Terminal Boredom and Shopping
"Leisurely, with no particular place to go, stewards of a new anxiety."
Oh hello
I work in an office with walls and walls and windows that look out onto buildings with walls. There is aircon that kills flowers bought to brighten, and transports smells throughout. Today, I’m wearing a scent that mixes chlorine, sunblock, granola bars and a towel left in a bag for two days. I think it is evocative but colleagues have left to WFH, asked me if I’m okay, and sent an all staff email about the importance of minimising perfumes and odours at work. One did smile and said it reminded him of being 15, having pimples that burst and grow and burst, and being taken in the car to swimming training by their mum. I said: exactly.
Did you miss me? Iris is in Australia, still, exploring the underwater surfing community there. Occasionally, she sends me videos of golden locked Australian men spinning in the sea and photos of fish n chips by the beach after. In my latest text to her I quoted Rilke:
Like the jet of a fountain, your arched bough
drives the sap downward, then up: and it leaps from its sleep
barely waking, into the bliss of its sweetest achievement.
She hasn’t seen the message yet.
A predictability to the structure of my life has turned me inwards. On a walk, recently, with that same friend, Sam, who I went to the sea with, he reminded me that all I can ever do is ask that people love me for how I am right now, and that includes both any internal narrative of my stagnancy as well as the enthralling possibility of my life. That anyone worth my time must adore both. But first, (between bites of apple, sips of coffee and pulling at a bagel), he says I need to accept myself totally and utterly. He says that he doesn’t go out much, that he rhythmically walks on Sunday mornings and watches two hours of reality TV each day. And that has built a greater internal peace. So, I am writing lists, and rewriting them, eating banana bread, devotionally, sitting with my coffee like the moms in big little lies, and researching perfumers to learn under. I was remembering driving through the night to scotland on family holidays. I’m thinking about how to bottle the smell of the pillow that we used to share. Is that too much?
This week, I decided to move on from my reading of the british experimentalists and nouveau roman. Instead, I’m writing about the sci-fi collection of short stories Terminal Boredom by Izumi Suzuki and accompanying it with Paul W S Anderson’s Shopping (1994). I feel slightly lost, if I’m honest, about the shape of these emails. It must be just the summer blur, so let’s not think about it too much for now.
Terminal Boredom (2021) by Izumi Suzuki
Teenagers seek out recordings of violence to lift themselves from boredom. A government plan to deal with overpopulation puts people into long term sleep for a future “full of nature and all-round prosperity”. A world of “women and women. Just as it should be” comes under threat when a girl sees a man walking past her window. The stories of the Japanese icon Izumi Suzuki in Terminal Boredom are about boredom, the over saturation of entertainment and a general ennui towards social demands. They are sad, haunted by regret and comic in their sci-fi qualities. World building is mixed with tragic reflections from characters who struggle to accept the requirements and limits of their life. In a depressed inversion of the stoic virtues, Suzuki’s people are stuck in a world that spins and spins regardless of what they want. In That Old Seaside Club, Naoshi tells the “dejected housewife” living out a doctor mediated dream world, “Don’t worry. The world won’t stop spinning. It’ll keep going, even if you don’t want it to. On and on, until you’re absolutely sick of it.” In Forgotten, the narrator adds:
“The world around them went on moving, regardless of their desires or their feelings, like a huge river.”
In my favourite story, the title story, youth struggle to find excitement or even interest in their lives due to the blurring of visual entertainment and their physical lives. Two friends or lovers slouch around. The main character grows tired because she forgets to eat, is scared by “[u]nfettered spaces”, not used to “scenes that aren’t in a frame” and can’t tell whether she’s “genuinely pissed off or not”. She says: “the performance had just become part of my personality”. They watch a man beat up a woman and the friend asks for a recording. They are bored, terminally. They continue the story looking more and more desperately for ways to reduce their boredom, to make them feel more of something. He suggests violence. Against his own girlfriend. She doesn’t want to but he latches to her remaining feelings of jealousy: “Is envy always the last emotion standing?” she asks.
Terminal Boredom is a wonderfully ugly collection. Suzuki brilliantly pares a commitment to building strange eerie worlds with opportunities for reflection on the absurdity and despair of contemporary life. In You May Dream, a daughter visits her mum in the morning with a coffee. Mum is awake:
“Hey, what did you expect? At my age, when I wake up, I need a minute to sit here and just sigh at … I don’t know, the heartless logic of this world.”
Shopping (1994) by Paul W S Anderson
You should watch this film because it is Jude Law’s debut and because he met, on set, Sadie Frost. It’s dangerous, I know, to think you can see the off screen chemistry on screen, but, just like Mr and Mrs Smith, you can in Shopping. Billy (Law) gets out of prison and meets his friend Jo (Frost). Together, they steal cars and crash them into shops to take things from them. Billy drives and Jo plays a video game in the passenger seat. (Wet from the sprinkler alarm system, Jo yells at Billy: “They never have anything in my size!”). The film is set in the near future, in a decaying city controlled by a hopeless but militant police force. Jo and Billy drive cars and go dancing. Billy lives in a campervan by the water (they steal an Alessi kettle for the home). Jo loves Billy and Billy is too lost in his chase for grandeur to see that what he should really be focussing on is Jo.
Paul W S Anderson went on to do Death Race and Mortal Kombat and Shopping contains too a gratuitous pleasure in a car chase, in the thrilling action of a fight. But Shopping is also a movie about the struggles of moving on from a city and community that you outgrow. Jo wants to leave. She thinks her and Billy can go and build a life somewhere else, somewhere safer. But Billy remains fixed on the shiny glamour of making it in this rust heap city. Jo’s love, which you see in the film through stares of longing and regret for what is not there, is unconditional, yes, but she doesn’t accept or want to accept that the conditions of their life have to remain so limited. She is tired of crashing cars, and the risk of getting caught by the police. She wants Billy too to be moved by love but he’s not, or not right now. So what can she do? She wants to be with him, but she wants him to live as well. Ugh, life.
Love
Anne