|
The following
is from 312 No. 6, June 2005 [Download
Publication in .PDF format]:
A
Few Telling Laughs
Sometimes,
all you can do is laugh. In Elizabeth Monoian’s video I
want to feel, the narrator recounts the fates that have befallen
his children—death in mid-life, Hepatitis C, drug, alcohol,
and gambling addiction—and says with sarcasm, “I’ve
had a good family,” punctuating his statement with a few
telling laughs. It’s easy to understand the disappointment
encapsulated in his laughter—it signals the dashed expectations
and the frustration of an older parent unable to do much more
than watch as his children are felled by the challenges of adulthood.
It becomes even easier to understand when considering the narrator’s
admission of his own affliction, the degenerative Alzheimer’s
Disease. Over time, his memory will leave him, taking with it
the past.
Onscreen,
I see the remains of that past in the form of a derelict factory
interior, a place where the narrator once worked. Standing in
the bare rays of sunlight that spill into the dark is a ballerina
performing a simple gesture. She faces away from the camera at
first, then turns with a delicate outstretching of the arms, pausing
briefly to look at the camera before reversing back into her starting
position. The ballerina repeats the gesture in an edited loop,
an homage to the repetitive motions of the workers who once performed
in their own steel-driven ballet upon the same factory floor.
The building itself seems to have lost its identity—it is
a forgotten place; it could be any number of abandoned buildings
across the continent, skeletal monuments to the industrial North
American past now overshadowed by the tumultuous changes wrought
by the North American Free Trade Agreement and the ‘invisible
hand’ of globalized market forces.
The forgotten
past is also suggested in the video’s background music—hearing
Andy Williams sing his rendition of the Hollywood hit “Moon
River” brings up nostalgia for the period in which the song
emerged. The era, the early 1960s, is often remembered as the
tail end of the ‘good ol’ days’ preceding the
cultural changes of the same decade’s last half. Of course,
any era remembered in such a stereotypically positive manner is
being selectively remembered, or, perhaps more tellingly, selectively
forgotten. As Rebecca Solnit puts it in As Eve said to the
Serpent, our idealized vision of the past “may never
have existed” (1). The song’s vague and dreamy lyrics
of drifting “off to see the world / with such a lot of world
to see” provide an interesting American Dream-style optimism
when heard in contrast with the narrator’s downtrodden matter-of-factness.
The music symbolizes hope and great expectations, but the narrator
has lived (and is beginning to unwillingly forget) the hard reality.
I want to feel doesn’t really oppose or pursue either the
unsullied hope or the experiential disappointment, but it does
allow an idea of the narrator’s emotionally complex situation
to emerge. Just think—it’s almost all contained within
a few telling laughs…
Mark
Prier.
|
