Tonight The Super Trouper Lights Are Gonna Find Me
But I won't feel bluuuuee...
A line of sunlight across the tops of all the buildings this morning, the hard dark ice rinks in the gutters, my gloveless hands dry and stiffened in the cold. I walked with a friend to buy a bagel. I complained there was too much lox, too much cream cheese, and then I ate a bag of pretzels instead. My friend asked if I wanted to go to a nearby bar with him so he could charge his phone. The bar was not yet open, but he knows the bartender; we sat near an electrical outlet, and the room felt private and strange—the dead air and uneven lighting of pre-service.
Later I was in a strangely shaped movie theater in Manhattan. The room was very narrow and long, and I sat in a two-seat row next to an old man with long white hair. I spilled crumbs from a cinnamon streusel muffin all over my lap.
The movie I saw was Joachim Trier’s, “The Worst Person in the World,” which Richard Brody rightly, I think, criticizes for its messiness, its groundlessness, how it stops short of trafficking in the very questions it presents. And yet, I found myself moved by this flimsy quality. The main character, Julie (Renate Reinsve) is a woman trying to figure out how to be. She is a doctor and then a psychologist and then a photographer. She is working at a bookstore. She is dating a man, and then she is dating another man. She is trying to feel, with these men, as though she has landed on something, as though she has arrived somewhere. She tells one man, in bed next to him, that she can’t be herself around anyone else, and later she tells an ex-boyfriend that she can’t talk to anyone like she can talk to him. One arrival replaced by another, another conversation, another man. The strange conflicting desire to see oneself reflected in another person, and yet then the delayed resistance to being defined by him.
Cramps today, and a slight lingering hangover from the other night when, after the movie, I returned to Crown Heights and sat cross-legged in a booth drinking beer and eating chicken enchiladas with an oyster fork. Nonetheless it is a good excuse not to attend karaoke night in Manhattan, which sounds fun in theory but I fear may send me further into a newfound panic regarding my regression to the thoughtless mayhem of my prior more miserable self, the old days of smoking cigarettes outside a bar with a guy I liked wondering if this was what life is. I suppose this is the question no matter the setting. It’s just, a few nights ago I was smoking cigarettes outside a bar with a guy I liked wondering if this was what life is.
Near the beginning of the film, Julie’s boyfriend is talking to her, and it is not in a necessarily demeaning way, but Julie appears a little bored, annoyed, though it’s not explicitly obvious why she should be feeling this way. Lately when I see women onscreen talking to men, it makes me want to cry. How difficult it is to stand on equal footing, the quiet accidental undermining of women by the men who really love them, know them, are loved by them. The familiarity of watching Reinsve’s subtle slip into acquiescence, that attempt to become particularly lovable under a particular gaze, the reward. In the movie it is almost imperceptible, and I wondered if I was just feeling especially on edge. How women so often allow themselves the ease of this subordinate role because it is what we are supposed to do, because it is easy, because it is easier than figuring out exactly who we are and exactly what the person we are would like to say, or do. Nodding, agreeing, leaning in so he can kiss my forehead, and being kissed on the forehead is enough, is everything.
When the movie ended I followed all the bundled up people toward the exit and into the late afternoon. It was not yet dark—the flickering sepia of dusk, everyone crossing the street at the same time, and I had no idea where I was headed. Maybe I’ll get a drink, I thought, but didn’t. I thought maybe I’d walk until I got very lost or call Halle to see if she was done with her long run or just go straight home or sit at the bar at the restaurant I work at until someone told me what to do with myself.
I’m telling everyone I have $12 in my bank account even though I haven’t checked the actual number. I’m pretty sure it’s less. I don’t quite know why I don’t want to go to karaoke except that I’m a little tired, and I just started my period, and I don’t want to talk to anyone I can’t really talk to so I don’t want to talk to anyone but Halle, and Koreatown seems very far away, and I’ve barely gotten anything done today, and I’m feeling a little uninspired lately, and also kind of nauseous.
“I’ve grown uninterested in why people do the things they do,” writes Laurie Stone. “People don’t know why anyone does anything. Even the person doing a thing doesn’t know why, and people who admit this or skip over the subject of human motivation appeal to me.”
All the films in history are about a man trying to be a good man, but “The Worst Person in the World” is about a woman not knowing what she’s doing. In one scene, Julie and her boyfriend Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie) are arguing about Aksel’s tendency to analyze, overthink. “Everything we feel, we have to put into words,” she says. “Sometimes, I just want to feel things.”
Of course I ended up going to karaoke. I sat in the tiny room and sang “Hey Ya” and “Super Trouper” and “Promiscuous.” I ate Korean fried chicken that someone else bought. The spinning lights were red and green and blue and traced everyone’s cheekbones as they stared up at the screen. The guy at the front desk brought us tiny bags of chips arranged on plates and a bottle of very sweet champagne. Allie and I leaned in together over the song book, flipping through all the laminated pages. There were a lot of songs called “Always.”
A certain restlessness; a searching, but an aimless one. Is that it? An unsustained and unsustainable attention, thinking maybe I should be in Midtown or alongside a different man or wearing a new coat. When I decided to follow my friends into the city, it was because I looked up Koreatown, and a tiny rectangle lit up on the map just below the Empire State Building and thought, this is what people do, isn’t it? It was midnight, and I bought a Gatorade and a candy bar, which Cat and I split on the Subway platform waiting 20 minutes for a late train home.
Things I ate:
Red onions (sort of) pickled in lime juice and salt, on top of everything
Tangelos from my favorite Brooklyn CSA
A $5 bag of chocolate covered peanuts
Two slices of cheese pizza for 99 cents
A Snickers bar (this week’s list really shows my range)