Vertigo and Innocence
Oh hello
Sitting, resting, on the tube, on my lunch break, or after locking my bike, checking my phone and emails appearing, always, out of nowhere, bringing news that can, despite the conformity of form—the vibration, rectangular alert, introductory address (Dear Anne, Hi Anne, Anne)—annoy, transform, that can crush. Here, now, emails—and emails, of course, are just an example, I also mean texting, phone calls, instagram stories—are terrifyingly agnostic to their content. There is no ceremony, no ash, no bow tied email for birthday messages, or bloody daggers introducing an email that hurts. News simply arrives to disrupt the movement of your day.
This is the discordance of contemporary life. Objects, things, modes of speech, even people, if you’ll let me extrapolate beyond reach, always shelter the possibility of rendering in any instant feelings of joy, happiness, bitterness, despair, boredom: all of it! That overlapping jumble, the chaos trembling inside any moment reminds me of Wittgenstein’s theory of meaning as use. Wittgenstein, irritated by the slipperiness of language and struck with wonder at its variety of shapes, argued that meaning is determined by use. A bottle, he said, can be both something to satiate thirst and a weapon. That instability is, I’m telling you, exhausting.
In Vertigo by Joanna Walsh and Innocence by Lucile Hadžihalilović, the two works that I write about in this email, recurring motifs—of water particularly but of other things too—carry with them both joy and despair. Even, or especially, when moments seem pretty, calm, cute, there is a nagging thread of darkness capable of unspooling. Scary!
Vertigo (2015) by Joanna Walsh
In The Children’s Ward, one of the stories in Joanna Walsh’s collection, the main character, who is in the children’s ward of a hospital, says: “And I have stopped breathing neither on the in nor the out breath, either of which would be a bit showy, but in the middle of a breath so nobody would notice.” This ethic—of holding breath quietly—runs through this startling and compressed collection. There is a story about having oysters by the sea; another about a mother and daughter catching the bus; another about catching the plane; another about drowning. In these stories, women shrink and contain an anger and hurt that shakes and leaks, sometimes, into bitterness. In the title story, the first person narrator says: “And, no, I am not one of those women who has learnt how not to eat, only how not to want. And it is not food only.” In another, quoting some fashion person, the principal character adds: “Elegance is refusal.”
That external restraint pairs, though, with a deep introspection by the characters that Walsh builds. In Vertigo, which takes place on a plane, the main character, returning from holiday, realises she is happy but felt “it was terrible to be happy with anything so ordinary”. Her happiness and joy seems unjustified, “out of place”, and so she is “impatient to get rid of it”. That personal interrogation of feelings brings to mind Leslie Jamison’s incredible essay In Defense of Saccharin(e), in which Jamison considers the validity of feeling too sentimental, too gooey. She asks: “At what volume does feeling become sentimental? How obliquely does feeling need to be rendered so it can be saved from itself? How do we distinguish between pathos and melodrama? Too often, I think, there is a sense that we just know. Well I don’t.” Walsh, too, seems concerned with the logic and productivity of feeling. Seeking to trace the origin of her joy, the main character in Vertigo says: “... when she felt along its string she found it was not easily traced or attached to the objects that she thought it might have been attached to. Perhaps it was not attached to anything at all.” What do you do then? Do you go on smiling?
In Walsh’s collection, there is the sea. In her second story, the main character is by the sea, eating oysters. The water is placid, part of the view. “The sound of the waves is pitched and modulated precisely so as not to intrude, distract, but so as to remain constantly audible: perfection.” And in Drowning, in which the title gives the game away, the story begins with the sea as a lovely backdrop to a family holiday. Yet Walsh twists the image. Drowning becomes a story about drowning. “Shall I tell you what it is like to drown?”, the mother swimming in the sea alone asks. “It is very calm and quiet.” As the woman struggles, now treading water, now drowning, now treading water, feeling the salty meniscus cup her lips, Walsh connects gorgeously the sea’s depth to bear both “perfection” and death to the flickering turns that our life takes. Now, fulfillment. Now, disappointment. Now, stability. Now, rupture. She writes: “In this way, despair turns quickly over to happiness, and back to despair again.”
There is an unrelenting desperation to this collection that resonates. It is a desperation that thrashes inside yet remains implacable, brittle outside. In New Year’s Day, a woman recounts holding herself “still while you told me about the lovers you’d had while we were together”. The story begins after this recollection. It is now New Year’s Day. And she is on the sofa. “I folded my life in on itself, seven times. The last few folds it only bent.”
Innocence (2004) by Lucile Hadžihalilović
In Innocence, there is a nearby stream that is loud. There is also a pond that is very still. The pond and stream are on the grounds of the girls’ boarding school that is the focus of Innocence, the debut feature length film by the French director. In Innocence, new pupils of the girls’ boarding school arrive in coffins, eyes closed. The students wear white tennis skirts and tie different coloured ribbons in their hair. Marion Cotillard, as Mademoiselle Eva, teaches them ballet. The girls play games, studiously. It is important, an elder student advises a younger, to be able to tell the time here. Such an innocuous statement becomes menacing when spoken in a school where obedience is, according to the ballet teacher, “the one and only way that guarantees us a good life”. The school is mean to its students. Eva tells them that they are “still just ugly maggots”. She adds: “Unfortunately, not all maggots transform themselves into butterflies.” The school exists seemingly without the financial support of the parents (who are nowhere to be seen). Instead, the school is funded by an unseen audience that comes to watch the students perform.
Innocence keeps your stomach clenched. There is an eerie glockenspiel soundtrack that is like ice cream truck music. In the forest, there are street lamps that prevent an idyllic nature scene; a grate that goes somewhere but we don’t know where. The camera stalks like an intruder: it follows from behind; or closes up pausing for too long; or descends to the level of the water, watching (like what? Like something scary of course) the girls swim and learn to swim in the water. Echoing Walsh’s use of the sea, the water in Innocence is a site of play and freedom that hints uncomfortably at death. Laura, one of the students, tries to escape in a rowing boat but does not succeed. Learning to swim is also about learning not to drown.
Hadžihalilović’s film creates a world in which nowhere for these girls is safe. It is a film that, like Vertigo, offers no consolation. Walsh, again: “Despite everything, we are good people, who can hardly live in this world that continues almost entirely at our expense.” In Innocence, they are there at the boarding school to be kept safe from outside threats. But the school is more cage than cradle. In one scene, the headmistress studies the children’s bodies, observing their napes, their tummies, their teeth. The unseen audience does not appear to be watching the students for their virtuosic talent. Watching the girls, as “maggots”, you want them to be free, but free to what? Outside looks no better. Outside, that unseen audience becomes seen. At the end of the film, we watch a girl, who has left the school, playing in a water fountain. She seems totally happy, delighted by the shooting water. But something is going to go wrong. I don’t know what, and you don’t know either. But something is going to go wrong. There is a boy. He seems sweet. The boy makes her smile. He splashes her. They play together in the water.
Love
Anne