Friday, April 24, 2020

Pillow Shots




Phil Connors: What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?
Ralph: That about sums it up for me.
From Groundhog Day

The opening credits to Groundhog Day is a procession of clouds and circus music. The music is a slapstick series of trombones farting and purring against a triumphant march. I always imagine a fat clown lumbering around a ring, smiling and tripping through his act, his pants falling around his knees or getting kicked in the ass by another clown. While the music plays, clouds are moving much too fast. Weather is building, the atmosphere is churning, and all of this too is circuslike. It would be beautiful, if not charming, but for the music. The music gives us the weather as something absurd, absurd in the sense that it is random, out of our comprehension, and all powerful. We are subject to its whims. We always have been.
As the clouds pull away, we hear the voice of Phil Connors, the weather man who we will follow through the same day repeatedly. Once Phil speaks, there is no shot that doesn’t contain him, his point of view, or his voice. There are no establishing shots and no relief from Phil. The tyranny of Phil’s point of view in Groundhog Day is not unlike our own, as we stare through our eyes and listen to our interior voice. Our inner voice narrates, navigates, decides, but never relents. Once we hear Phil’s voice, all action extends from and is caused by Phil. And what is Phil saying? Why, he’s telling us about the weather, he is patronizing us about the weather. He, at least at the beginning of the movie (a belief that he reiterates to a state trooper on a highway closed due to a blizzard), “makes the weather.”

*

I was in La Cita Cantina in downtown Los Angeles with my friend Jarrett Earnest and we got into one of those favorite movie discussions, and being three margaritas in and onto my fourth, and the air being one of conversation laced with philosophical tendencies, I said that my favorite film was Groundhog Day, and Jarrett, matching me, said that his was Showgirls.
This is all fine, of course, if we would have left it at that. However, the booze led us to an alternate path, where we started to make claims about writing about these movies. Jarrett had the incredible idea that he was going to write about Lola Montes in regard to Showgirls, and I, left with nothing to say but wanting to match the spirit of the enterprise, responded with an un-reflected upon lie: “I’ve always wanted to write about Groundhog Day and Tokyo Story.”
Though I knew I had made an improper boast, when Jarrett said that we should write these essays, I necessarily had to go along with it, for how could I not when La Cita and the city of L.A. and that wonderful campy patio where the happy hour is called “Angry Hour” demanded only a yes?
Groundhog Day happens to be my favorite film. I watch it every year on my birthday, and I like it so much that I attended its 25th anniversary screening at the Academy of Motion Pictures. Ned Reyerson – “Needle Nose Ned, Ned the Head” – was in attendance, and a band played the music not only from the title sequence, but also the polka numbers from the bandstand scenes in the film, which we hear at the beginning of every day that Phil lives. The groundhog wrangler, as she called herself, told us how she had to reach through Bill Murray’s legs to hold the animal during one scene because the beast had bitten Murray. I love all this trivia.
I’ve developed a theory of living from Groundhog Day that could be described as an optimistic take on Stockholm Syndrome. The equation that I put forth is this: outlook, not location, matters. Since many of the activities in which I take part are the same everywhere I go, then perhaps it is the simple grace and depth of those activities that provide the best shot at salvation. It is not a matter of trying to find the best croissant, or trying to speak a foreign language perfectly, or any other bit of skill development, it is more like the world is deep enough to offer enough fascinating entry points to keep us full and seeking. It is a matter of immanence rather than transcendence, existence rather than essence.
Phil’s journey through diversion and despair winds up at his eventual acceptance and contentment in Punxsutawney, PA, because that is the best we can do from inside our sets of patterns and sets of people. Harold Ramis, the film’s director, says that Phil had, at this point, been reliving the same day in Punxsutawney for 10 years, though the matter is heavily debated. One website puts the numbers at 8 years, 8 months, and sixteen days. Others put the time as much longer, accounting for Phil’s ability, inside the day, to learn French, become an expert piano player, and to truly master the intricacies of being kind to those inside of the day with him.
The conditions do not change. Phil changes. This last point, at least to me, is the important one: how long would it take to break a narcissist, to kill the tyranny of his consciousness and voice, and cause his ego to move from its anchor in itself and out towards others? I think Phil must have been living, over and over, for around 10,000 years (Ramis said that he once had this thought as a length of time for Phil), or at least, it is far longer than 8 or 10 years. This must be what it takes to get to the end of that other equation in Midnight’s Children, where to “understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.”
By the time Phil says to Rita, “Let’s live here,” he has moved from a sense of Punxsutawney as a place of “hicks,” annoying and frustrating enough to cause him (multiple times) to try to commit suicide, to a place where he could stay. He has learned to love and sympathize with his captors. They will “rent to start.”

*

Had I even finished Tokyo Story? What was it about? The movie was directed by Yasujirō Ozu, who I know little about, and, at the time that I made boast, I had only seen the one movie one time. I remember being arrested by the slowness of its visuals, its rhythms, and I remembered that it concerned two parents that went to visit their children in Tokyo. The children, upon the illness and death of their mother, go back to their hometown.
Jarrett’s gauntlet and my booze-soaked response required at least a little exploration about why I had put those movies together. When I watched Tokyo Story and then watched it again, I found two small towns set again larger horizons. In Tokyo Story, the parents come from a town called Onomichi which is set against the larger, vibrant Tokyo where most of their children live. In Groundhog Day, we hear that Phil is not only from Pittsburg but thinks he is bigger than Pittsburg, and that Punxsutawney is only worthy of his contempt and sarcasm.
On a superficial level, perhaps my boast had something to do with the congruence in the film between what Kathe Geist wrote of Onomichi – “all that is good, stable, and ongoing in the Japanese tradition” – and the world of striving, of change, and progress. In this simple reading, the annoyance of the children in Tokyo Story at the arrival of their parents, the inconvenience to their lives, is comparable with annoyance that Phil feels when he has to go to Punxsutawney when national networks should see him doing more impressive things.
At La Cita over Margaritas, I was a person approaching forty. I was a person trying desperately not to have a mid-life crisis out of mere hatred for cliché, but I felt myself slowly being brought back into the tribe of humanity. I was starting to fall into the necessary rituals, starting to feel my age, and starting, for lack of better description, to feel the sand falling faster into the hour glass. Could it be that at the very moment, I was starting to measure the place which I have, by default, chosen as my new home, Los Angeles, against the place where I came from, Texas? Is that why these two films would rise out of the soup of my subconscious, by way of alcoholic lubricant, to warrant study?
Up till this point, my basic philosophy of life was based on Groundhog Day, but perhaps Tokyo Story was requiring that look at the same conditions in a new way. Both movies, after all, feature epiphanies, and if anything can be said of forty, it is a time when you test your past epiphanies and long for new ones. I knew the epiphany in Groundhog Day, but I had to get to know the one in Tokyo Story, one that involved a character name Noriko.
I admit to being tempted to see Noriko, brilliantly played by Setsuko Hara, as a Japanese counterpart of Rita, the girl next door love interest in Groundhog Day played by Andie MacDowell.  They both have impossible, glorious smiles and are both wholesomely beautiful. They also both serve as foils in each of their movies. Rita is the foil of Phil. She is a person who does have time for people. She is comfortable in her skin, likes poetry and the idea of living in the mountains, and has nothing but tenderness for people who “sing songs 'till they get too cold and then they go sit by the fire and they get warm, and then they come back and sing some more.” Noriko is the similar foil for Tokyo Story’s children. While they quibble over what is just good enough for their parents on their visit to Tokyo from Onomichi, Noriko offers them (the parents of her departed husband) more than what she has, she awkwardly approaches her boss for time off to spend time with them and asks for even more time to attend the eventual funeral of the mother.
Noriko is more three dimensional than Rita. We know more about Noriko’s past and how she is handling her present. Noriko holds the candle of her dead husband and uses the parents of her departed to keep him alive. She cannot move on, despite the parents gently prodding her to give up her memories in favor of the future. We get the impression that she is unquestionably kind, but that she is limited, that her romantic virtue and true love faithfulness is a slow drain on something essential about her. She starts the movie equipped with all the revelations that Phil achieves at the end of the Groundhog Day. She lives for others. She is outward facing. She is kind.
However, her time tunnel will not release her. Noriko smiles, she responds to life cheerfully, but the life of her day, which she replays over and over, will not end. She is in the hell of her grief, grief has become the structure of her life and set up the walls of her life. While Phil and Rita are off into the sunset once Phil’s day finally ends, Noriko offers a sadder truth.

*

What I had, in the wake of my boast and on my journey into two films randomly put together, was two twist endings that I must grapple with, both brought forward by mortality.
Phil’s revelation is brought on by the death of the old homeless man that ushers in the final act of the film. After living thousands of days, Phil did not realize that his eternal day contained death. He was unable to die, and therefore he assumed that no one else could. When the old man cannot be saved, when “it was just his time”, Phil finds a horizon that requires more from his contentment in Punxsutawney than defeating boredom or loving Rita. He must get the most out of the place not only for himself but also for everyone else.  Groundhog Day establishes the world as a matter of consciousness, and Phil eventually sees that he can purge and change his consciousness.
              This is a far cry from Noriko’s revelation. When the mother, Chieko, dies, and the children come to her bedside, Noriko experiences a double loss. She had used the mother to retain an image and a partial reality of her dead husband, and now that image had taken yet another hit through death. At the end of the film, she stands with the father, Chishū, in his garden, which we assume he will merely tend till death comes for him. Noriko realizes that her fantasy, the zombie life of her love, was built on a deeply flawed and painful foundation. She doesn’t realize that she is lonely, she knows that she has always been lonely. There will be no dancing in the snow for Noriko. This is not the world as a matter of consciousness, it is a world that is tougher than our perspective.
              I realize that I cannot align myself to these two endings without some confessions of my own. I’ve seen Groundhog Day so many times that it has taken on angles and dimensions that can only emerge from repeated, obsessive viewing. I’ve seen it as an emblem, as a slogan, as a self-help book. I’ve been in a terrible job, and, through watching Groundhog Day, tried to mine deeper into the realities of individual moments. I’ve tried, sometimes even with some success, to grow those moments from within, and transcend the little details which were hurting me. There have been times when I have felt like Phil in the Jeopardy Scene, where I know my patterns and rituals and their outcomes so well as to become a sort of prophet of despair, ennui’s deadpan angel. 
When I watched the movie at the 25th anniversary, I felt for the first time that Groundhog Day might not be as deep as I thought it was or as helpful as a life philosophy. I know that I am hardly alone for my love of the movie – Stanley Cavell, for instance, has written rapturously about the movie as has priests and Buddhist monks – but there was an edge to watching it publicly with many adoring fans. I began to think of what type of church service I was at, and what type of religious text the script of this movie was.
There was the voice of Phil, the tyranny of his outlook, and the reality that the entire movie is a sort of David Hume exercise in the mind being able to shape any reality. Could I love Punxsutawney? What type of heaven would Punxsutawney be? Doesn’t this all smack of The Power of Positive Thinking or Panglossian hogwash thoroughly debunked by being dragged through shit until we see that there are structures of society, that some places really are better than others, and that transcendence in the Phil sense is merely fleeting?
I suspect that Jarrett’s gauntlet was responsible for this doubt of my favorite movie.  I was starting to get deeper into Tokyo Story and the hardness of Ozu. The Japanese film seemed to know that, while there are some big-ticket narcissists like Phil, most of us are lower level narcissists or people who are losing the battle between looking outward to others rather than merely inward to ourselves. Few of us fight for kindness as valiantly as Noriko. The world does not move for us. Ozu’s fixed camera holds its shots as people enter and leave the room, sometimes holding the shot until not only the room is empty but until we as viewers question whether the person who was in the room matters to the room at all.
There’s the character Shige. In the quiet world of Tokyo Story, Shige is the film’s monster, but her monstrousness is hardly remarkable. Her biggest sin is that her practicality doesn’t not allow much time for little warm human things. She does what she needs to do, but how she goes about things clinically stands in contrast to Noriko’s warmth and quiet suffering. Shige has work to do, and, while she is happy (within reason) to see her parents, she knows that she also has clients at her hair salon. She is also more than happy to pawn her parents off to a resort instead of putting them up for the night. The most memorable moment with Shige is when, in the face of people who are hoping for the best in terms of the outcome of her mother’s illness, she takes her mourning clothes just in case.
While it is easy to think that Shige might be as lonely as Noriko, like all humans are lonely, it is hard to see Shige admitting it. She goes on. She attends to things roughly but protects herself from the larger doubts, the larger admissions of guilt. She refuses, or so it seems, to put herself on trial the way that her brother Keizo does when he too late to say goodbye to his mother, or the way that Noriko does when she must admit her hell at the end of the film. I know a lot of people like Shige, people who just handle life like it is something to be cooked. She is not kind, but she survives.
There are no Shiges in Groundhog Day, and therefore, there is likely no me in Groundhog Day either. I may identify with Phil, but, I doubt, even under Phil’s extended and almost infinite conditions, I can ever transcend the battle between my inner Shige and my inner Noriko, to stand in my surroundings glowing with contentment and facing joy. I am in Tokyo Story’s world of people who wanted to be doctors only to achieve lower level residencies in the middle of nowhere as their houses fill with stuff. I am in a world of people who work too hard, have little time, and sometimes feel bad about it. I am in a world of people who gather around death beds and try hard to enjoy the final moments while the thought of what it all could potentially mean hammers their brains. I am in a world where fathers get drunk and confess their disappointment in their children. I am in a world where they can do this and still love their children.
Noriko’s confession at the end of Tokyo Story is often thought of as key to the film. It is devastating to know the secret behind her fantastic smile and know what tortures this kind and very good person. But watch the film several times and you know that the confession is the last of a chain of small admissions, all equally revealing. Shige refers to her parents to a customer as “just friends from the country.” The group of drunks in the bar, which includes Chishū the father, expected too much from their children, and they are not only disappointed but very sad about it. Chieko, the mother, reveals her worries about Tokyo, that “If we get lost, we will never find each other again.”
There are no clichés in Ozu. All rituals and all repeated things must be part of the complicated reality of individual lives and are thus unrepeatable. His characters’ constant politeness and thank yous might well be Stein’s evolving rose, as their context defines and fills their meaning whether they like it or not.

*

However, the opening credits to Groundhog Day is a procession of clouds and circus music. The music is a slapstick series of trombones farting and purring against a triumphant march. I always imagine a fat clown lumbering around a ring, smiling and tripping through his act, his pants falling around his knees or getting kicked in the ass by another clown. While the music plays, clouds are moving much too fast. Weather is building, the atmosphere is churning, and all of this too is circuslike. It would beautiful, if not charming, if not for the music. The music gives us the weather as something absurd, absurd in the sense that it is random, out of our comprehension, and all powerful. We are subject to its whims. We always have been.
These credits remind me of certain moves in poetry. I think of Czeslaw Milosz’s ten-line poem called Love, which he wrote when he was twenty. It is type of poem that one would write when they are twenty, full of confidence that one knows what life is like and what life is going to be, but this poem has the added benefit of being good. The key line is the first one: “Love means to learn to look at yourself/ the way one looks at distant things / For you are only one thing among many / And whoever sees that way heals his heart.”
I think there was a time when I would have read that line and have been damaged by it, or by my lack of understanding of it. I would have taken the cue as justification for paths I was already taking, extinguishing myself and getting trampled upon by a crush or an obsession, not even to the point of Milosz settling of a relationship between things outside myself and myself. I would have taken the line as justification for my light and false drama, happy to see myself as a fool but a noble fool, for love.
Now, I think I would take a more modest approach. Now, I see this line and take it literally. I think of W.H. Auden’s Fall of Rome when he turns away from his own Empire, which he is comparing to the Romans, and sees the deer moving in the wilderness “silently and very fast.” I think of Joseph Brodsky refusing to see Rilke’s famous torso as anything but an item that has somehow made it a while through time, against which he can see a mouse go out into the night and not return.
The rub of the out there against private drama, does generate a friction, but I think I am to the place where I need to be careful in attribute meaning to the heat generated. Icarus is hitting the water and the world is “altogether elsewhere,” but do I understand what Auden is saying about pain? I am wrong about suffering all the time. Knowing what everything means might not always be the best position to be in.
The elegance and mystery of these gently changing dynamics reminds, bear with me, of the so-called pillow shots and their function in Toyko Story. Roger Ebert describes them thus:

“Ozu uses "pillow shots" like the pillow words in Japanese poetry, separating his scenes with brief, evocative images from everyday life. He likes trains, clouds, smoke, clothes hanging on a line, empty streets, small architectural details, banners blowing in the wind (he painted most of the banners in his movies himself).”
Some commentators say that Ozu’s pillow shots set moods, which is often the case, but what is always the case is that these shots do not contain any character involved in the drama of the movie.
Pillow shots show interrelated but separate dimensions in the same reality, how crisis and loss arrive in one house while another house is spared, and how the drama of these local pains is always humbler than we thought and quieter than we thought they were going to be. They exist for us, on the margins, and once they happen, they will never happen again in the same way. The hold of what occurs starts to loosen its grip on us immediately. This is both liberating and sad. Noriko will never lose all of her husband to death, just enough to end her happiness.  
The opening of Groundhog Day is the only shot in the entire movie that has something in common with Ozu’s pillow shots. It is the only time when there is an acknowledged existence outside of consciousness, a reality that is not tethered to us, a reality that exists whether we are in it or not. There is something about that circus music that recommends that we are one thing among many, that we can look at ourselves the way we look at distant things, that this might even be (and this is the big difference between Ozu and Ramis) a comedy.
Jarrett’s gauntlet at the age of forty, his challenge that I think of two movies together? I think I will take this as the lesson.