Roger Angell, Spike Jonze, & Gotye

A beautiful piece by Roger Angell in this week's New Yorker about aging and mortality got me thinking about several recent experiences related to loss.  It reminded me of a video that Devon shared recently by Gotye, Somebody That I used To Know, and of my response to Spike Jonze’s new film "Her".  While Angell’s piece is a much deeper meditation on the nature of aging and true mortality, all three are ultimately about loneliness and melancholy, a subject largely avoided by most of our society today. I find myself attracted to all three

Angell, whose son, John Henry, is a dear friend, and his wife Carol was a teacher of Caroline's at Brearley, recently suffered tremendous loss, Carol, his daughter Callie and their dog Harry all died in relatively quick succession.  In the piece he describes of one of the surprises one experiences after suffering so much loss:

  "We geezers carry about a bulging directory of dead husbands or wives, children, parents, lovers, brothers and sisters, dentists and shrinks, office sidekicks, summer neighbors, classmates, and bosses, all once entirely familiar to us and seen as part of the safe landscape of the day. It’s no wonder we’re a bit bent. The surprise, for me, is that the accruing weight of these departures doesn’t bury us, and that even the pain of an almost unbearable loss gives way quite quickly to something more distant but still stubbornly gleaming."

Angell continues later that one of the biggest surprises of life is:

"Getting old is the second-biggest surprise of my life, but the first, by a mile, is our unceasing need for deep attachment and intimate love. We oldies yearn daily and hourly for conversation and a renewed domesticity, for company at the movies or while visiting a museum, for someone close by in the car when coming home at night."

Here is what Angell's piece shares with both the Gotye video and "Her".  All three pieces are about longing for contact with a loved ones.  "Her" is a problematic film for the very reason that it is compelling. It is about an ultimately un satisfying relationship with a computer. Jonze is one of a small handfull of popular directors who are willing to wade into loss in this way. Perhaps not coincidentally another video director, Michel Gondry, is among those who are well versed in the language of loneliness. The Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind is perhaps the ultimate breakup film.  Maybe it is telling that film makers that come from a music background are the most comfortable with loss and heartbreak, an area where music has always been at ease.

Yet even in the seemingly loss-comfortable music world, the Gotye video stands out as an unusually powerful example. The video depicts the lead singer Wouter De Backer

standing naked singing and being painted in stop motion, as the camera passes over G-rated parts of his body.

The video is notable not only for its elegantly simple production, but also for the response it garnered.  I read several of the comments and was struck by number of people disgusted by the idea (that's all it was) that he was naked. It was as if they were so afraid of the real versions of their bodies that even the thought of nakedness was offensive. More than likely these very same people are completely comfortable with a tanned body in a swimming pool selling perfume.

Which ultimately just made me want to yell at them and ask if they have ever actually looked at themselves in the mirror. "Are you aware that this body is all you've got? That is the body you'll die in? That one day some kind person at a funeral home will hold and wash the body you are looking at, and it's not going to look like that person in the perfume ad!"

Angell begins his piece describing all the many notable physical attributes that accompany his age. It made me wonder, if we all took a similarly long look in the mirror once in a while, perhaps we would become a little more comfortable with our own frailty and mortality. Maybe we'd also become a little better at the vulnerability that's a needed for the intimacy we crave.