Recently, A movie and a book, have provoked some unexpected emotional, and
Orphic reverberations for me.
I’ll start with
In the Land of the Living, What I didn’t know when I started to read it, is that the book took place where I lived as a child and teen. In the most literal of possible ways,
the area in which I grew up, the locality, the specific points of reference that managed to evoke a loneliness with such a specific geography and history,
that I was wrecked.
Austin Ratner, wrote a book that
may have saved me. Sincerely, I’ve remembered feelings and predicaments that left me scarred but without an origin, just a general memory, now made more clear, and precise, then I would have ever imagined. The isolated, misanthropic, and self conscious main character cracked the code of my own feelings of
inadequacy, and lament of failure, and loss, acutely.
Inside Llewyn Davis also harkens back to a collection of memories, that coincide with activism, hope, and oddly, neglect. My parents, like many others in the late fifties and sixties, were swept up in the
political/musical movement of folk and pop performers. As it was a volatile time, and the sense of clampdown and stronghold monopoly of
business-government and a burgeoning media’s naïveté, brought the Vietnam war and social movements into the mainstream, as opposed to the present status of distance and invisibility.
I think the movie does an extraordinary job of presenting both a personal story of an artist, and the lack of value within pop culture, that one without a “hook” ends up losing out to the
mediocre and superficial.
So there.
