1205

 Monday, December 5, 2022

In bed at 9, awake around 3,, and up at 3:30, thinking of crime against my mother, Kitty, and me.  It was 75 years ago, my memory of it is mostly repressed and still I think of it in the middle of the night.  Some form of PTSD, triggered by news of the remorseless 10-year-old who shot and killed his mother???  or am I just a little nuts?  In any case, it's 3 and 1/2 hours before sunrise and I'm in my recliner typing and thinking when I should be sleeping.  

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Buxulles

6 years widowed, fastidious, housecoat, repetitive, OCD?, habit-driven, monotony, flat emotion, a place for everything and everything in its place, silence, sound of her footsteps, perfect hair except when it isn't, back to camera, uncommunicative, does everything for son, daily shoe shining, lights on and off, controlled and controlling, 3 days, Day 3, habits breakdown, button on robe, light in bathroom, bureau kantoor closed, stamp machine out of stamps, uncomfortable scene just sitting in chair waiting, making the meatloaf, johns bourgeois regulars, prostitution the means of supporting life for her and son, facial expressions in elevator, especially Day 3, waiting in housecoat, crying baby, missing button, someone at her table in cafe, different waitress, package under mailbox, last john

These were notes I made about Jeanne Dielman.  It's hard to know what to make of this 3-hour film.  An early thought that came to me was that it is not surprising that Akerman died a suicide, although Akerman made this remarkable film at age 25 and she didn't die until age 65.  It is a bleak film.  Depressing.  Unable to say whether it would be classified as a tragedy or a comedy.  A viewer looking at the back of the last john in the act of intercourse or at his front, sitting on the bed afterward, thinks of him as at best a lout, at worst an ugly male exploiter of a woman who relied on his weekly 'paycheck' to survive.  Was killing him an act of liberation or the opposite.  Once I was really 'into' the film, I thought it was a work of philosophy, of psychology, a character study but also a study of humankind.  It seemed a mirror on the lives of everybody.  In what ways are we like Jeanne Dielman?  In our acts of habitude, in emotional deadening, in doing work in which we exploit or are exploited.  I wonder why Akerman's Jeanne had a son rather than a daughter considering Akerman's close bond with her own mother.  Was it simply to show the son as a bit of an ungrateful, exploitative lout in his own right, a commentary of men being serve(ice)d in all kinds of ways by women?  I thought as I watched the movie 'I need to watch this again', the only drawback being its 3 hour length.  Maybe the next time I get up at 3 in the morning thinking of my own exploited mother. In any event, I will be thinking of this film for a long time.

Reservation Dogs

We watched the closing episode 8 of Season 1 tonight.  I like this series very much.  It's a comedy in that it ends well, by most lights.  Willie Jack bows out of the plan to go to California to stay with her loving parents, Chees also to be available to his non-grandmother, Bear we're not sure about.  He is clearly not comfortable with the idea of moving away from his mother, but it's not clear that he wouldn't do so if Eloras hadn't dumped him for Jackie.  Elora takes off in her grandmother's car for California with Jackie and there seems to be something resembling peace between the remaining RezDogs and the NDN Mafia.  Brownie chases a tornado away from the town/tribal area and is visited by the Spirit on horseback.  There is no comic undertone to the series.  Flora's boyfriend Daniel has hanged himself.  Her mother died in a drunken car crash.  All the young people are unhappy living on the reservation, in the town that 'eats people,' where crime and alcohol and drug abuse abound.  The moral/ethical underpinnings of the series is interesting, with the Dogs feeling no compunction about stealing the property of others to fund the proposed move to California, including Flora's appropriating her grandmother's car to the California trip.