Revenge of the Scapegoat and Happy Hour
Oh hello
At my desk, pausing, sipping my licorice tea, gazing out the window, listening to ultraviolence, pausing again, pious, spiritual, beginning now to hover a few inches above my chair, working on accepting my body, my relationships and, ultimately, my life for what they are. At first, performing this ritualistic acceptance feels, let me tell you, like becoming that person you knew in high school, who, many years later, encountered CBT and gives weekly FB updates on breathing exercises. But over time, adopting this approach with metronomic regularity to the texts I send, the conversations I’m having, the frequency with which I shrug and roll my eyes, what initially seemed like a belligerent grief has shifted to a deeper reckoning with what I can control and what I can’t. It can be depressing to accept the incompleteness of my life and the limited capacity for those things to change, but then, after a while, it liberates.
Simply, I have been expending too much energy into, e.g., trying to get something from certain relationships that now I see I cannot, or, e.g., in searching, frantically, for the ways to make my vision for my life come true and come true pronto. But all this effort was, honestly, exhausting, unsatisfying, fine line inducing and was hurting my relationships with myself and others. Now, or at least today at my desk, I am working on an all encompassing acceptance but one that does not descend to a mumble core nihilism. I want a blissful nonchalance, a wan smile: to be not happy with my life but optimistically resigned to it. And then I want to pivot to focus on areas of my life where there is the capacity for transformation and on communities and people that offer me what I’m looking for. And what is sexier than that?
In my head, possibly inaccurately, I think about Firdaus in Nina Menkes’ Queen of Diamonds: she is deeply dissatisfied with her world, but still she is there, wandering around with her face of makeup, critical but not fighting against what she can’t control. The book and film I write about in this email are not directly about this, but they sit modularly alongside: both are about women coming to terms with and then looking to discard the sadness and pain that has encrusted their lives.
Revenge of the Scapegoat (2022) by Caren Beilin
Iris, an adjunct in Philadelphia, who changes her name to Vivitrix Marigold, is “soaking” in pain both physical and psychic. She has rheumatoid arthritis, which leaves her barely able to walk, and she is burdened as the scapegoat of her family, lumped with guilt and responsibility for her family’s problems. “When you are the scapegoat in your family, your body becomes your family. When you get sick, your body begins talking to you, too.” Now, 34, she receives a package from her dad that includes letters that he hand delivered to her when she was 14 and 16 years old.
Receiving the package of letters “retrograded” her hard and she leaves. She goes to work as a cowherd at The mARTin, a stupid rich art mecca in New England. She tends to special heart-stepping cows that the museum purchased from Sachsenhausen, Germany: cows that had been, generationally, trained to step on people’s hearts when they find them lying in the grass and were used by farmers during WW2 to catch those fleeing from a concentration camp. Vivitrix feels loved from the cows in their benevolent domination of her: stepped on but “not applying any pressure”. The museum brands the cows with one of her dad’s letters to use in an exhibition. Revenge of the Scapegoat is funny, absurd and also totally serious.
Echoing Arendt, Beilin articulates Vivitrix’ struggle to communicate the pain that she experienced as the scapegoat. Caroline, who runs The mARTin, says that she “got bored” after reading the first letter. The New York Times described the letter, in their review of the show as, also, “boring”: “The show … fizzles at the level of this completely unremarkable and totally mundane letter.” For Beilin, pain can be isolating—and expressing that interiority publicly can render starker the privateness of that experience. Which is not, I think, to suggest that talking can’t be helpful and, even, transformative but Revenge of the Scapegoat asks for an acceptance of the limits to that communication: that some distance will remain.
There is a circularity and satisfying incompleteness to the novel: no bow-tied resolution, or Pollyanna hopefulness. The book ends, instead, like it starts: with Vivitrix and her friend Ray gabbing away at a cafe, talking about their lives, finding some small comforts, solace, closeness: together!
Happy Hour (2015) by Ryusuke Hamaguchi
Happy Hour follows four cis women in their 30s, living in Kobe, Japan. The film, with a run time of over 5 hours, begins with one of these women, Jun, announcing that she is getting divorced. She is unsuccessful in divorce court and decides to run away instead (dramatically, leaving by boat!).
Over dinner, the other women express that they feel like they are meeting Jun for the first time: that only now they are beginning to understand her. Jun’s departure prompts them to reflect on parts of their lives—whether relationships or work—that they feel stuck in. Akari, a nurse who is brittle, focussed, and tough at work, spends a night out, telling someone there that she’s not looking for excitement from sex, she’d like to “just melt like butter … and forget who [she is]”. On the metro, Sakurako tells Fumi that she wants to be noticed, “But I don’t know who I want to be noticed by and what to be understood.” Fumi finds out her husband, a publisher, is in love with a young writer and asks him to leave.
There is a steady haze of languor throughout Happy Hour: an aridness, an oppressiveness, a calm grief that all of the women are, in their ways, trying to escape from. I admit that five hours is long for a movie but it offers Hamaguchi space for drawn out conversations over meals and drinks that have a sense of indulgence and pacing, reminiscent to me of this scene from Jacques Rivette’s brilliant La Bande Des Quatre (1989).
Torrey Peters dedicated Detransition, Baby to divorced cis women because “like me [they] had to face starting their life without either reinvesting in the illusions from the past, or growing bitter about the future”. Similarly, I found it utterly inspiring watching these women shake themselves into new lives, lives that they actually want for themselves, and to do so not slowly, but in jolts. In divorce court, Jun says that she was killed by her husband. But Happy Hour is moving to watch because of the fact of her survival and the manner in which she continues to live. Rebuffing claims of fearlessness, Jun says she’s “scared of everything”—yet she persists because she finally feels like she is “stepping” onto her path. Akari is asked how she managed with her loneliness after divorce. She replies that she had her friends :((
More? No
One particularly devoted reader told me that she wanted MORE from my emails. While I would hate for these emails to collapse into curated listicles, I thought I would try adding two more snippy recommendations to read and watch:
Mercury Retrograde (2020) by Emily Segal: autofiction in which Segal joins a big start up, and quickly becomes tired, broken, overworked. Mercury Retrograde is full of funny and pointy observations as Segal grapples with how to make art and live a fulfilling life. Perfect for a sweaty and existential summer 2022.
A Taxing Woman (1987) by Juzo Itami: from the director of Tampopo, Juzo Itami turns the life of a tax inspector into a thriller, as she doggedly reviews companies’ books, scrutinises their accounts, and looks through their trash. Gripping, sexy, fun!
Love
Anne