Father's Day, and it's quiet and still here. S left me pretty much alone today, which was exactly what I wanted, or needed. Just some time to sit here and hurt.
There have been a lot of tough conversations lately. S is doing much, much better than she was, which makes life a little bit easier. There's smiling and laughing again, and that's nice. Like healing always does, it happens slowly, when you aren't looking. Suddenly, all of the things that you never thought you'd ever be able to do (or do again) are easier to contemplate or even do. I can be around kids without feeling the loss acutely, maybe just a wry smile. And when it comes to the children of people I like, I can play with them, make them laugh, hug them, and it's okay. The wanting to pick them up and make them laugh comes so naturally you'd think it was wired in from birth. It's okay, the feeling says. You could be a dad after all. That's the feeling, that all of the worry and insecurity and unpreparedness for fatherhood I felt before we started trying wasn't necessary. I'm wired for it.
And then I have to give the child back. And that hurts a little. It's a small, dull ache in the pit of my stomach, like all of those small moments after someone dies, all of the specific "I'll never ______ again" moments that reveal the truth of your loss. But considering there was a time I couldn't imagine being around kids at all, it's progress.
And then there's days like Father's Day. I wonder if this is how veterans feel on Memorial Day, if this is the one day they can't escape all of the stuff they'd like to forget. This is the one day when I can't duck around it, this is the one day I can't drown out the words I'm not a father, I don't have any sons. It rings in my head. Of all the things I am or do or have, that's the one that got away. And on Father's Day, no matter how much I avoid TV or even going outside, there it is. The little hands I'm not holding.
And like I said, we've been having some tough conversations lately. We came into a bit of a windfall after S's grandmother passed away, and all of a sudden, some things we thought were closed to us are open again. The thought of trying to conceive again weighs on me. Our odds aren't good, and at our age, they're getting rapidly worse. We could afford maybe one round of IVF, maybe. Or one shot with donated embryos. Or put money away for adoption. Pay off some debt, maybe sock some away for the down payment on a house or a condo. I can't imagine getting on that merry-go-round again: Tests, pills, shots, procedures, catheters, speculums, endless doctor's offices. I think about it and I start to feel sick inside. I think about people who did the work for twice as long as we did, and I honestly don't know how they did it. I don't think I can do it again.
S and I were both late bloomers in different ways. I made some bad decisions during college and ended up dropping out for about 5 or 6 years. I didn't graduate until I was 29. We got to where we wanted to be sort of late in life. I learned to stop kicking myself about it a few years ago. But this brings it back. We're backed into a few corners - I've just turned 40 (Yay?), and S will next month. S still has work to do on her doctorate and I'm planning to go on the job market this year, though I'm not optimistic about my chances at a decent job. And we're still climbing out of the hole, one day at a time, learning to live our lives again. In some ways, we've just exchanged one set of pills and appointments for another. We don't have a lot of time left to start a biological family, and there are other life things that have to happen first. If we were in our late 20s, this wouldn't be an issue. Woulda, coulda, shoulda.
It's hard to face. For S especially. This desire to have and love a child is embodied for her in ways that it can't be for me. The world has told me no, it told me no when our only successful attempt at conception ended in death and blood and grief and pain. I felt like a door was closed in my face that day, and all I could see to do was put one foot in front of the other, make sure S was safe, and get back to the business of living. The world won't wait for you, I heard in my head. The world does not care about what has happened to you, and you have obligations. So come spring, I went back to school and wrote my dissertation. What else was I going to do? Shake my fist at the sky? The sky wasn't listening. The sky didn't care.
Maybe we'll try again. Maybe we won't. Maybe it's selfish, but I feel like we've got to put our own well-being first for awhile after sacrificing so much of it for so long. I'm writing a little more, keeping a blog on a totally unrelated subject. Still fighting depression, still wondering why and how I'm going to get things done sometimes. But most days I have music and light and a couple of sweet cats and an adorable dog and a loving wife and good friends.
Which makes Father's Day easier, when all of that goes out the window, and all I can do is sit here and feel empty.
Monday, June 21, 2010
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Persistence
"If at first you don't succeed/try try again
Step up to the mic/and die again
This is the next lifetime and you want to battle
You must like reincarnation/or the smell of carnations"
- "Raspberry Fields", Cannibal Ox
So we've tried three cycles since we lost the boys. Each one hasn't worked. Not even close. And oddly enough, I don't feel worse for it. Maybe I'm just numb, inured to disappointment after tragedy. Or maybe losing the boys was some sort of large NO, and ever since, I've just assumed this was never meant to be, and keep trying because I don't want to say we didn't try. Is it masochism if it doesn't hurt anymore?
There's a part of me that's given up. That has to assume that we aren't going to have biological children and needs to start getting used to the idea. Inoculation. Introduce the pain a little bit at a time until it builds up a resistance. Let it hurt a little bit all the time until the pain is manageable. Get used to it. Get accustomed to it. And the last year has been rough for me, but never so rough at once that it felt like a real struggle.
I've grieved the boys. S got worse and I had to take care of her while trying to finally transition into a career. I put the boys and my own pain aside because S couldn't get out of bed. There were days I honestly thought I'd come home and find her body on the bed. That today was the day. Not because she was going to kill herself but because the medication and the depression would eventually reach critical mass. Maybe the line between deliberately killing yourself to end the pain and accidentally killing yourself in the process of managing the pain is so thin as to be academic. But that was a hard year. Always alert, always vigilant.
Then things started to get better - counseling, better medication strategies, talks with doctors that helped absolve S of some of the guilt she felt. Started putting our life back together, engaging it what we called "Operation Grow The Fuck Up" - get back to living, being social, managing the daily business of living and climb up out of the grief, the long dark hole. And part of that meant trying again.
The first couple of cycles didn't work, and apparently part of it was because S's endometriosis had come back. One laparotomy later, we try the next cycle. Lots of drugs, lots of pills, and two IUI's this time. And it didn't work. Why? Well, why not?
I teach a class on child development. The first semester it was just a horrible irony. Those who can't, teach. The second semester it felt more integrative, critical examinations of parenthood, childhood, fertility, the social constructions that shape us from conception onward. This third semester I've taught it, it's fine. I know what to do with it now, and I know what role my own experience can play. Part of what I teach is the probability of conception. Only 10-15% of conceptions successfully implant. And all we're doing with the pills and the shots and the vitamins and the hormones and the centrifuging and the catheters is getting us to that 10-15% place. We're marshalling huge amounts of technology to do what two people do anyway. So at a certain point, it's a numbers game. Try, try again.
We've got one last cycle in us, I think. It's taken a long time for S and I to get to the point where we both feel this way. I was there some time ago, she wasn't. But the cost of beating our head against the wall, of coming up on the wrong side of the numbers again and again is getting too high. It might work, it might not. I think if it works, it'll be a surprise. If not, we'll need to start saving up for a shot at IVF. Our only shot, most likely. But nobody can say we didn't try, try, and try again. And again, and again.
Step up to the mic/and die again
This is the next lifetime and you want to battle
You must like reincarnation/or the smell of carnations"
- "Raspberry Fields", Cannibal Ox
So we've tried three cycles since we lost the boys. Each one hasn't worked. Not even close. And oddly enough, I don't feel worse for it. Maybe I'm just numb, inured to disappointment after tragedy. Or maybe losing the boys was some sort of large NO, and ever since, I've just assumed this was never meant to be, and keep trying because I don't want to say we didn't try. Is it masochism if it doesn't hurt anymore?
There's a part of me that's given up. That has to assume that we aren't going to have biological children and needs to start getting used to the idea. Inoculation. Introduce the pain a little bit at a time until it builds up a resistance. Let it hurt a little bit all the time until the pain is manageable. Get used to it. Get accustomed to it. And the last year has been rough for me, but never so rough at once that it felt like a real struggle.
I've grieved the boys. S got worse and I had to take care of her while trying to finally transition into a career. I put the boys and my own pain aside because S couldn't get out of bed. There were days I honestly thought I'd come home and find her body on the bed. That today was the day. Not because she was going to kill herself but because the medication and the depression would eventually reach critical mass. Maybe the line between deliberately killing yourself to end the pain and accidentally killing yourself in the process of managing the pain is so thin as to be academic. But that was a hard year. Always alert, always vigilant.
Then things started to get better - counseling, better medication strategies, talks with doctors that helped absolve S of some of the guilt she felt. Started putting our life back together, engaging it what we called "Operation Grow The Fuck Up" - get back to living, being social, managing the daily business of living and climb up out of the grief, the long dark hole. And part of that meant trying again.
The first couple of cycles didn't work, and apparently part of it was because S's endometriosis had come back. One laparotomy later, we try the next cycle. Lots of drugs, lots of pills, and two IUI's this time. And it didn't work. Why? Well, why not?
I teach a class on child development. The first semester it was just a horrible irony. Those who can't, teach. The second semester it felt more integrative, critical examinations of parenthood, childhood, fertility, the social constructions that shape us from conception onward. This third semester I've taught it, it's fine. I know what to do with it now, and I know what role my own experience can play. Part of what I teach is the probability of conception. Only 10-15% of conceptions successfully implant. And all we're doing with the pills and the shots and the vitamins and the hormones and the centrifuging and the catheters is getting us to that 10-15% place. We're marshalling huge amounts of technology to do what two people do anyway. So at a certain point, it's a numbers game. Try, try again.
We've got one last cycle in us, I think. It's taken a long time for S and I to get to the point where we both feel this way. I was there some time ago, she wasn't. But the cost of beating our head against the wall, of coming up on the wrong side of the numbers again and again is getting too high. It might work, it might not. I think if it works, it'll be a surprise. If not, we'll need to start saving up for a shot at IVF. Our only shot, most likely. But nobody can say we didn't try, try, and try again. And again, and again.
Sunday, January 3, 2010
In transit
There's an old prison maxim - "Drink a lot of water, and walk slow." Drink a lot of water because it keeps your system flushed out, and walk slow because you're going nowhere fast.
Being stuck at an airport always reminds me of this.
Long story short - RE appointment scheduled earlier than we thought it would be, try to fly standby out of Seattle only to be told that all other flights are overbooked already. Wouldn't be too much of a hassle, except my scheduled flight is a redeye that leaves at 11:30pm. So here I am at the airport for the next 9 hours or so. As much as I'm impatient and in a hurry when I travel by air (as my inhumanly patient wife would tell you), being stuck here for a ridiculously long time tends to put me in a contemplative state. I walk slow and look around.
Airports are weird. They have aspirations to permanence - shops, restaurants - but they're essentially places of impermanence. They aren't destinations, they're ways of getting you to your destination. We are only here to be elsewhere. We're in transit, suspended between here and there.
Cycling is like that. We know entirely too much about what it takes to have a child, we have our attention called to every detail in ways that you wouldn't if you were just doing what comes naturally and hoping for the stork to unload his storky payload over the house. We are doing what comes unnaturally. There is no "baby dust" here. Well, there are ashes. I'd like to ask some of those "baby dust" people if those count. We know what the costs are, in dollars and tears and moments lost. With every cycle we hold our breath, caught between "it's over" and "it's just beginning." In transit, suspended between here and there.
This one isn't looking good. S stimmed hard, but only one out of four follicles showed any significant growth by the ultrasound. I'm going to be going right from the airport to the appointment, which might make for the least hallowed/sacred/whatever attempt at conception in my life. S is starting to wonder if we shouldn't just quit IUIs and start saving up for IVF. I'm starting to wonder the same thing. And so we hang between "do we" or "don't we", with everything in the middle up for grabs.
And the first person to ask me why we don't "just adopt" is getting punched in the throat.
Saturday, November 28, 2009
It's beginning to and back again.
It's all about circles right now.
I'm giving a lecture on issues around treating mental illness -
(pacing around the auditorium - I can't stand still when I teach)
"Let's say you have paranoid schizophrenia, and as long as you take your meds, you're fine. But when you feel fine, you think 'I'm doing fine, I don't need to be on the meds.' So you go off your meds, at which point the delusions and hallucinations return. And what's the first thing that happens? You become suspicious of anyone trying to give you your meds, because they're trying to control your mind. And you get hospitalized, and they medicate you, and you get back on your meds. After awhile, you think 'I'm doing fine, I don't need to be on the meds', and so on."
"It's a vicious cycle."
We lose our sons - our last shot on the long, hard road to accepting infertility as a state of life - and spend almost two years coming to grips with that. Lots of meds, therapy (pharmacological, psychological, singly and as a couple), some vindication along the way. We can see daylight. We're getting our act together ("Operation Grow The Fuck Up", we call it. And in this process of act-getting-together, we think "hey, we're doing well, we've got energy, we're being social, things are looking up - we're finally in a position to do another cycle." And so we do. And nothing. Zilch.
And another. And again, nothing.
It's like a punch to the gut. And it all comes back. The wondering, the "will this ever work?" Ironically, it's more expensive now than it was when we had crap insurance. We're struggling to make it to the end of the month. And I'm back on the couch, staring at my computer. And S. is back up in the bedroom, wondering what the point of anything is. Resentful, rejecting the idea of hope. "I don't care. What's the point? Why do I bother?" It's three years ago all over again, the rawness of futility in trying to conceive. If I never see the acronym "TTC" ever again, it'll be too soon. Fatigued. Worn out.
It's vicious, this cycling.
And S. sits sobbing, depressed. And I have to remember that this is not her forever. This is her now. Even as I'm telling her that this is not forever, this is just now. She feels this way now, but this is not how it is. I tell her that I know it's hard for her to see this when she's in such a sad, bleak place, but there is more for her - for us - out there. And yes, there's a shift in her medication, and the new stuff may not have kicked in yet. So I'm having to tell someone who struggles with depression and their meds that although they're convinced of one world, it is not the world as it is. And when the meds kick in, it'll be "wow, that was bad." And right now, it is bad.
And so on, and so on, and so on.
I'm giving a lecture on issues around treating mental illness -
(pacing around the auditorium - I can't stand still when I teach)
"Let's say you have paranoid schizophrenia, and as long as you take your meds, you're fine. But when you feel fine, you think 'I'm doing fine, I don't need to be on the meds.' So you go off your meds, at which point the delusions and hallucinations return. And what's the first thing that happens? You become suspicious of anyone trying to give you your meds, because they're trying to control your mind. And you get hospitalized, and they medicate you, and you get back on your meds. After awhile, you think 'I'm doing fine, I don't need to be on the meds', and so on."
"It's a vicious cycle."
We lose our sons - our last shot on the long, hard road to accepting infertility as a state of life - and spend almost two years coming to grips with that. Lots of meds, therapy (pharmacological, psychological, singly and as a couple), some vindication along the way. We can see daylight. We're getting our act together ("Operation Grow The Fuck Up", we call it. And in this process of act-getting-together, we think "hey, we're doing well, we've got energy, we're being social, things are looking up - we're finally in a position to do another cycle." And so we do. And nothing. Zilch.
And another. And again, nothing.
It's like a punch to the gut. And it all comes back. The wondering, the "will this ever work?" Ironically, it's more expensive now than it was when we had crap insurance. We're struggling to make it to the end of the month. And I'm back on the couch, staring at my computer. And S. is back up in the bedroom, wondering what the point of anything is. Resentful, rejecting the idea of hope. "I don't care. What's the point? Why do I bother?" It's three years ago all over again, the rawness of futility in trying to conceive. If I never see the acronym "TTC" ever again, it'll be too soon. Fatigued. Worn out.
It's vicious, this cycling.
And S. sits sobbing, depressed. And I have to remember that this is not her forever. This is her now. Even as I'm telling her that this is not forever, this is just now. She feels this way now, but this is not how it is. I tell her that I know it's hard for her to see this when she's in such a sad, bleak place, but there is more for her - for us - out there. And yes, there's a shift in her medication, and the new stuff may not have kicked in yet. So I'm having to tell someone who struggles with depression and their meds that although they're convinced of one world, it is not the world as it is. And when the meds kick in, it'll be "wow, that was bad." And right now, it is bad.
And so on, and so on, and so on.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Yeah, it's kind of like that.
Walking the dog tonight, while S. is at class, I pass two little boys playing on Big Wheels. One of them says hello, I say hello back.
He asks me if I'm Dennis the Menace. I tell him no. Then I ask him if he's Dennis the Menace. This appears to stump him.
Then he asks me "are you the Daddy of..."
"No. I'm nobody's Daddy."
No, it's not true. I hold my boys next to my heart. But at the end of the day, regardless of what the grief counselor says, I'm nobody's Daddy.
He asks me if I'm Dennis the Menace. I tell him no. Then I ask him if he's Dennis the Menace. This appears to stump him.
Then he asks me "are you the Daddy of..."
"No. I'm nobody's Daddy."
No, it's not true. I hold my boys next to my heart. But at the end of the day, regardless of what the grief counselor says, I'm nobody's Daddy.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
In memoriam.
For Jacob Rhys and Joshua Spenser, in loving memory on Father's Day.
I miss you boys. I miss who you would have been and who you would have become.
All I could give you was an end to suffering.
I miss you boys. I miss who you would have been and who you would have become.
All I could give you was an end to suffering.
Saturday, June 6, 2009
On horror.
First, thank you for all of the happy birthday wishes. S. and I had a very nice day together, and like I told her, the best gift I could get was getting back a little bit more of the woman I love. We had a nice lunch at a favorite diner, went to go see "Land of the Lost" (wasn't one of Will Ferrell's best - closer to "Blades of Glory" than "Anchorman"), and did a little shopping. I picked up a copy of The Road by Cormac McCarthy and a few DVDs. All of which happened to be horror movies. Which brings me to the topic of this post.
Since we lost the boys, I've been watching a lot of horror movies.
I've probably mentioned this before, if only in passing. I'm not sure what it is that draws me to watching scary movies. I've always enjoyed them to one degree or another, moreso as an adult. But since we lost our sons, I've found it much easier to watch them, almost reassuring in a way.
Maybe it's that sense that somebody has it worse than me, if only in fiction (a concept the pros call downward comparison). Maybe I've had my capacity to feel fear dulled by such a traumatic experience, so it takes longer to hit my threshold for the sort of scares I used to get. Maybe it's because there are a shit-ton of good horror movies coming from all corners of the world, and it's much easier to see these movies in the age of the Internet than it used to be. Or a mixture of all of these. All I know is that I've been watching a lot of scary shit as of late. Some of it enjoyable, some of it not.
Conversely, almost anything involving children makes me really angry. Kids on television, kids in movies, people becoming parents, the trials and tribulations of parenthood. I would honestly rather watch somebody get their leg sawed off than fumble to get the quadruplets ready for their school field trip. Some might find that a little perverse. Honestly, I don't care and anymore I don't have the patience to keep up appearances.
Both are probably products of the same urge. We are afraid of what's out there in the dark. We have stories to explain lightning and thunder and fire and rain and snow and disease and birth and death. Our beliefs, our ideologies, our faiths: All torches against the dark. We open ourselves to horror stories because fictional terrors are manageable terrors. We inoculate ourselves against fear this way, by letting in just enough of the dark to keep from being overwhelmed by it. We celebrate birth and children for the same reason - we stave off the idea of oblivion by reassuring ourselves that through children our legacy will live on. As long as our bloodline continues, we never really die. As long as we have children, we will never die. Whitney Houston was right: The children are our future (and also, that crack cocaine is fucking fun). In the hopes of future generations, we light a candle against the dark.
Which brings to mind the movie "The Village." But I'll get to that.
Almost anything having to do with children fills me with grief and sadness and frustration and rage. Not exactly reassuring. So I no longer have that as an option. But I can open myself up to the horrors others envision and that alleviates the sadness for awhile. I've also been spending a lot of time with apocalyptic imagery lately. But that's for another post.
So, horror.
I want to get this down before I get to the pithy part. As I'm writing this out, I keep thinking about the movie "The Village." If you haven't seen it, go see it. Get it from Netflix or something, I'll wait.
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Seen it yet? No?
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Okay. So as I'm sitting here writing this post and working these ideas out, it occurs to me that "The Village" is sort of a literal instantiation of the stuff I'm talking about here. You've got a bunch of people who have been traumatized by the death of someone close to them and decide that the sane response to this is to abandon the modern world for an invented pre-industrial agrarian society. Which is a fiction intended to keep real horror at bay. And these people have kids, and kids being kids they know that the kids are going to want to explore life beyond the village, but since life beyond the village is what drove the adults to create the village in the first place, the adults don't see that as an option - no rumspringa here. So the adults create "those of whom we do not speak." They invent small horrors to keep their children safe from the larger horror of the outside world, from which they have made themselves safe with their own invented village. Their protective fiction has its own protective fiction, complete with pantomime raids and sacrifices and costumes hanging in a shed at the edge of the woods.
And yet, they can't keep trauma and violence at bay. One of their own, for reasons nobody can fathom, does something horrible. Something for which nobody's fictions can account. Death and tragedy lie outside of reasoning and explanations and platitudes. And their only chance to avert the monster they ran from, reappeared in their midst, is to send someone out into the world to retrieve medical help. They send a blind woman - a woman for whom the dark isn't just my clumsy metaphor, but life itself. She fumbles out into the dark beyond the village, guided only by necessity, without the comfort of fiction to keep her safe. No matter what narrative we construct, be it community, tradition, birth and growth, or monsters in the closet, it always comes back to the dark and all the ways we shelter ourselves from it.
So that was quite the tangent.
So I'm going to share with you some of the horror movies I've enjoyed lately - I wouldn't be surprised if I'm the only one who finds solace in them, but it works for me.
Basic: Suitable for most people.
Pulse - Based on the Japanese movie Kairo, this is basically a technological ghost story á la The Ring. Not qute as good as that movie, but sufficiently somber and spooky to be effective, with more of an emphasis on mood and atmosphere than cheap scares.
Cloverfield - A verité take on the giant monster movie, sort of like The Blair Witch Project meets Godzilla. The protagonists can be really irritating, but I think that's sort of the point - this is pretty much exactly what it would look like if a bunch of clever New York yuppie types found themselves running for their lives from something that can play tiddlywinks with skyscrapers. A little slow to start, but once it does, it doesn't let up until it ends.
The Descent - A prime example of what I like to call the "just when you thought it couldn't go any more wrong" movie. Interpersonal drama between a group of women on a caving expedition leads to disastrous consequences...and then things get really weird. There are bad things happening on about two or three different levels at once, and the tension keeps racheting up and ratcheting up masterfully.
Shrooms - A solid teens-in-trouble film. A group of more or less annoying college students go to Ireland looking for psychedelic mushrooms. Of course, they happen to go looking in a part of the country with a decidedly shady past involving a brutal order of monks and feral orphans, and nobody's sure if what's happening is real or not because they're all tripping balls. Sufficiently creepy, gory but not overly so, and well-plotted.
Intermediate: If you're not fond of horror movies, approach with caution.
Halloween (remake) - I don't understand why this remake attracted so much negative attention, it's not like the original is no longer available. Plot-wise, it's very similar to the original, which was pretty much the first slasher movie, but Rob Zombie's aesthetic makes all of the difference. This is an actively hostile movie. It aims to make you uncomfortable and succeeds. This is a good thing. Every death scene in this movie looks like a crime scene photo, messy and horrible in its banality. Everyone suffers, physically or emotionally, and the portrait painted of humanity is bleak. Puts the "horror" back into "horror movie."
The Abandoned - A haunted-house story about inescapable destiny, in which a woman travels to rural Russia to check out the family homestead she's inherited, and instead finds all manner of creepy shit. I don't want to say much else for fear of ruining it, but this movie has atmosphere in spades and will freak you out.
The Mist - Based on the Stephen King story of the same name, it's one of the better adaptations of his work. Like any other good scary movie, it works on psychological and supernatural levels at the same time - the situation the characters find themselves in could be something as simple as a really bad snowstorm or the bizarre invasion with which they're actually dealing, and there would still be the equally terrifying human factor to deal with. The ending is a real kick in the teeth, though, and although I commend the director for having the sheer balls to include it, it's also the reason I'm listing it here instead of under Basic.
Quarantine - Oh, this one is scary as fuck. Like Cloverfield, it's told from an immediate point of view. The conceit here is that a TV journalist and her cameraman are out riding along with a group of firemen for a human-interest story when the firemen are called to take care of a medical emergency at a small apartment building. The medical emergency goes very bad very quickly, and the cameraman keeps rolling, if only to document what's happening. The screws tighten very suddenly and very quickly and the ending spares you not at all. The original Spanish version, titled [REC], is equally recommended.
Advanced: Approach with great caution, not for the average movie buff.
The Ruins - A much bleaker take on the teens-in-trouble genre, where a group of spring-breaking boys and girls in Mexico run off in search of an archeological dig and meet a really grisly end. Ostensibly, the movie is about a malevolent force of nature. But, like The Mist, the people involved do as much damage to each other as the antagonist does.
Hostel - Famous mostly as the progenitor of the so-called "torture porn" genre of horror film, we once again have a group of college-age boys engaging in spectacularly bad decision-making and paying dearly for it. Although this movie does not skimp on the graphic violence and suffering typical of the genre, I think critics of this movie miss the black satire underneath - this movie has a lot to say about capitalism and industries designed to cater to a particular set of desires. One man's spring break is another man's murder holiday, perhaps. It's also much more plausible than, say, The Ruins, which rattled me more in the actual events of the movie, but it's much easier to imagine the situation outlined in Hostel actually occurring. Which leads me to the next movie...
Shuttle - I'm not sure this is actually out on video yet, but it's great. It has a simple, elegant premise - what if the bus driver didn't take you where you wanted to go? - and builds up twist after twist, spiraling it into deeply disturbing territory and an ending that neatly wraps up everything that has come before with the force of a blow to the stomach. The last images of this movie haunted me for days afterward. And I find the premise of this movie even more plausible than that of Hostel, which makes me genuinely nervous. It takes a lot to affect me any more, but this did it.
Martyrs - A young girl escapes her imprisonment in an abandoned slaughterhouse, where she was beaten and starved by a mysterious group of people for reasons that aren't made clear. As she recovers from her ordeal, she makes a friend and trusts her to keep her secret - that she was followed out of imprisonment by a shadowy creature that mutilates her periodically. Flash forward several years, to the same girl murdering a family as they sit down to breakfast. From here, what seems like a psychological thriller turns into something both stranger and more noble - a meditation on devotion, loyalty, suffering and transcendence that reminds me more of Lars Von Trier's Dancer in the Dark that anything else. And like that movie, this one can be really hard to watch, especially in the last 30 minutes or so. It doesn't offer easy answers, and in some ways it doesn't even offer clear moral choices, something horror films usually do. Not at all a scary date movie, this one will leave you shaken.
Honestly, I think scary movies get a bad rap. Like science fiction, they're mostly treated as genre trash - something cheap and disposable - and certainly there are plenty of films in both genres that are. But there are also films that refuse to pander, that hold difficult ideas up to the light and present them clearly and honestly. And it's been my experience that that's the best you can hope for when faced with real trauma and loss, so in a way I respect that in my entertainment as well.
Or, you know, I'm being all pretentious and shit.
Since we lost the boys, I've been watching a lot of horror movies.
I've probably mentioned this before, if only in passing. I'm not sure what it is that draws me to watching scary movies. I've always enjoyed them to one degree or another, moreso as an adult. But since we lost our sons, I've found it much easier to watch them, almost reassuring in a way.
Maybe it's that sense that somebody has it worse than me, if only in fiction (a concept the pros call downward comparison). Maybe I've had my capacity to feel fear dulled by such a traumatic experience, so it takes longer to hit my threshold for the sort of scares I used to get. Maybe it's because there are a shit-ton of good horror movies coming from all corners of the world, and it's much easier to see these movies in the age of the Internet than it used to be. Or a mixture of all of these. All I know is that I've been watching a lot of scary shit as of late. Some of it enjoyable, some of it not.
Conversely, almost anything involving children makes me really angry. Kids on television, kids in movies, people becoming parents, the trials and tribulations of parenthood. I would honestly rather watch somebody get their leg sawed off than fumble to get the quadruplets ready for their school field trip. Some might find that a little perverse. Honestly, I don't care and anymore I don't have the patience to keep up appearances.
Both are probably products of the same urge. We are afraid of what's out there in the dark. We have stories to explain lightning and thunder and fire and rain and snow and disease and birth and death. Our beliefs, our ideologies, our faiths: All torches against the dark. We open ourselves to horror stories because fictional terrors are manageable terrors. We inoculate ourselves against fear this way, by letting in just enough of the dark to keep from being overwhelmed by it. We celebrate birth and children for the same reason - we stave off the idea of oblivion by reassuring ourselves that through children our legacy will live on. As long as our bloodline continues, we never really die. As long as we have children, we will never die. Whitney Houston was right: The children are our future (and also, that crack cocaine is fucking fun). In the hopes of future generations, we light a candle against the dark.
Which brings to mind the movie "The Village." But I'll get to that.
Almost anything having to do with children fills me with grief and sadness and frustration and rage. Not exactly reassuring. So I no longer have that as an option. But I can open myself up to the horrors others envision and that alleviates the sadness for awhile. I've also been spending a lot of time with apocalyptic imagery lately. But that's for another post.
So, horror.
I want to get this down before I get to the pithy part. As I'm writing this out, I keep thinking about the movie "The Village." If you haven't seen it, go see it. Get it from Netflix or something, I'll wait.
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Seen it yet? No?
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Okay. So as I'm sitting here writing this post and working these ideas out, it occurs to me that "The Village" is sort of a literal instantiation of the stuff I'm talking about here. You've got a bunch of people who have been traumatized by the death of someone close to them and decide that the sane response to this is to abandon the modern world for an invented pre-industrial agrarian society. Which is a fiction intended to keep real horror at bay. And these people have kids, and kids being kids they know that the kids are going to want to explore life beyond the village, but since life beyond the village is what drove the adults to create the village in the first place, the adults don't see that as an option - no rumspringa here. So the adults create "those of whom we do not speak." They invent small horrors to keep their children safe from the larger horror of the outside world, from which they have made themselves safe with their own invented village. Their protective fiction has its own protective fiction, complete with pantomime raids and sacrifices and costumes hanging in a shed at the edge of the woods.
And yet, they can't keep trauma and violence at bay. One of their own, for reasons nobody can fathom, does something horrible. Something for which nobody's fictions can account. Death and tragedy lie outside of reasoning and explanations and platitudes. And their only chance to avert the monster they ran from, reappeared in their midst, is to send someone out into the world to retrieve medical help. They send a blind woman - a woman for whom the dark isn't just my clumsy metaphor, but life itself. She fumbles out into the dark beyond the village, guided only by necessity, without the comfort of fiction to keep her safe. No matter what narrative we construct, be it community, tradition, birth and growth, or monsters in the closet, it always comes back to the dark and all the ways we shelter ourselves from it.
So that was quite the tangent.
So I'm going to share with you some of the horror movies I've enjoyed lately - I wouldn't be surprised if I'm the only one who finds solace in them, but it works for me.
Basic: Suitable for most people.
Pulse - Based on the Japanese movie Kairo, this is basically a technological ghost story á la The Ring. Not qute as good as that movie, but sufficiently somber and spooky to be effective, with more of an emphasis on mood and atmosphere than cheap scares.
Cloverfield - A verité take on the giant monster movie, sort of like The Blair Witch Project meets Godzilla. The protagonists can be really irritating, but I think that's sort of the point - this is pretty much exactly what it would look like if a bunch of clever New York yuppie types found themselves running for their lives from something that can play tiddlywinks with skyscrapers. A little slow to start, but once it does, it doesn't let up until it ends.
The Descent - A prime example of what I like to call the "just when you thought it couldn't go any more wrong" movie. Interpersonal drama between a group of women on a caving expedition leads to disastrous consequences...and then things get really weird. There are bad things happening on about two or three different levels at once, and the tension keeps racheting up and ratcheting up masterfully.
Shrooms - A solid teens-in-trouble film. A group of more or less annoying college students go to Ireland looking for psychedelic mushrooms. Of course, they happen to go looking in a part of the country with a decidedly shady past involving a brutal order of monks and feral orphans, and nobody's sure if what's happening is real or not because they're all tripping balls. Sufficiently creepy, gory but not overly so, and well-plotted.
Intermediate: If you're not fond of horror movies, approach with caution.
Halloween (remake) - I don't understand why this remake attracted so much negative attention, it's not like the original is no longer available. Plot-wise, it's very similar to the original, which was pretty much the first slasher movie, but Rob Zombie's aesthetic makes all of the difference. This is an actively hostile movie. It aims to make you uncomfortable and succeeds. This is a good thing. Every death scene in this movie looks like a crime scene photo, messy and horrible in its banality. Everyone suffers, physically or emotionally, and the portrait painted of humanity is bleak. Puts the "horror" back into "horror movie."
The Abandoned - A haunted-house story about inescapable destiny, in which a woman travels to rural Russia to check out the family homestead she's inherited, and instead finds all manner of creepy shit. I don't want to say much else for fear of ruining it, but this movie has atmosphere in spades and will freak you out.
The Mist - Based on the Stephen King story of the same name, it's one of the better adaptations of his work. Like any other good scary movie, it works on psychological and supernatural levels at the same time - the situation the characters find themselves in could be something as simple as a really bad snowstorm or the bizarre invasion with which they're actually dealing, and there would still be the equally terrifying human factor to deal with. The ending is a real kick in the teeth, though, and although I commend the director for having the sheer balls to include it, it's also the reason I'm listing it here instead of under Basic.
Quarantine - Oh, this one is scary as fuck. Like Cloverfield, it's told from an immediate point of view. The conceit here is that a TV journalist and her cameraman are out riding along with a group of firemen for a human-interest story when the firemen are called to take care of a medical emergency at a small apartment building. The medical emergency goes very bad very quickly, and the cameraman keeps rolling, if only to document what's happening. The screws tighten very suddenly and very quickly and the ending spares you not at all. The original Spanish version, titled [REC], is equally recommended.
Advanced: Approach with great caution, not for the average movie buff.
The Ruins - A much bleaker take on the teens-in-trouble genre, where a group of spring-breaking boys and girls in Mexico run off in search of an archeological dig and meet a really grisly end. Ostensibly, the movie is about a malevolent force of nature. But, like The Mist, the people involved do as much damage to each other as the antagonist does.
Hostel - Famous mostly as the progenitor of the so-called "torture porn" genre of horror film, we once again have a group of college-age boys engaging in spectacularly bad decision-making and paying dearly for it. Although this movie does not skimp on the graphic violence and suffering typical of the genre, I think critics of this movie miss the black satire underneath - this movie has a lot to say about capitalism and industries designed to cater to a particular set of desires. One man's spring break is another man's murder holiday, perhaps. It's also much more plausible than, say, The Ruins, which rattled me more in the actual events of the movie, but it's much easier to imagine the situation outlined in Hostel actually occurring. Which leads me to the next movie...
Shuttle - I'm not sure this is actually out on video yet, but it's great. It has a simple, elegant premise - what if the bus driver didn't take you where you wanted to go? - and builds up twist after twist, spiraling it into deeply disturbing territory and an ending that neatly wraps up everything that has come before with the force of a blow to the stomach. The last images of this movie haunted me for days afterward. And I find the premise of this movie even more plausible than that of Hostel, which makes me genuinely nervous. It takes a lot to affect me any more, but this did it.
Martyrs - A young girl escapes her imprisonment in an abandoned slaughterhouse, where she was beaten and starved by a mysterious group of people for reasons that aren't made clear. As she recovers from her ordeal, she makes a friend and trusts her to keep her secret - that she was followed out of imprisonment by a shadowy creature that mutilates her periodically. Flash forward several years, to the same girl murdering a family as they sit down to breakfast. From here, what seems like a psychological thriller turns into something both stranger and more noble - a meditation on devotion, loyalty, suffering and transcendence that reminds me more of Lars Von Trier's Dancer in the Dark that anything else. And like that movie, this one can be really hard to watch, especially in the last 30 minutes or so. It doesn't offer easy answers, and in some ways it doesn't even offer clear moral choices, something horror films usually do. Not at all a scary date movie, this one will leave you shaken.
Honestly, I think scary movies get a bad rap. Like science fiction, they're mostly treated as genre trash - something cheap and disposable - and certainly there are plenty of films in both genres that are. But there are also films that refuse to pander, that hold difficult ideas up to the light and present them clearly and honestly. And it's been my experience that that's the best you can hope for when faced with real trauma and loss, so in a way I respect that in my entertainment as well.
Or, you know, I'm being all pretentious and shit.
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