Cassandra at the Wedding and Medicine for Melancholy
Oh hello
Today, emboldened by one more moka pot than usual, I was speaking to my niece as she sorts her cue cards. I said: Listen, listen! you are not listening. I’m telling you we are living in a perpetual state of war, conflict and collapse; a time where there are aggressors everywhere, but now and then, and here and now is one of those moments, that fact feels closer. You’re only seven (or maybe nine?), but regardless, you were saying that you don’t understand enough about the invasion of Ukraine; that the videos on the BBC and TikTok are not cutting through. As an antidote to that bane, I think you should read, if you’d put your cue cards down for a moment, the daily blog posts from Ukrainian artist and writer Yevgenia Belorusets, which can be found on Isolarii (a small press that has also published her work). Belorusets, who has a new collection out called Lucky Breaks, provides informative and beautifully written updates, capturing both the big and small of war. She writes about the anticipated blowing up of a world heritage site next to where she lives and about queuing for the pharmacy. On Day Six, she implores the international community to save her country and then adds: “Today I drank a cappuccino for the first time since the invasion began.”
Cassandra at the Wedding (1962) by Dorothy Baker
Cassandra, a graduate student at Berkeley who is struggling to complete her thesis about young, mostly women, contemporary French writers, drives to her family ranch to attend but preferably stop the wedding of her twin sister (Judith) and a dull but smiling junior doctor called John Thomas Finch. Her father retired young from academia because he couldn’t be bothered with students. Her mother, who died three years earlier, was a successful writer, which holds back Cassandra, at least for now, from following that same course, which is what she would be rather doing: “to be myself the writer and have all those others writing their theses about me”.
The novel proceeds in three parts: first, from the perspective of Cassandra, as she drives to and arrives at the ranch; then, after Cassandra takes pills with the intention of killing herself, we hear from Judith (who is more modest in what she expects from life, lacks some of Cassandra’s self loathing, and is quite obviously not the brilliant one (that’s Cassandra)). We then return to Cassandra for the wedding, the reception, and the aftermath.
Cassandra doesn’t want Judith to get married. She wants, instead, for them both to abide by the sleepover-style commitments that they made to each other (à la “let’s never grow up”, “let’s never have boyfriends”). Cassandra wants them to live together, in Paris, with the Bösendorfer piano that they share but only Judith plays, where Cassandra will write and Judith will play the piano. “We can start living”, Cassandra tells Judith, “where other imaginations fail”. But Judith is getting married, that reality doesn’t seem to go away, and, while Cassandra thinks Judith will be unhappy and it’s true that the husband-to-be does not have Cassandra’s charm, Judith does seem comforted by and happy with him. So, what, what should Cassandra do?
Baker’s novel—that situates in a family drama the academic references and cutting remarks normally found in a campus novel—exposes how hard it is for Cassandra—and other gay women like her—to figure that out. Cassandra clings to one vision—that with the piano and the sister—because—filled with self loathing and few models of what a future for herself looks like—she can’t imagine anything else. She has, according to Judith, “no faith in anything except the decayed memory of us as a family, living in a fortress, being self-sufficient and superior”. In attempting frantically, to leap into another future, she acts destructively, trying to sleep with her therapist, Vera Mercer, as Vera nurses Cassandra back to health following her suicide attempt.
Vera says she’s been trying to show her “that there is such a thing as a whole life” and that thing is: “Work mostly. Work, and interest, and love”. But I don’t think we, or Cassandra, are expected to find this very satisfying. Cassandra is plainly looking for work and interest and love to throw herself into. Unblinkingly and horrified, Cassandra is looking around for examples of that whole life. All she has, though, is her dead mother, her gifted alcoholic father, her coupled sister, and her irresponsible therapist who loves her job. She tells us: “All I want out of life is to find something worth being serious about. … I’m so committed to true seriousness that I spend my time clearing out rubbish.” The difficulty for her, like it is for us, is how to fill in the gaps, to get a bit more specific about how she can develop a strong sense of self and imagine herself into the future. Failing that, Cassandra hopes for a plan, a plan to pass from one year into the next until she is living a life that she is happier with. Cassandra asks with a stubbornness that some readers may find frustrating but I found utterly relatable: “Where is there to go? Or barring that, where can you hide?”
A question that lingers is what Baker makes of Cassandra’s pessimism. When Cassandra was born, she cried so much that her father named her Cassandra, after the daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba “wailing from the walls of Troy”. In Virgil’s Aeneid, where Cassandra does all that wailing, Cassandra is given the gift of prophecy but is cursed by the god Apollo to never be believed. Perhaps, the naming of Cassandra (as a prophet) is Baker’s way of indicating subtly that she also relates to Cassandra’s despair. That, or maybe Baker is simply making one more nudge nudge academic joke.
Medicine for Melancholy (2008) by Barry Jenkins
How do you live and how do you date in a city that is hostile to your presence? Medicine for Melancholy, the debut feature by Barry Jenkins of Moonlight fame, begins how it progresses: in soaked sepia tones, Micah and Joanne brush their teeth with their fingers, the morning after sleeping together at a party in someone else’s house. They leave, with minimal dialogue, to the glaring brightness of the day. Joanne, a Black woman, is dating a white male gallery owner. Micah, a Black man, is single. We follow them as they spend the weekend together: walking, biking, going to an art gallery, going to a supermarket: moving between standoffishness, closeness and awkwardness.
There is a lot of charm in M4M that comes from its styling and late 2000s aesthetics. The credits open and close with songs from indie darling Casiotone for the Painfully Alone. Both Micah and Joanne carry messenger bags and have leather Brooks saddles on their bikes. Joanne has a side parted pixie cut, wears black Cheap Mondays, a T-Shirt that hugs her hips, which she printed with the words Loden (after actress and filmmaker Barbara Loden). They spend time in Micah’s apartment, which is mostly occupied by a bed, two bikes (one belongs to his ex), a fish tank, and a poster with the words “We Believe Go Warriors” (this was 2008 and Golden State was bad; Steph Curry would join the franchise the following year). The final credits include the details of each song played in the film along with a still from when it is used.
Medicine for Melancholy is a true gem of the mumblecore genre. Where often those films are criticised for being about nothing (but life itself!!), Jenkins offers more. He takes what we expect from mumblecore (romance, lo-fi cinematography, minimal and awkward dialogue, very little plot, slumped shoulders paired with head tilts) and mixes it with explorations of, for instance: the gentrification of San Francisco, how to make sense of yourself and your life, as a Black person, in a city that is pricing and pushing you out; and the politics of dating. Micah, reminiscent of Fanon, and Claire Denis’ film No Fear, No Die (1990) which grapples with Fanon’s theories, blames in part his single status on being in an indie scene that does not value him, as a Black man, and views Joanne’s decision to date a white man as reflective of that.
Jenkins blends gorgeously a serious critique of the gentrification of San Francisco with a story about, not really love but connection; about meeting someone where there is an initial friction created from similarity: here, of being two Black people in a city where (according to Micah) only seven per cent of those that live there are Black. While they talk together about these bigger issues, nothing else happens during their weekend. They experience that blissful submarine feeling of a weekend with one another where the world shrinks and slows. At the end, Micah, holding Joanne, whispers—like we all have—“Just stay, stay.” As Cassandra looks at her life, Micah looks to Monday and to the city he lives in and is not moved: “I hate this city but I love this city”, he says at another point in the film. Micah doesn’t want his cloistered weekend to end or for his city to change from the home he holds dear to a vessel for the storage of capital. He would like it to just stay, stay.
Love
Anne