4:2:25
“Even the actors don’t know what’s going to happen next.”
-Griffin Dunne on Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1961 La Notte.
I love this. Dunne’s (a great comic actor, underused) and my generation are the last that will ever really understand and know how to talk about (make films about, write books about) the profundity of love. We were the great love songs that no longer get written or lived. Love is the Great Big conversation and adventure no one wants to have anymore. I remember even 10 yrs ago when that was still all we talked about with friends and family. Back in September an Albanian hairdresser I visited once, casually declared, “Love doesn’t exist. Not in this world.” I found her assertion shocking. And devastating. She then shared a litany of heart breaking stories about her failed love affairs. I haven’t forgotten her statement. What struck me was her hardness, her resignation. Her new approach, she explained, was to be as bad as the men who had been bad to her. The married guys who strung her along and lied to her. “You are too good,” she told me. “So you expect people to be good. You can’t understand why they aren’t.” She didn’t know me, had never met me, so what was she basing this on? These are the things people say—know?—when they have soul and can sense things, as they used to say, about other people. This is how the world used to work. People were perceptive, interested, curious, attentive, seeking, drawn to one another. Why has everyone forgotten what people used to be like, how things used to between them. All the rituals, customs, manners, propriety, generosity, warmth. Many just don’t know. Have never truly lived. Aren’t cultured. Others forgot, stopped caring, got programed to the point of being erased, or were born and raised on screens and algorithms. The world is junk food now. People are fast food. The art of talking is dead. How do you love things you can’t trust? How do you keep loving things you’ve lost faith in? The pain and disillusionment of betrayal and fakery can drive a person crazy. Hell goes back further than we know, that’s what we’re all learning now each day. Instead of wanting to know, they continue to blame the people uncovering it, instead of thanking them.
In La Notte, as in most of Antonioni’s films, those miserable concrete buildings are the fucking problem. From Antonioni to Romero to Cronenberg. From the post-war European urban suburbs to 70s/80s American malls. No one knows where they are. Relationships are trapped in these cold-dead structures. How could anything survive? Who are the flowers still growing through the pavement cracks? And now there are no structures at all because all the structures have been poisoned and dissolved. What’s next? Who the fuck knows. I’ve stopped knowing.
