I’ve never had the right words to describe my life and now that I’ve entered my story, I need them more than ever
I should be writing my vows.
But I feel out of practice, like a cog whose gears are out of sync. The words come out but they’re unwieldy, requiring finessing and shaping. Nerves take over, along with the glaring fear of having produced something that could best be described as pedestrian. A friend tells me that I’m a writer and that I’ll figure it out, but that presents its own set of questions, led foremost by: am I a writer? Was I ever? Does it matter either way?
I go through my journals and commonplace books for inspiration, for reminders of the tumultuous feelings of the past, and come across a page inspired by Yechiel, the Hasidic Jewish man I met during my first trip to the psych ward in 2019. We bonded during our short five-day stay in the ward, where he gifted me his Casio watch on his last day. The windowless, clinical setting offered little to suggest the passage of time. Yechiel and his gifted contraband gave us all a sense that we weren’t living in a state of purgatory. When he was summoned to gather his things and leave, we hugged goodbye. His parting words: ‘Your place is in the world.’
I still have the watch, but I don’t wear it anymore.
Since then, my place in the world has seen its ebbs and flows, to put it mildly. From a global pandemic to the extinction of a past life, I’ve experienced no shortage of agony, joy, hostility, and beauty. Periods of deep self-loathing gave way to moments of enduring conviction in the world’s life-generating potential. I experienced love and its antithesis, endured disparagement, and began anew. I met fate with indifference, contended with meaninglessness, and through trial and error, found pockets of benevolence. I write now not in a manic frenzy like in my late teens and twenties, but with greater calibration and attentiveness. Or so I try. Every time I begin these confessional retrospectives, I think it will be my last.
My relationship to film has changed. Once a priority, films have retreated to the periphery of life’s frame, where the movie-going experience has become an every-so-often retreat rather than the house of worship it once was. But to quote David Foster Wallace: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism. The volume of my cinematic diet may have declined, but I’m pickier and more deliberate with the way I use my time. No more useless screenings of the latest installment in a blockbuster franchise; I’m seeing what’s important to me and revisiting the films that broaden and challenge my worldview. The films remain the same, but I’m the one who’s different.
As part of my 2019 year-in-review, I reflected on coming to grips with the end of my 12-year relationship with Karina. I wrote how it was my “hardest year.” I lol’d pretty hard when revisiting that blog post. Whether it’s JC, Allah, or (more appropriately), a coven of Wiccan Mother Goddesses, I would see that statement challenged on more than a few occasions since 2020. Reality is always more complex than our means of representing it and over the course of writing during the last few years, I’ve aimed to, deliberately, address the stories and lies told about me. Sometimes I was informed by anger. Other times I was informed by hope. Over the past few years, I’ve accepted that I need to put this all behind me. All that hate keeps no one warm, it just burns you up; a mantra that’s been more difficult in practice than anyone could imagine.
The following ten films were selected for what they meant to me over the past 2000 days; the quasi half-way point in the decade of the 2020s. They’re films that I’ve hung my hat to, and have held close to me for what they’ve inspired. I see pieces of myself in all of them. They’re candid reflections of myself at various stages of life, from the unsavory to the wistfully hopeful. All have been revisited periodically through the last five years; when I’ve called out to the past, it’s these films that return an echo. With or without them, my place remains in the world, but it’s made the journey all the more endurable. They’re companions, not to be worshipped, but reminders of what once was, is, and could be.
10.
Fourteen
Directed by Dan Salitt
But if you do not like the person we have learned to be, I think that maybe it is possible to make a new way.
One of the understood, if not gendered, aspects of planning a wedding is the expectation that the bride will most certainly have more attendees than the groom. With none of my family, with the exception of my brother, attending, I was left to reach out to my limited pool of friends for support. And they came through; despite some of my closest friends moving to other parts of the country, having lost touch in the interim, I’m profoundly grateful for those that have remained by my side. I know it hasn’t been easy. I’m not the easiest to vouch for. But you can’t keep everyone by your side all the time, and that’s been the tough lesson that I’ve had to contend with since my engagement, and certainly before it.
Dan Salitt’s Fourteen examines a friendship that has run through its share of peaks and valleys, with the landscape of the past slowly vanishing to the periphery. Mara (Tallie Medal) and Jo (Norma Kuhling) have known each other since childhood, and we observe them for about ten years, starting in their 20s. Mara’s the more rational, steadier of the two, while we first observe Jo beginning to crumble, losing her marketing job and having to contend with a litany of unsuitable boyfriends. Mara is there to pick up the pieces, serving as a friend and confidant as Jo’s mental health spirals.
Their friendship often registers as a series of inhales and exhales. There’s a tension, where Mara is providing the emotional support that Jo needs, with a sense that it’s never quite enough. As an audience member, I couldn’t help but feel that Mara was giving so much more of herself into a relationship that wasn’t giving her anything back in return. But it’s an antiquated form of thinking, and a moral framework that I think destroyed a lot of my past relationships, platonic and otherwise. Later into the film, we uncover why Mara remains so loyal to Jo, as Mara, now raising a child on her own, imparts the wisdom of her openness and love.
In reconnecting with old friends, I’ve had some difficult conversations about my past. I like to think that I’m open and transparent about it all, and with that comes having to sit through some uncomfortable silences on the other end of the receiver. A friend of mine living on the west coast was there for me when I was at a low point in my mid-twenties. I distinctly remember drinking on their rooftop in the early 2010s after a lay-off, and despite feeling like I was at the-end-of-my-rope-and-prepared-to-hang, they gave me the reassurance that things would be fine. The bottom of that moment would give way to new rock bottoms, but somehow, I persevered. I was aloof and kept everything hidden, and they still checked up on me. Why didn't I return the favor? You get wrapped up in your own mess that when it’s time to finally celebrate your accomplishments, you find that you’ve pushed people away with your close-mindedness. I’ve been the Jo in a lot of my relationships over the last decade or so, and am now finding myself yearning to be like Mara. To give, to support, and to be someone that a friend could rely on in times of trouble. Memory is a patient gardener, with the seed of numerous positive relationships taking root in my head; it’s not so much that I need to return the favor as much as it's just knowing that you’re there for people. So, for those that ghosted or walked away from our friendship, acquaintanceship, or otherwise: I get it. The door is always open, and what you’ve done for me in the past is preserved in the loam of my memory. And for those that have stood by me, through it all: your presence and support has meant more to me than you’ll ever know.
09.
After Yang
Directed by Kogonada
Search your memory, find something concrete. Something you can touch
I cycled for the first time in three weeks today. Earlier in May, I broke my collarbone while cycling, colliding with a driver that attempted a u-turn in front of me. I’ve joked that I’m living in my John McCain-era; incapable of lifting my right arm above my head, I’ve struggled with the sort of day-in-day-out activities that we all take for granted, from putting on a t-shirt to wiping my ass. There’s something to be said about the timing of the injury (a little over a month before my wedding), but I’m improving by the day. The bike ride from Pilsen to Edgewater is a familiar one, and while the 17-mile ride was more arduous than usual (you truly use your whole body while cycling), I made it to the cafe of my undergrad years. This is all eerily familiar.
I wrote about Kogonada’s After Yang for my twenty 22 annual review. Back then, I made the same trek, sat at my favorite red table at Metropolis Coffee, and wrote about missing the people of my past. There’s a lot of complicated feelings that emerge from re-reading that post, but unsurprisingly, given my present circumstance, I’m fixated on the injuries that I’ve amassed over the last few years, and the significance I’ve afforded them in the story of my life. Like Jake (Colin Farrell) charting the past of Yang (Justin H. Min) in After Yang, I’m traversing the memory museum of my mind. With the wisdom of hindsight, I look back at the litany of scrapes, fractured bones, and bruises I’ve absorbed and notice how they coincide with significant forks in the road, harbingers of things to come, and choices that led me here, back again, at my favorite red table.
While it wasn’t my first accident, it was my goriest. In the summer of 2018, I’m cycling on Chicago’s lakefront path as I normally do. It’s more crowded than usual, and children are darting about. I’m frustrated and attempt to bypass them, only to have to careen to the ground to avoid hitting someone. It’s a gravelly, downhill portion of the trail and I practically have the skin of my left forearm torn clean off. Adrenaline seizes me and rather than going to a hospital, I text my girlfriend at the time, Karina, and ask that she set aside the medical kit. I cycle the four or five miles back home in Ravenswood, leaving a trail of blood along the way. It’s a deep gash and I peel off my clothes, finding other scrapes and bruises dotting the rest of my body. Karina picks out pieces of gravel lodged inside the gash with tweezers. I stare into her eyes as she’s focused on picking out every pebble before she wraps the wound in gauze and a bandage. I would leave her a few months after this. She deserved better than that. The scar from the wound remains there to this day.
In many ways, reader, you’re operating like Jake. You’re reading these memories like Jake traverses the mind of Yang. In Kogonada’s film, androids are weaved into daily life. Yang, an android, has malfunctioned and Jake attempts to have him repaired. His wife and daughter (Jodie Turner-Smith and Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) rely on him to get this done, even as he struggles to contend with the reality of the situation: Yang is dead and all that’s left of him is a memory box that contains all the data that he’s accumulated throughout his life. It’s here where Jake peeks into Yang’s life, viewing the moments that he stored daily, the moments that all left a tangible impact on his life. What Jake uncovers is the depths of Yang’s memories, both while with their family, and his past.
In 2020, it was a godsend when then-mayor/cop Lori Lightfoot re-opened the lakefront path. After a summer of missing out on the space, I would commute again on the trail. It was a particularly gusty afternoon and I’m on my way home from work, on the stretch of the trail near Navy Pier. The pavement is wet from the crashing waves on Lake Michigan. Again, it’s busier than usual and the slick conditions force me to decide between falling or running over a small puppy. My feet were still locked into my pedals as I hit the wet concrete but the fall itself seemed minor; it was only when I got up and put pressure on my right foot that I noticed something was wrong. Fast-forward a few hours and my foot has ballooned to twice its size. The only shoe that would fit was my oversized croc as I had it x-rayed the following afternoon, forced to wear a boot for a week or so. Not that a fractured foot would prevent me from seeing the women in my life.
Like with Columbus, Kogonada’s execution of form (precise framing, inspired use of repetition, preference toward hushed silences) gives After Yang a kind emotional heft that lingers long after a single viewing. Released just months after the publication of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, a similar-minded text involving an android, it’s impossible to imagine that Taika Waititi’s upcoming adaptation will come remotely close to capturing the existential profundity that Kogonada accomplished in After Yang. It’s a film that provokes empathy through memory, plunging viewers into the mind of someone cast to observe, and realizing the full scope of what it means to be; to be part of a family, to be loved, to love.
I made my way to Aislinn’s Uptown apartment a few days after breaking my foot. She had a surprise for me. Back in January 2020, I bought a ticket to go to France, hoping to pave my way again through Paris and the countryside, this time alone. I was learning French at the start of the year and really tried to make an effort to make my return to Paris mine. By August 2020, the idea of going there was not feasible and the trip was cancelled. Like a lot of my plans for the year, the second half of 2020 was more about survival than anything else; I was emerging out of the wreckage and nursing my wounds, literal and emotional. I hobbled my way to Aislinn’s apartment, where I was greeted with a French spread: a charcuterie board, a litany of pastries, and wine. Hard to believe that I didn’t know it then, or that I would have to make mistake upon mistake, before realizing that this was the woman I would marry. But I go back to that memory, am reminded of my broken foot, realize that people are still capable of having a generosity of spirit, and realize that 2020 wasn’t all bad.
08.
The Souvenir Part II
Directed by Joanna Hogg
She said, "You're pretty good with words, but words won't save your life"
And they didn't, so he died
Despite once being a member of a few critics’ organizations, I never identified myself as one. At times, mingling with local would-be filmmakers, that’s how they would introduce me to their friends: “and here’s Daniel Nava, a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association”. I never felt comfortable with the label, mostly because I didn’t necessarily know if what I was doing possessed any qualitative critical merit; I just engage with films on a personal (some would say superficial) level, relying on them as a springboard to make sense of the thoughts that course through my brain. Sometimes they speak to me about the cultural moment of the present, but most times, particularly involving the films that are most important to me, I connect with them for their ability to communicate a feeling that language so often fails to address. I don’t think this is me coping or rationalizing my feelings after getting ousted from the CFCA, but rather a reflection of truth: it didn’t mean much to be inducted as a member, and it certainly didn’t mean much to be excommunicated from the group. After it all happened, I took a breather from Internet spaces, but realized that I still needed to write, and to write the only way I know how: through film. Despite efforts to the contrary, that’s something no one can take away from me. In the wake of trauma, I suppose it makes writers out of all of us.
More so with Joanna Hogg’s sequel, I identified with Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne). The Souvenir Part II picks up after the first film ends, with Julie mourning the death of her ex-boyfriend Anthony (Tom Burke). She’s in her final year of film school, and has decided to mine the turbulent relationship for material for her thesis film; she’s going to recount what it was like to be in love with a drug-addled partner. She navigates the complicated terrain like a smuggler in a graveyard, picking at the bones of a relationship that she herself can’t quite understand. I’ve been there. What the film becomes is an encapsulation of what was a similar daily battle that I contended with for years: learning to live with ghosts without becoming one myself.
The film doesn’t promote a compare-and-despair kind of commiseration. Instead, it goes through the various stages of grief that one endures in order to make it to the other side. Without a tight script or a precise vision for her project, Julie draws the ire of her fellow students and colleagues as she attempts to articulate the nuance of both her relationship and what she wants to achieve with her thesis film. She doesn't know what she’s going to find. But she’ll know it when she finds it. For better or worse, my writing operates in a similar way. As I pore over my journals and read through old pieces from years ago, I see hued fragments of myself; the defensive, angry Daniel, the somber, hopeless Daniel, or the optimistic, yet dogmatic Daniel. These are all me, and not.
Of all the films on this list, this was the one I was most hesitant in returning to. At the time, my favorite film of 2021, I couldn’t help but feel like I was still grieving, still clinging onto fantasies of tidy resolutions and radical forgiveness. Returning to Hogg’s film, I was most struck by the importance of trusting the process; my words, which got me in trouble, which hurt people I cared about, would be what saves me. The soul thrives on ephemeral fantasies. What I saw when observing Julie again, was someone just trying to figure it out, emerging from the rubble. You don’t always know what you’re doing. And it’s not quite the linear process that you’d expect it to be, but for both us, the only way through it was with film.
07.
Red Rocket
Directed by Sean Baker
Death always makes people practical
The circumstances of my life have changed so much that I might as well be another person. These changes began well before June of 2020. The tectonic plates began their shift just before October 2018, where I broke things off with Karina. She left our Ravenswood apartment and moved in with her twin sister while I was living my bachelor life, meeting new women on a weekly basis. I was filling the Karina-shaped hole in my heart, shirking my responsibilities and feeling genuinely invincible. But it all caught up with me eventually, and I was afforded the opportunity to live more deliberately. But I didn’t. Instead, I was too busy having my fun, feeding off my id, and paradoxically yearning for comfort but denying the placid domesticity of my past.
Mikey (Simon Rex) was chewed up and spat out. A former L.A. porn star, he returns to his hometown of Texas City, Texas to begin again. He hopes to crash with Lexi (Bree Elrod), his estranged wife’s home (which she shares with her mom). But without a job and only a few dollars in his pocket, Mikey goes back to dealing weed to make ends meet, contributing to a household that’s reluctant at best to welcome him back. Eventually, he earns his keep, as Lexi slowly begins to open her life back up to him. But Mikey doesn’t want that. He wants to get back to where he was, back to Los Angeles where he felt like someone. And he doesn’t care whose lives he has to ruin to get there.
With each new relationship came a richer understanding of what I wanted, which served to only underscore my own short-sighted selfishness. I wasn’t one to work through problems, but rather walk away from them. My excuses were plentiful, but they all stemmed from this inherent feeling that I had “wasted” my twenties and sought to have fun in my thirties, and anyone that impeded that needed to be excised from my life. My past relationships would sometimes see one romance bleed into another, so when I ended things with Anna Lisa only to begin a new one a few days later with Yvonne, I thought that that was a notable improvement. I didn’t give myself time to breathe, or reflect, or even examine what any of these relationships meant to me; instead, I just kept moving. A global pandemic, or a Twitter thread, or broken bones, or self-inflicted despair was not going to stop me.
As Mikey’s life approaches some modicum of comfort, he discovers Strawberry, a 17-year old working at a local donut shop. Immediately, he thinks she could be his ticket to returning to the porn industry. As he becomes closer to Strawberry, Mikey distances himself from Lexi, prompting a litany of arguments between them. With his relationships in town disintegrating one by one, Mikey decides to make the move, taking all the money he saved through dealing and using it to produce Strawberry in a porn. But Mikey’s lofty dreams aren’t going to come to fruition, where the all-too-familiar axiom takes him for a wild, screwball ride: you may be done with the past, but the past is not done with you.
The most recent seismic shift occurred in early March of 2023. It’s what alcoholics commonly refer to as a moment of clarity. I was in love with the memory of a person (Sara), the idea of another (Jackie, the Harvard variety), and a zombie to the love of the person right in front of me (Aislinn). I shared breakfast with Sara, and went on a walk with her. We had our typical disagreements about life and in that moment, I had to ask myself what the fuck I was doing. She was someone who dispensed with me, and since then, we clinged onto a memory of the past that we seemingly were both angry that we could never realize. I’ve previously recounted my story of walking from Humboldt Park to Pilsen as some kind of Moses-and-the-Israelites trek of absolution. I sincerely don’t mean to mythologize the moment. But it was sacrosanct because this was the first time since the earth fell out from under me where I wasn’t floating. Finally, my feet kept me upright and grounded. And it’s in the moment where I had to make a concrete decision on how to live. I decided to seize control of my own life, and dealt with the consequences since. I’ve never been happier, and better yet, I’ve never been more at peace with myself.
For a guy like Mikey, who makes a trek at the end of Red Rocket to see Strawberry with nothing but $200 and whatever he can carry in a trash bag, you see him indulge in the fantasies of a future that seem unlikely. When the earth falls from under your feet, it’s easy to remain floating, drifting from one situation into another. Not to devolve into self-help cliche or vacant Kumbaya rhetoric on the nature of transcendence and survival, but it’s a moment of profound joy when you can finally be honest with yourself about who you are and who you want to be. I know who I am, and my past’s infidelities and selfishness have shaped my perspective on who I want to be. Every human being has to make their own mistakes.The pain that was there was as real as it gets, but the earth is at my feet again.
06.
Tár
Directed by Todd Field
Start, stop and start, stupid acting smart
Flirting with the flicks, you say it’s just for kicks
You’ll be the victim of your own dirty tricks
Few films have made me feel more seen than Todd Field’s Tár. None of it is savory, but like looking into a dirty bathroom mirror, I was confronted with my lack of kindness, my aggression, my avoidance, and most of all, my hate. But through mental gymnastics, I could manipulate the crooked image, angling my position in the mirror, thinking that the reflection could look better. My perceived charm would do the heavy lifting. And for a long time, I believed it. I could be cruel and charming, because cruelty was my interior life, not my presenting one. How did I present myself? As a self-important intellectual, someone who could string together a few words to form complex sentences. Or, as Maya put it: an idiot with a robust vocabulary. It was all concealing insecurities that I’ve constantly been at odds with: that I’ve never been smart enough, never been attractive enough, and will not amount to anything remotely important.
Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) is interviewed by Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker, where, as the first female conductor of a Berlin orchestra, she offers calculated insights into her process. She’s an affable personality, someone you can feel at ease with in an instant; intellectual and sharp, but attentive and open. She looks you directly in the eyes when addressing you, has the delightfully cute tic of brushing her hair behind her ear, and concludes every remark with an intimate glance and the beginnings of a smirk. Like her dedication to her craft, she has practiced this orchestration of presentation in front of a mirror, time and time again to precise effect. It’s a self-staging that I’m familiar with. I think we all do this to a certain degree. What changes is the depths in which we go when outside of this curated version of ourselves, behind closed doors, unsurveilled and, theoretically, free from judgment or consequence. The lesson, as it were, is that every action has a reaction.
Tár’s life continues unabated despite persistent indications that something is boiling under the surface. Her assistant, Francesca (Noémie Merlant) warns her of urgent emails from an unseen former student, Krista Taylor. Blacklisted, Krista’s emails suggest a relationship between her and Tár that extended beyond mentor-mentee. Later in the film, we discover that Krista kills herself, with Tár now distancing herself from any involvement. Meanwhile, a heavily edited video involving Tár dressing down a student at her Julliard class goes viral. The discourse on the video involves the discomfort in which the student has with performing pieces by Bach given the man’s sexist past. To Tár, Bach is one of those canonical figures whose misogyny and past infidelities is hidden in his considerable shadow. But the student’s nervousness makes the whole exchange of ideas seem one-sided, with Tár refusing to discount the works of a genius on the basis of his extracurricular cruelty.
Assembling itself like a tree diagram of transgressions, Tár’s overt and passive cruelties catch up with her, resulting in the loss of her Berlin conductorship. Professionally, she’s cooked, leaving her to take a job in the Philippines, where she now functions as the proverbial robot that, during her New Yorker interview, she cited as what separated her from mid level conductors. She still takes her job seriously, but she knows the heights of what she achieved could never be reached again, leaving her to live with the repercussions of her past, tortured by ghosts.
I used to look in the mirror and ask myself if I’m the bad guy. It took a long time for me to understand how flawed that question can be. I would blame my past, my childhood of lack as the reason for my defects. I’d blame my parents. I so often wanted to blame others when it all, simply put, comes back to me. I don’t know if Tár will have her moment of redemption. At the end of Fields' film, we observe her vomit outside of a Filipino massage parlor, when confronted with the decision to pick a woman as her masseuse. Her body rejects it, in that all too familiar feeling of just wanting to escape being trapped by a bad decision. There have been moments where I’ve seen the ghosts of my past and I just tense up, feeling my heart sink to the soles of my feet. In them, I see distorted reflections of myself; people who have conjured up an image of me that is fueled by misinformation and hate. But with increased distance from the past, along with therapy and a desire for openness, I’ve found these moments to be more endurable. Time stumbles on and I’ve learned to enjoy my life for what it is. I don’t let myself act in a way that brings pain to others, and with that, I’ve found myself looking at my reflection… and not wincing. The birthmark that ornates the luggage under my left eye isn’t a bruise, but me. And in that moment, I’m able to crack a smile.
05.
Aftersun
Directed by Charlotte Wells
There’s something particularly sad about parents. They’re tragic figures in the sense that you can’t ever really see them as people until you’re grown up and it’s too late to forgive them.
I don’t talk about my father because I don’t know him very well. He was always there during the 18 years I lived at home. He worked hard and provided for our family. But, as a kid, we never really had a conversation. He was never open about his past and he often spoke of a world that was radically different from my own. He had brothers and sisters; an entire family that I never knew. I feel like this speaks to my own impatience, but I never felt like he had much of an interior life. I didn’t think that he really… thought. Which sounds cruel and dismissive, but the more I reflect on it, the more it appears to be my coping mechanism. A father is supposed to protect, right? My father beat the shit out of me. My father would hit my mother. My father wouldn’t buy his four-year old son a bed, and instead he had me sleep next him and my mother as they fucked. My father would use a faux-leather belt for discipline, leaving bruises and welts on my body that would force me to go to school in the sweltering heat wearing sweaters to conceal his handiwork. So yes, I rationalize that he simply doesn’t think. Because cruel, mean men don’t think. And maybe if I, Daniel Nava, decide to think then maybe I won’t be considered the product of that cruelty and meanness. I believe that’s referred to as moral differentiation. Or maybe it’s just a survival tactic.
Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun details Sophie’s (Frankie Corio) Turkish vacation with her father Calum (Paul Mescal). At just 11, this would be the last time she sees her father, before his presumed suicide. Set in 1999, I would be the same age as Sophie at the time, and can vividly recall the sort of humid torpor that bubbled in the last summer before the millennium. Sophie’s time at a resort pool brings about the sort of moments that would be a staple of any coming-of-age story, but it’s Calum’s tall shadow that casts Aftersun in a different light. Moment to moment, Calum’s melancholy threatens to subsume everything about that summer, and every memory that Sophie has of her father.
Following a suicide attempt in February 2018, I would reconnect with my family. It was the first time I saw my parents outside of a psych ward in nearly nine years. My father would give me a lift back home and it’s in that 45-minute car ride that we actually had a conversation. I learned about how he was laid off just two years before he could collect his pension. He worked at the same company, every night, of every week, for nearly 30 years, and they fired him for a mistake. He thought about killing himself. But he didn’t.. I don’t know how he could be happy or even remotely content. I see his mind drifting and he refuses to challenge his brain, instead embracing minute physical tasks. Yet his body is giving out on him. Tightly, he grips the handrail down the flight stairs to the condo he shares with my mother. His knees crack. His fingers are arthritic. But he keeps working. To stop would be a death in itself.
Interspersed through Wells’ film are moments of Sophie as an adult, reflecting back on the past. We see images of Calum on Sophie’s miniDV camcorder, where you observe Sophie scrutinize the video. Oh, how I’ve been there. Every time I would go to my parents place as an adult, I would pour over the pictures in our photo albums, trying to interpret how someone like my mother would be with someone like my father. It never made much sense to me. And still doesn’t. It’s senseless. Kind of like how Sophie last remembers Calum, bidding her farewell at the airport, looking back longingly, neither knowing it at the time, but feeling it all the same: this will be the last moment we see each other.
You never know when it will happen. In the most painful cases, it’s sudden. Other times, it’s to be expected. With my parents, when I told them about my engagement, they seemed vaguely pleased. But when I asked them to contribute to the cost of the wedding, it was met with the usual bickering and avoidance. My mother always does the talking and my father just retreats to the periphery. I don’t really know what he thinks, and so a lot of my anger gets directed at my mother. I confess: I have been especially hard on her. The older I get, the more I reject my father’s newfound passivity, particularly when in the past, it was his cruelty and violence that impacted me most. In this passivity, I have so many questions on why he did the things he did. I imagine Sophie also has so many questions to ask. But she can’t.
After years of disappointment and hostility, I’ve found that I simply cannot rely on my parents if they’re not capable of having a conversation. I asked them to apologize for their past actions towards me. The violence, the abuse; all of it. And they just refused to acknowledge it. I’ve inherited a lot of this pain, and an apology wouldn’t necessarily be absolution, but rather an acknowledgment. It honestly would just make me feel a little less insane. But it was still met with deaf ears. They still have their pulse, wasting away in their dirty condo in Addison, Illinois, in what resembles a casket of their own making. They’re alive to themselves, just not to me.
04.
The Beast
Directed by Bertrand Bonello
Can't love for us both
You've gotta live and I gotta go
As long as it's us two
Fuck being remembered, I think I was made for you
My favorite film from last year, Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast, has burrowed into my brain in a way that I cannot shake. It takes elements of some of my favorite films of the century, particularly Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Past Lives, and melds them into a treatise for survival, of cataloging the past and living with regret. My thoughts have always gravitated toward whatever’s missing inside of me; what The Beast implores its viewers to consider is how this missing feeling embodies everything about the human experience itself. Bonello doesn’t ask us to imagine something as banal as Sisyphus happy, but instead suggests that there’s a distinction between the happiness of a dullard, and of someone who keeps asking questions, of someone who actively refuses contentment.
Now, post-wedding, I must confess that a kind of activist’s lassitude has settled in. I got married on the same weekend that a certain fascist brute in an orange epidermis costume commissioned (with tax-payer dollars) a military parade. It’s not apathy that’s settled in, but instead a by-design fatigue of constantly being bombarded with nonsensical bullshit. It’s what I see on a global level, and it’s what I experienced in droves at the start of this decade. There was no shortage of inane, positively toxic discourse about, of all people, me. As someone who never cared to be the center of attention, my momentary entry into being publicly shamed was a death and provoked, for years, quite a bit of soul searching. There are many versions of this question that I could ask, but the heart of it can be summed with two contrasting ideas: why was I cruel to Jackie and why did it take five-plus years for Jackie to seek her karmic retribution?
Significant parts of me would rather just forget. To be stripped of anything feeling and embrace the contentment that I’ve nurtured with Aislinn over the last few years. It’s the appeal of the 2044 world that The Beast is set in; where AI has taken over, where humans possess no practical utility as they are, and can only be made useful after completing a lobotomy to remove all sense of feeling and memory. The society of The Beast remains a capitalist one, and Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) must prove her worth to her AI overlords by destroying a piece of herself in order to procure a job. So she considers the procedure, where she sifts through the terrain of her former lives in 1910 France and 2014 Los Angeles.
The Daniel Nava of 2014 was confused and callous. I’m 26 and realizing that I’m approaching my self-imposed deadline of 30 to make something happen in my life. I was living in a ridiculously tiny studio apartment and was profoundly malnourished; socially, professionally, and sexually. The hopes of my late teens and early 20s were becoming increasingly distant, and I just didn’t have the resources, communication skills, or smarts to figure out what to do to hoist myself out of my situation. So instead, I found a distraction. That’s where Jackie comes in. She was a distraction then, much like how she was a distraction in 2020; it took several years to excise the tumor of her memory from my day-in-day-out life. And in the wake of that memory are the scars from that excision.
Whether it’s 1910, 2014, or 2044, Gabrielle contends with a version of Louis (George MacKay) that embodies something that she desperately needs in each timeline. In 1910, she finds herself pining for Louis despite being in a loveless relationship; here, it’s the connection of someone who dares to understand her that captures her attention. In 2014, she’s a struggling actress in Los Angeles trying to form any kind of connection, as she becomes the object of fascination to an incel version of Louis. In this timeline, it’s a literal earthquake that rollicks both lonely people into each other’s lives. And in 2044, she lives a monotonous, unaffecting life where she encounters a version of Louis that is also considering the same emotion-wiping procedure that would make them more commercially viable. Here, they meet at a nightclub that changes its theme to various years; their love for one another is constantly out of time. The prevailing sentiment here, the motivating catalyst behind Gabrielle and Louis’ love, is rooted in their all-encompassing loneliness, in attempting to make sense of the world in which they inhabit. Regardless of timeline or even socioeconomic status, the two find themselves in desperate need of a connection that only the two of them can afford one another.
I found no peace in 2014. Or in 2020. The loneliness that I combated within myself seemed like a permanent condition with no salve. The Jackies of my life were a balm for that malignancy. I don’t blame her for lashing out. I don’t blame anyone for doing it. I question the accuracy of it, along with what I would call strategic malice, but - and this took time to realize - we’re all cruel in our own petulant ways. I literally almost killed myself over her lies. I have the scars to prove it. I took a lot of hits to the psyche, to my confidence, and my well-being. It’s not lost on me that she probably endured something similar. But I’m thankful she failed. And while there’s a part of me that will always be upset about having my life upended and turned around, I cannot express anything but gratitude with how I landed. Even if the landing was clumsy. Happiness is no longer elusive, and even more importantly, it’s the peace that I’ve cultivated since that makes life more endurable than it ever did in 2014 or 2020. I’ve lived a good life, in spite of myself. I could excuse myself for a brief descent into pettiness, where I would hope that it’s salt in all of their wounds. The Jackies and anyone who joined a coven without being honest with themselves. But at this point, reflecting on the tumult of those moments, I just see these acts as a way of rationalizing and making sense of relationships that just didn’t work out, by tethering themselves to me and my name. But no, I’ve clamped and cut the umbilical cord with the skin of my teeth. Or in other words: I survived.
I wanted to write about the future. That kind of, “well, if I write it down, then maybe it’ll come true” sort of manifestation that my generation holds close to the chest. I’m trying hard to make things matter; analyzing the past and gratitude for the present can only take me so far. The idea of moving forward and focusing on the future has always been difficult for me to express, let alone realizing.
In the present, you have all these plans of what you hope to realize. And writing this now after spending most of the night in the emergency room with my wife, I came closer to a new rock bottom that I hadn’t experienced in my lifetime. Nothing makes you reconsider your future more than having your present become blotted out and uncertain. I’ve experienced this soul-snatching sensation more than once during the last five years. The train barreling toward me, inches from my face, had long been the scariest moment of my life. That changed.
It’s Friday night and Aislinn is treating me out. She picks a restaurant in Andersonville, where we enjoy some mediterranean and a few sazaracs. We plan on watching the sunset but opt for an early night cap at Simon’s Tavern beforehand. Sporting the best jukebox in the city, we select a handful of songs each and sip on a glogg slushie; it’s become an annual summer tradition for both of us and seemingly was a lovely way to begin our busy weekend.
We’re both starting our third drink of the evening when Aislinn asks for water. As I got up from my bar stool, I noticed that she began to crumble in her seat, seemingly about to rest her head on the bar table. It’s unlike her so I hold onto her hand and ask if she’s alright; she doesn’t respond. I briefly let go to circle around the table to be by her side, but in a moment she begins to seize up, her legs stricken tense, and she falls backward in her seat. I rush to grab her but it’s too late, she hits the ground, the back of her head whiplashing against the bar floor as I try to grab her arm. I panic, shout her name louder than I’ve ever done in my life, and yell for help. A nurse that happened to be in the bar rushed and kept talking to Aislinn as I desperately tried to call 911; my phone had no service. She wasn’t responding. She wasn’t saying anything.
At that moment, I thought I lost everything. I failed my wife. Forget about the moments in my life where my heart sinks to the soles of my feet; I felt any and all life escape my body as I kept saying Aislinn’s name over and over again, pleading for her to wake up. In what was a minute that felt like eternity, she came to, but even then I was terrified by the slowness of her re-emerging cognizance. Was it a stroke? An epileptic fit? An ambulance was summoned and we got her out of the bar quickly. I buckled in the ambulance as a litany of tests were done, fearing the things I see at work daily; a subdural hematoma or an aneurysm rupture or a cavernoma all ran as possible scenarios in my mind. I have the connections to help her but was I too late? I’m supposed to protect her but I let her down, I wasn’t fast enough.
We’re back home now. The head CT cited no brain bleed. She has a bruise on the back of her head, but otherwise is in good spirits. Just a fainting spell. Syncope. A month after our wedding, I thought that I lost her. Even now, recounting the broad strokes of the event, I remain completely shaken. Fate is not without a sense of irony, and for a brief moment, I thought I was living the life of a character out of a Thomas Hardy novel; a neurological surgery admin tries to get his fucked up life back in order and falls in love with a woman that cares for him, only for her to have a brain abnormality that I was feckless to prevent. Leaving the bar, the last song that I played was spinning on the jukebox: MJ Lenderman’s She’s Leaving You. Fuck no you weren’t. No fucking way.
As we left the house that afternoon to get to Andersonville, I mentioned to Aislinn that I didn’t bring my housekeys. “Guess we’ll be coming home together” she said in response. I replayed that moment in my head as she was being surrounded by nurses, medical assistants, and doctors at Swedish Covenant. We’ll be coming home together. We’ll be coming home together.
03.
Drive My Car
Directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi
Most of us live less theatrically, but remain the survivors of a peculiar and inward time
I needed to grieve in order to move forward. Little deaths pinged like raindrops around me, where the existential storms of my twenties led to a cataclysmic torrent in my thirties. I look back at my trip to Hawaii with Aislinn, where we hiked during a massive rainstorm, as a cleansing. I would propose to her on that trip. Maybe I had hopes that all my problems would fade away into the ephemera from there. They didn’t. New, daily travails took the place of old wounds. Do we all tell ourselves these stories in order to make sense of the chaos of our lives? Do we all infuse these literary moments and asides retroactively to figure out why we fucked up and how we can stop from fucking up again? I know I look to art, to novels and film and music, for solace and comfort, but also to relate. To see myself, and those that have orbited my life, in someone else’s work. And in that way, I’m less lonely. Key word being less.
Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car follows Yûsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a theatre director and performer who lost his wife to a brain hemorrhage. Two years after the loss, he takes a job in Hiroshima to direct a multilingual rendition of Uncle Vanya. Kafuku drives around in a red Saab, where he plays tapes of his deceased wife reciting lines from a previous play. It’s the connective tissue he has to her, even if the events surrounding her death (she had been cheating on him), leaves him uneasy. Working his way through the new production, Kafuku slowly, if not reluctantly, cedes control, right down to letting his theatre-appointed chauffeur Misaki (Tôko Miura) drive him around.
Kafuku’s descent into self-imposed purgatory is a familiar one. To some readers this may seem surprising given my quote unquote checkered romantic past, but I’ve spent a considerable amount of time being alone. In that solitude, I’ve found myself circling the drain, reflecting on my life in that sort of hopeless vanity of wanting to erase the past and having no power to do so. My solution was to connect. Someone once claimed this was an act of hubris. I’ve sat with that comment for a long time, mostly because I have to wonder how true it might be.
Therapy will tell me that it all comes down to control. I can espouse a litany of banal platitudes of how “man plans, God laughs” but having exhausted those water metaphors at the beginning of this essay, I fear that this is all becoming a little too biblical for my flavor profile. Instead, I’ll go with something blunt and opt for something more my speed: everybody has a plan until you get punched in the mouth.
The idea of losing Aislinn, in the longest minute of my life, felt like a punch to the mouth. All these self-indulgent literary devices fail to capture the sheer magnitude of that moment and the mental anguish of running through every moment of our time together in rapid succession in my brain, as I bellowed out for her name in a vain hope of stirring her awake. In that moment, I could relate to Kafuku, and feel that pang of loss. And in that moment, like this one right now, I understand how art - or whatever this is - doesn’t necessarily hoist you out of despair, but rather serves as a life preserver. As a tool. What I make out of these words, how I craft them and put them together, is valuable but won’t save my or Aislinn’s life. I used to believe that was the case.
Now? I see it all as collaborative. From my friends to my brother to my wife, we all have different inflections and accents on what’s more or less the same language. And with that, we have community. The grass is green not elsewhere, but where it’s watered, and Kafuku cultivates a community of artists of different walks of life and experiences, where he quickly realizes that it’s not control that makes him a good director, or a thoughtful actor. It’s openness; to all of life’s joys and hostilities. The sadness inside him is there. It’s in me too. And sometimes, we doubt our basic goodness. With some people, the poison inside keeps growing. These days, I feel more inspired to make the most out of life. If only just to tell the same story, but in a different, less harsh light.
02.
The Worst Person in the World
Directed by Joachim Trier
I think the key is being honest and being yourself
I think love is understanding that people can change
And loving them anyway through every stage
Nothing is what we ever thought.
Expectations (see also: daydreams, nightmares, inane delusions): After graduating from Lane Tech High School, I’d say “fuck it”, take out a litany of student loans, and go to Georgetown (first great regret), where I’d have ambitions of being a high school history teacher. Eventually, I find the goal of being a teacher too small for my posh sensibilities, so I’d continue my studies, and instead become a tenure track professor, whereby I become the chair of Georgetown’s history department by my mid-thirties. January 6 rolls around and with the aid of my comrades in the history department, we’d defend the capital from rogue assailants. The HOYAS (Historians Opposing Your Authoritarian Shit) would serve as a special council to undo all the damage done by our would-be dictator and build toward an actual utopian society. I’d be too busy to think of loneliness or companionship or sex or any other kinds of distractions because I would never know what I had missed in the first place, finding comfort in the written word, and in something larger than myself.
Reality (see also: the capital T Truth): After graduating from Lane Tech High School, I’d say “fuck it” and not worry about a litany of student loans (though I’d still take some on as an undergrad), attend the other Jesuit college, and be miserable. I’d find comfort in Karina, and we’d grow, only to stagnate after a decade-plus together. I’d cheat on her with a few people (second great regret), assume an abundant amount of new student loans, and endure a series of jobs and career setbacks in rapid succession, year over year. I’d find something that makes me feel important, eventually, and decide to end things with Karina abruptly as I turned 30. My life is destabilized, and everything catches up to me to an exponential degree; all the hate I spouted, all the lies I told, all the people I wronged. The noose wasn’t tight enough, the train didn’t barrel fast enough, the incisions weren’t deep enough; and so I survived. Yeah, I fucked up. But I took the heat and learned from it. And only then was I able to find comfort in someone kinder than myself.
Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World is my great comfort movie of the 2020s. It fills me with sadness and joy in equal measures, and captures the uniquely specific circumstances of growing up as a millennial of a certain age. Julie (Renate Reinsve) is first observed in Norway as an undergrad, where she considers a life as a surgeon, only to consider psychology, and finally settling for photography. She dates, experiments, and more or less enjoys her ho-phase before meeting an older man named Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), an illustrator of a Fritz the Cat-style comic, he has a cult following that gives Julie some semblance of security as she enters her thirties. Working at a bookstore, she finds herself struggling to find meaning in her work, instead having a knack for short-story telling where she’s able to produce a compelling piece of erotic fiction that gets the internet talking, briefly.
Trier’s film is divided into distinct chapters that mark significant passages in Julie’s life. This shift includes a chance encounter with Eivind (Herbert Nordrum), a barista she meets while crashing a wedding reception. This meet-cute, while still with Aksel, captures a specific sensation that resembles all the meet-cutes of my past infidelities. From the mental gymnastics that are played to the naive “this won’t happen again” feeling, I saw myself, and a great deal of the women of my life, in all of these characters. Julie’s flip-of-the-switch moment, where she pauses the world in order to pursue Eivind, embodies so many of the feelings I’ve felt through my thirties as I went from Mae to Anna Lisa to Yvonne; a refusal of the mundanity of the present, with an over-the-top, hyper-romanticized idealization of the new person in front of me. It’d be funny if it weren’t so true.
But Julie, after a mushroom trip and a forceful confrontation with herself, her past, and who she wants to be (again, embarrassingly relatable), she’s forced to reconsider her life path. Having your life rollicked by loss, by persistent ennui, and by your own body forces you to carve out a new future, no matter how difficult. I don’t know much, but that’s the kind of lived-in experience I know all too well. We don’t know if Julie is happy at the end of The Worst Person in the World. We do know that she’s doing a job that she seems content with. She sees Eivind with an actress that she was working with earlier in the day and smiles, before returning home to work. She’s living her life not for prestige, romance, or unending happiness, but contentment. You gather, throughout the film, that Julie hates herself for what she’s done to hurt Aksel, Eivind, and herself. By the end of the film, she seems at peace. It took a really, really, really long fucking time, but I got there too.
01.
The Taste of Things
Directed by Trần Anh Hùng
These are the people that I get drunk with
These are the people that I fell in love with
Well, so what?
We're young
We're thin (most of us)
We're alive (most of us)
Don't you realize our bodies could fall apart any second?
I am terrified, your body could fall apart at any second
My relationship to food has always been a little complicated. As a child, I was expected to eat everything off my plate, no matter how oversized the portions may be. My parents would berate me for a lack of gratitude, and so I ate, and ballooned in size. Whether it was my parents teasing me about my weight or other children at school, I’ve always felt oversized. No humblebrags here, but I’ve been a 31 waist since high school and I’ve never felt thin. It’s a kind of body dysmorphia that either informs everything or nothing at all. I eat, probably more than I should. And I feel guilty about it, probably more than I should.
That changed a bit once I started to cook for myself. Keep in mind: I was not good at this during my twenties, where it got a bit out of control. I was larger than ever, my pants fit tightly, where deep indentations from denim would bruise my waist. Dinner was often a choice between take out or a frozen za, with plenty of sugary beverages in between. That changed considerably as I entered my thirties, and particularly after dating Yvonne, where we’d make a conscious effort to cook together weekly. In the spring of 2020, as the world seemed like it was crumbling, where paranoia became a daily obstacle, it was a massive comfort to distract ourselves by cooking, and even exchanging dinners with friends, composing menus and full courses to be appreciated.
The beauty of Trần Anh Hùng’s The Taste of Things is in the multifaceted ways that it could be savored. It’s a film about process: about the incremental steps required to cook a full course meal, the attention to detail required, and the collaborative patience necessary to bring the best out of those around you. This isn’t some fetishized version of the process that you’d see on something like The Bear, instead The Taste of Things implores its viewer to admire the stillness of the cook and the richness of understanding why you’re doing something, rather than simply going about an exercise as routine. The Bear will espouse how “every second counts” as if the passage of time is your enemy; for The Taste of Things, the clock is the metronome, the tempo that makes every pour, every bake, every moment a harmonic rhapsody.
I won’t pretend that any of my forays in the kitchen match the late 19th century French countryside cottage core aesthetic that Eugénie (Juliette Binoche) and Dodin (Benoit Magimel) inhabit. No, you’d have to imagine a certain Chicago apartment aesthetic; bungalows with a lot of brown trim and inadequate lighting, typically facing brick walls. But we made due. Whether it’s learning my now signature dish of tofu and haricots verts in a chraimeh sauce, making saksuka, or replicating Rachel Yang’s spicy rice cakes and chorizo from Joule (still haven’t quite figured out the right amount of gochujang quite yet), the closest binary I can imagine is akin to being a research scientist, experimenting in the lab. There’s an intimacy in these moments that stick with me to this day, under the rubble of a lot of painful memories, it’s the work in the kitchen, alongside my partners, and sharing a meal, that offers me the greatest solace.
We savor these moments, even if they can seem fleeting. Tran’s film examines this, as Eugénie falls ill, Dodin makes the grand effort of making her an incredible meal. Beyond the culinary grace of his execution, the gesture is loaded with everything that I still hold deep within myself when making a meal with or for someone: a need to express your love, your appreciation, and your utmost respect for the person you’re serving. When someone you love falls ill, you see yourself tested in a litany of ways that you simply cannot prepare for because your imagination so rarely wants to consider worst case scenarios. In those moments, you simply live through them, uncomfortably permitting new feelings to enter your body and mind. But with that comes a deeper appreciation of the stasis that makes up so much of life. Even now, it’s the moments when I simply sit with Aislinn, on my laptop pouring over the hundreds of wedding photos from now over a month ago. Plenty has happened in the interim; day-in-day-out minutia to the catastrophe of nearly witnessing my wife die in front of my eyes. All the painful things that have amassed themselves through the passage of time are reduced to dust when compared to the beauty of the stillness of the present. The future remains unknowable, but as time has marched on in its metronomic pace, I have the freedom to choose between indulging in the bounty, or stepping away. I’ve been angry. I’ve been happy. I’ve been sad. There’s some comfort in all those familiar feelings. But the greatest elation I’ve experienced has been this contentment. To live in the present. This is life, my place in the world, and it’s mine to savor.