. (Despite the romantic image of a blogger wrapped in a robe with a big cup of coffee typing away all day, I can damn well assure you that just about the last thing I want to do when I’m sick is sit at a computer. You can’t be prone at a computer).
This means that I lost an entire day of having any clue what the hell is going on – I haven’t even looked for State of the Union responses yet – and frankly I don’t care, because I still have a touch of Whatever. Symptoms include pronounced fatigue and a weird throat thing that isn’t exactly “sore,” but it hurts when I talk.
So why post at all? No reason. Just trying to spread the misery.
I did manage to watch Hiroshima mon amour for the first time as I was flopped on the couch (bad film scholar, I know), and I was suitably impressed. Actually, make that “fucking blown away.” I don’t have anything to add to the wide admiration for this film, but I will drop in with my two cents to argue that I can’t name any film ever with an original soundtrack used to such shattering effect. Giovanni Fusco provided most of the music, and it’s this strange expressionist-tinged thing that Alain Resnais uses to signify the presence of intrusive, unbidden memory.
The whole film is really one of the very best films I’ve ever seen about the relationship between the present and the past, how where we’ve come from intrudes rudely upon where we are. It reminded me of the director’s early Nuit et brouillard as an example of how war trauma sits in the back of the mind; but while that film uses the Holocaust as a prism to view its own trauma, Hiroshima uses the nuclear bomb as a prism to view a woman’s personal trauma. And the trauma of nuclear war. Both at the same time, really, although they don’t overlap. It’s hard to explain. A great movie, if you can get into its very stylized pace, which I can only describe as Resnaisian.
Back to trying not to fall asleep over paperwork.