Self-isolation in the movies

 

Lauren Ashley Carter in Darling (2015)

Our days in quarantine have been compared to post-apocalyptic dystopia and endless time loops — but how do movies actually depict what it’s like when you’re physically disconnected from the rest of the world?  

One of the movies I have watched under lockdown is Vivarium, which is science fiction horror featuring Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg. It was two weeks into the community quarantine, and I felt shaken as I watched the main characters — a couple looking to buy their first home — try to find their way out of the never-ending suburbia in which they had found themselves trapped.

The houses, all the same pallid shade of green, were ordinary-looking, stood next to each other in neat rows that seemed to go on forever into a sun that seemed more artificial than anything. No matter which way the characters drove or walked, they ended up right back outside the house that’s been chosen for them. It was deadly silent, the air stale, and there was nobody else around. There was no escape, nowhere else to go.

It was chilling, and it was too close to home. Literally.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the movie would end up embodying the uncertainties of the future that lay ahead of not just me personally, but the planet as a whole. You do what you can to survive, and you do what you can to alleviate your own nervousness, to rekindle your sense of purpose and direction, even if it means digging a hole into the earth just to find where it leads.

Vivarium (2020)

In the weeks since, it has left me curious about what other movies have to say about self-isolation and disconnect. I looked back on what I’ve watched and emerged with a list that has its fair share of collective similarities and differences. There’s a whole range of genres and stories, from the lighthearted to the mindscrew-y. Quarantine movies, after all, have never had a reason to exist before today — a gaping hole in cinema that I have no doubt will soon be filled.

The first movie that came to mind when I started thinking about this running theme was Two Night Stand, a romantic comedy starring Miles Teller and Analeigh Tipton. A pair of virtual strangers who have a one night stand end up not being able to stand each other come the morning after — only they’ll have to put up or shut up, because there’s a blizzard and now they’re stuck with each other for the time being. The movie has plenty of the recklessness that comes with being removed from routine or the status quo, and its depiction of people trying to get along under close quarters rings especially true these days.

In Weepah Way for Now, the fictional sisters played by real-life siblings Aly and AJ Michalka aren’t necessarily stuck at home. It revolves around the pair as they plan a going-away party in their house, and each scene is conversational and very slice-of-life. It resonated with me and felt very relevant to current events anyway; there was the bickering and adjusting that came with cohabitation, there was reminiscence and nostalgia for days gone by, there was purposeful movement coinciding with flights of fancy. The sisters cling to favorite places and the objects that have made up their lives. Their comfort and their grief come hand in hand and they live through the endings, the changes, and the bad news because they have each other.

Evan Rachel Wood and Ellen Page in Into the Forest (2015)

Into the Forest also features a pair of sisters, Nell (Ellen Page) and Eva (Evan Rachel Wood). Set in the near future, its plot is set into motion when a power outage and technological collapse occur nationwide, causing an apocalypse. With their father dead, the girls board themselves up in their remotely located home, surrounded by the forest and, beyond it, the still turning world. Food and supplies run scarce while fear and danger run high, but as in Weepah Way for Now, they still have a semblance of hope and protection in each other’s presence.

Two interesting studies of madness in isolation are Darling and Queen of Earth. The former is about a young woman who slowly loses her grip on reality when she takes on a job as caretaker of a New York apartment with a vague but morbid history. The movie is told in chapters that come off more like non-sequiturs instead of telling a linear narrative, serving only to better illustrate the descent into madness of the unnamed lead, who spends most of her time alone. Being shot in black and white with an absence of modern objects gives it the feel of being lost in time — a stylistic choice that heightens the anxiety and horror, especially set against the backdrop of a grand but empty home.

Queen of Earth, on the other hand, is a psychological thriller with a brilliant performance from Elisabeth Moss, in which two friends spend a weekend at a cabin in the woods and realize they’ve drifted apart. Moss’ character Catherine, in particular, already spiraling from a breakup and the death of her father, undergoes emotional distress that breaks down her sense of self: “I don’t really feel like I exist anymore.” There’s biting tension and hostility, the plot unfolding to ominous music that makes the viewer wonder where it’s going, or if it’s even getting anywhere — in his review, film critic Brian Tallerico describes it as “those hazy, uncertain days of our lives when our definitions of ourselves have to change.”

Elisabeth Moss in Queen of Earth (2015)

Finally, there’s 10 Cloverfield Lane. Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays Michelle, who after a car accident wakes up in an underground shelter after being “taken in” (read: kidnapped) by Howard (John Goodman), who appears affable but soon reveals himself to be quite unhinged. He claims that the world is in shambles and she’ll never be able to survive out there. Together with the third inhabitant Emmett (John Gallagher Jr., a delight), they quickly fall into a new day-to-day — but Michelle will stop at nothing to find out what’s really going on with the bunker and the world outside.

Beyond its otherworldly themes, what struck me most about the film is how it portrays a person’s sense of safety, and how the characters find ways to fill their days. When you’ve gotten used to a strange situation and begin to feel secure in it, it’s easy to forget that there could be very real threats outside, the way many of us tend to do in the midst of this pandemic.

Time moves differently when you’ve shut yourself away from the rest of the world. The movies I’ve seen over the last few weeks in order to write this essay sometimes take place over a few days, or weeks, or months — it’s interesting to me how they depict the passage of time, especially when characters have to remain in one place through it all. Hair grows, or the weather changes, or there’s a sudden dance montage. Being stuck in a certain space for that long, you’re forced to confront your own notions of ennui and amusement. Your resourcefulness and creativity are put to the test. The movies address that, too: characters doing their nails, bringing out VHS tapes and old board games, filling the silence with conversation.

AJ and Aly Michalka in Weepah Way for Now (2015)

Just beneath it all remains the paranoia and anxieties we’re trying to see through to the other side, always thrumming — along with the sides of ourselves we’d rather not face. I like that these movies have a wide variety of tone and mood; it shows that these thoughts that haunt us can lead to enlightenment and promise just as much as madness and despair.

But the part I keep holding on to is that most of these characters are never truly alone, no matter how dire their situations become. I find myself going back to that scene in Weepah Way for Now where, after the sisters face an unimaginable tragedy, the narrator refuses to dwell on the pain that follows: “We can choose to focus on other things if we want to.” It’s impossible to do that in real life — and it would be foolish and uncouth. But I like the idea of it anyway, that there will be an after that comes at the end of hard times.

The story skips ahead, instead, to the first time the sisters have a good laugh after what they’ve experienced. They’re overlooking the city they’ve grown up in; their movements are stilted and tentative at first, but they begin to smile in earnest and goof off, their limbs growing looser and bolder. They feel good, they’re surviving, they’re fearless, they’re loved. Together.

Tomorrow will be different, so I’ll pretend I’m leavin’

My undergraduate thesis was a stylistic analysis of The Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas’ lyrics supported by a corpus linguistic study centered on the word “wait.” This meant building a corpus — also known as a collection of words — out of his songs including his work outside the Strokes, tracking how frequently “wait” appeared in them, and breaking down the meaning of each track through a stylistic theory to find the relevance of the word to the songwriter, and to determine why he used it so much.

I’ll spare you the details; the important thing here was that when I uploaded Julian’s lyrics to the corpus analysis software, I was able to determine that “wait” was, indeed, the word that occurred most frequently in his songwriting. (Minus the more common pronouns and articles, of course.)

And the point here is: waiting is kind of a recurring theme when it comes to the Strokes. Even when you’re a listener. Especially when you’re a listener.

Their sixth album came out this month, released four years after their Future Present Past EP, seven years after their previous album Comedown Machine, and almost 19 years after their groundbreaking debut Is This It. That’s a lot of time. That’s a lot of waiting. It began to seem almost mythical, like it would never actually happen. Wouldn’t it have been just like the Strokes to have their final track be a half-somber, half-mumbled ballad titled “Call It Fate, Call It Karma,” after a line from Ghostbusters?

But they continue to beat the odds. The nine-track album is called The New Abnormal, and in its greater moments, it showcases the best of the Strokes together and apart. Since they adopted a more collaborative (if initially volatile) songwriting process on Angles, certain Strokes tracks have been easier to pinpoint as the work of a certain member, from guitarist Albert Hammond, Jr.’s frenetic and unpredictable energy to drummer Fabrizio Moretti’s loopy but sophisticated deviations. It’s nostalgic but in the moment, familiar but something nobody else could have done.

Single “Bad Decisions,” in particular, is practically a mashup of the Modern English classic “I Melt with You” and Billy Idol’s “Dancing with Myself” — a perfect example to cite when mentioning the album’s laconic description, which is basically this: It wouldn’t be out of place on the soundtrack of Disney’s 2005 teen-hero film Sky High, and it kind of works.

You can’t say it for sure, but you can guess that the Strokes actually had fun with the creative process; it’s not just something to do for a paycheck. There are “New York City Cops”-style ad libs between the members left on multiple tracks. For a band that’s known for unaffected Manhattanite cool, it’s refreshing to see that the Strokes care. They care so much that part of the album’s promotions included performing at a Bernie Sanders rally. The guitars are intricately tangled as ever, complementing ‘80s synths and falsetto — but there are also instances of crystal clear vocals recalling First Impressions of Earth, to match the equally unfiltered lyrics. They border on confessional, which is something new for a band that’s preferred to keep it vague and esoteric.

Another thing that sounds just like The Strokes? The fact that after everything, they happen to have dropped their long-anticipated album in the middle of a global pandemic that has drastically changed how we live. They’ve always been stuck with generational labels and expectations pinning them to the zeitgeist, their work and existence always seeming to signal the beginning or end of something. And with such an aptly titled album, they might have just done that again.

The songs were written pre-quarantine, but some of the lyrics can’t help but hit hard: “I just wait for this to go into circles,” Julian sings in “Brooklyn Bridge to Chorus.” “And the distance from my room, is anything so necessary?”

At six minutes and 15 seconds long, “Endless Summer” is the longest track on an album that averages five minutes per song. Having been raised on new wave karaoke sessions, I instantly recognized its sampling of The Psychedelic Furs’ “The Ghost in You” in the chorus as Julian croons, “Summer is coming, it’s here to stay.” The familiar melody elicits a feeling of deja vu, adding weight to its overall effect of dissonance — the song sounds bright and full of possibility, but it’s actually more about feelings of ennui, of the pitfalls of boundlessness. This boundlessness is inescapable. You want it to be over.

Last I heard, only two members remain in the city that they arguably define as much as it defines them. Final track “Ode to the Mets,” which is just under six minutes long, cements the fact that you can take a Stroke out of New York, but you can’t take the New York out of the Stroke. It’s a fitting outro, and also a little too close for comfort in these times: “Gone now are the old times, forgotten, time to hold on the railing,” the lyrics go. “So pardon the silence that you’re hearing. It’s turning into a deafening, painful, shameful roar.”

When I was working on my thesis, my adviser told me to study the sociocultural background of each album I was analyzing, i.e. what was going on in the world at the time of its release? I didn’t understand the significance of it at first — the state of the world in the aughts felt like too broad a topic to include — but it ended up helping me make sense of a lot of the lyrics with the added context. And it’s helping me make sense of this album, at least in relation to what we’re experiencing right now.

There’s always been something vaguely apocalyptic in certain Strokes songs, like “Ize of the World” (young adults to modernize / citizens to terrorize / generations to desensitize … cities to vaporize) and “The End Has No End” (one by one, ticking time bombs won / it’s not the secrets of the government that’s keeping you dumb). They welcomed the new millennium with Is This It, and now they’re welcoming a new decade. Their music has seen their generation — and the ones that have followed — through war, and disaster, and collapse, and now this pandemic. Their Gen X nonchalance has grown the heart and spine needed for political dissent.

When I first heard that they’re calling their album The New Abnormal, it sounded contrived, commonplace. Old. But now it’s almost prophetic, in a tongue-in-cheek kind of way, of course.

I’d been wondering whether the so-called tradition of “wait” in Julian’s lyrics would continue with this new era. And when lead single “At the Door” was released, there it was: “Anyone home? Have I lost it all?” he sings. “Lying on the cold floor, I’ll be waiting. I’ll be waiting from the other side, waiting for the tide to rise.” Another few instances to add to my corpus. A continuation of a cycle I’ve never minded.

Listening to this album, in the house I haven’t left in over a month, I turn pensive, restless. It goes too well with the aimlessness I feel as the days blur together, slow and everlasting. But somewhere in there, there’s also purpose, drive, and just the tiniest bit of spite: we will make it past this, by sheer force of obstinacy at the very least. What’s “Ode to the Mets” about, anyway, if not rooting for the underdog?

As always, as ever, we wait.

There's part of you that can't help but to see right through this part of me

River Phoenix is on Spotify.

I remember searching his name on the music streaming platform a few years back, curious to see if anybody’s ever written a song with his name in the title. There were a handful, but none by artists I’d heard of. The first result, though, was an artist page with only one track called “Curi Curi,” a minute and fifteen seconds long. I didn’t know what to expect until about halfway, when the late actor’s voice suddenly began reciting a spoken word piece. I felt a jolt; I didn’t expect it to actually be him.

The track was a collaboration with Brazilian singer-songwriter Milton Nascimento, whom I would learn had been a good friend of his. I didn’t save it to my library, but I would listen to it sometimes, when I wanted to hear his voice or when I was missing him. Which was a foolish thought, wasn’t it? He died exactly a year before I was born, on the Halloween of 1993. We never walked an earth where the other existed.

I was ten years old when my mom pointed to the television and said, as though greeting an old friend, “Oh, that boy is dead.” Stand By Me was on and I looked past her outstretched arm to watch the kid with his sleeves rolled up and a cigarette in his mouth, his eyes vulnerable but also world-weary. I couldn’t comprehend that he was right there, and yet he was also gone.

I would see him again years later, in The Thing Called Love, one of his last films. He was all grown up. He played guitar and sang softly, somberly. He was tall and brooding, hair dyed darker, but his eyes were vulnerable and world-weary all the same. He was beautiful. “He’s dead,” my mom reminded me, sounding slightly sadder this time.

I developed a crush that never went away.

The summer I was fifteen was a long one, the days stretching and bleeding into one another. I never had anywhere to be or anything to do but stay inside and read young-adult novels or watch Tumblr-acceptable indie movies like Nowhere Boy and Adventureland. It occurred to me that I hadn’t seen River Phoenix in anything other than the two movies I’d already watched, so I spent the rest of that summer exhausting his brief but prolific filmography.

His characters had the most wonderful names: Chris Chambers, Mike Waters, Eddie Birdlace, Devo Nod. A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon was terrible and cringe-inducing until the final few minutes, when it suddenly grew a heart and became more poignant and nostalgic than anything. More fitting of its original title — Aren’t You Even Gonna Kiss Me Goodbye? — which still pinches at my chest sometimes. Dogfight was a fumbling romance with Lili Taylor, both square in its earnestness and inexplicably chic. Running on Empty was the movie that earned him an Oscar nomination at age eighteen, and the movie I still cry to all the time, ten years later.

I learned, not long after, that he had a band called Aleka’s Attic. His songs were in the first person, his lyrics raw and capricious but clear and honest in his singing. He sounds young, but also like he has outlived everybody else. There were low-quality recordings of their songs straying across the internet — some of them from tapes the band made and sold themselves, some of them released through benefit albums for animal rights — which quickly became an on-again, off-again soundtrack to my own youth.

I saw a band manager, once, at a concert I had attended, who looked so much like a ghost of him — right down to the sandy blond hair that reached just past his shoulders — that I had to stop and catch my breath. But none of my friends knew who River Phoenix was. My crush on him, which had grown to include more complicated feelings like grief and disquiet, was something that was evidently mine and mine alone. Almost like he had been an imaginary friend I’d made up; something personal that I was keeping for my own.

That’s not exactly true anymore. I’ve noticed in the passing years that he’s become part of the internet boyfriend canon, put in the same category as, say, Leonardo DiCaprio in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet or, worse yet, Johnny Depp when he was dating Winona Ryder. Like either could ever live up to him. (Like Leo would have ever had the same career he’s had if River’s spot had never been vacated.) 

He was bigger than me, I realized. He had been a teen heartthrob, after all, his face plastered on the pages of BOP and Tiger Beat. I wasn’t even the first or the last person who’s put him on this impossible pedestal, who’s listened to his songs and thought she understood him, who’s held on to him as a tragic and dreamy figure. There were many of us who longed for him on the widow’s walks of our minds.

When I turned twenty-four, one of my first thoughts was that I would be older than him forever.

When I got a Spotify account, my iTunes library was left on my hard drive, abandoned and all but forgotten — the Aleka’s Attic songs included. It wasn’t until earlier this year, when Joaquin Phoenix had mentioned his brother during his Oscars speech (he and River were the only boys out of a brood of five) that I remembered they existed and wanted so suddenly and so badly to hear them again.

I typed the band’s name into the Spotify search bar, thinking I’d probably get nothing. But then there it was, an official artist page listing three of the songs I’d known and grown up with. Rain Phoenix, River’s bandmate and sister, had finally let them see the light of day after the band’s activities were cut short following her brother’s death.

River Phoenix is on Spotify, for real this time.

There was “Where I’d Gone,” a day-in-the-life kind of song that grew more unhinged as it progressed. There was “Scales & Fishnails,” a brief and dreamlike interlude I’d once imagined playing at my wedding someday. And there was my favorite of all, I couldn’t believe it was there, “In the Corner Dunce” — which River had written and recorded when he was eighteen and feels like the most authentic piece of himself he’d ever left behind, singing like it hurts and like it matters: I rarely get to feel, you know, I hardly ever feel in place.

I’ve read that Rain Phoenix hopes to continue releasing the rest of the tracks, completing the album that was once meant to be called Never Odd or Even. I hope it includes another favorite, “Note to a Friend.” A lone guitar chord, and then River sings: My days are heavy on the inside of my night. Rain joins in, and together they sing of better days about to come. The verse repeats, and so does the refrain. Once, and then again: Better they come, better days come.

He’s been gone so long. And yet he lives on years and years later through this small thing — an official release, the kind his band never got to have, on something so modern and so now, anachronistic in the best way.

So strange, and yet so welcome. Like that summer all over again, having him come alive once more like it was for me and me alone — only this time, I know I’m not alone, and I can’t wait to share it with anyone who’s willing to listen. This is River Phoenix, I would tell them. You can’t find many traces of him anymore, but he’s right here.

Something to die for

For the generation who grew up with Final Destination, the supernatural slasher franchise would end up embodying the anxieties and ennui of our adult years.

The last Final Destination movie came out nine years ago, so it was a bit of a surprise when the franchise trended on Twitter in the Philippines  recently. It wasn’t news of a new installment or a reboot however — there was just a game prompting users to share the movie that traumatized them the most, and Final Destination was the most common answer.

Even someone like me, who has become so desensitized to horror that I was able to shrug off Hereditary as soon as the credits rolled, could understand why. Who wouldn’t be traumatized by movies about people who cheat death and then are stalked by its vengeful supernatural form, meeting their ends in gruesome Rube Goldberg-esque accidents like burning in a tanning bed and strangulation via laundry line?

I could argue that Final Destination was actually my gateway to horror, beginning with a morbid fascination that soon became honest appreciation. My first glimpse of it was a scene from the second movie as it was airing on TV — a woman’s braid gets caught in the elevator doors, and she literally loses her head in the process. The whole thing was tense and drawn-out, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen. I was terrified.

When we talk about these movies, though, almost everyone agrees that Final Destination 3 is the icon of the series. Despite being released in the winter of 2006, it was a perfect summer movie, taking its bright colors from its initial setting of an amusement park, where a malfunctioning rollercoaster results in the deaths of a few high school seniors.The focus this time is solely on a group of teenagers who managed to get off the ride and narrowly escape their dark fate — before realizing that it, of course, has begun following them around. (Set to The Vogues’ “Turn Around, Look at Me” for added creepiness, and also added rock ‘n’ roll cool.)

Turns out, there’s a whole generation of 20-somethings who now walk around still carrying the fear instilled in them by this movie. Maybe they saw it in theaters, maybe it was shown to them by a friend. It was certainly a favorite for cable television reruns. Either way, a certain group of people seem to have grown up defined by Final Destination just as much as they are by Mean Girls or even Harry Potter. 

Again, horror barely ever affects me anymore. But I still remember the first time I stumbled on Final Destination 3 while looking for something to watch on cable when I was 13. I’d lie awake that night tossing and turning, replaying the tanning bed scene over and over in my head. Or the scene where a car’s engine fan obliterates some poor guy’s head. Or even just “Turn Around, Look at Me” giving me the worst kind of last song syndrome.

I swore up and down I would never watch it again, but somehow I did keep tuning in whenever it was on. And over time the debilitating fear I felt at the mere thought of it became something more like comfort — especially after I knew that my friends had seen it too, and they were also scarred by it the way I was. It became a bonding thing for us; we talked about the parts that scared us until we could laugh them off, and by the time The Final Destination came out, we had moved on to heckling the characters and making fun of their cartoonish demise. When Final Destination 5 turned out to be a stealth prequel to the first movie, we could even recognize it as a one-of-a-kind cinematic experience. (Or maybe that’s just me.)

These days I find that my relationship with horror has changed again. When I was in university it was a way to reduce stress; mindless entertainment with reliable patterns that might still form together to create twists and turns that could shock me and make me question reality. Now I suppose it’s a little more cerebral, a little more critical — something to help with the anger and powerlessness I feel about a world that refuses to make sense, something to take the edge off when my mind feels a little too full and a little too empty all at once.

I read an essay from Nick Antosca, creator of the horror series Channel Zero, about “creating horror in the era of Trump.” They had been filming an episode of the second season No-End House during the 2016 US elections, and he wrote, “When I watch that scene now, I can barely separate the sinking feeling we had that night with the sense of dread that lives within the show itself. The horror genre has always been a place where Americans go for cultural catharsis, but never in my generation has the day-to-day American experience felt so consistently like a horror movie.”

I realized this week that the trauma left behind by Final Destination goes beyond irrational fears of tanning beds and LASIK surgery. Somehow its nihilism and haunting imagery now reflect the modern anxieties and fatalistic coping mechanisms my generation came to embrace. Make it make sense, we’d recite, maybe even with a “weary face” emoji for emphasis. Because these days, it does feel a lot like everything in the world is out to get you — but if there’s anything I’ve learned from these movies, it’s that even if the worst to come is inevitable, it doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do to fight back and live another day. 

Life don’t always sparkle, but it’s turning me to gold

 

In the pop world, some singers were meant to fade into obscurity — but others rise from the ashes and keep making anthems for girls and the women they’re growing up to be.

I used to be the kind of person who defined myself by the music I listened to. In a way, I still might be.

I was 10 or 11 when I started learning that music existed beyond the songs I heard on the radio or the videos I saw on MTV. I was at a now-defunct music store in my local mall called Radio City when I found an album that would change my life — an auburn-haired, pouty-lipped teenage girl brooded on the cover, a green heart drawn around her right eye. Mismatched, chaotic letters spelled out her name and the title: Skye Sweetnam, Noise from the Basement. I had never heard of her, and I didn’t know a single song of hers. I bought the CD anyway. 

Skye Sweetnam was the first artist I ever discovered for myself, and she ended up becoming a blueprint for my adolescence. Her best known song is a passive-aggressive crush anthem called “Tangled Up in Me,” but my favorites were the ones about empowerment and nonconformity, like “I Don’t Care,” “Sharada,” “Unpredictable,” and “Smoke and Mirrors.” Her lyrics — she wrote or co-wrote all the tracks — taught me not to change myself in a contrived effort to get people to like me or accept me. That the only mold I needed to fit into was the one that embodied the goals and standards I set for myself, and the one that would make me into the person I wanted to be.

It’s funny thinking about the way Skye means a lot to me, because her solo career pretty much fizzled out after her second album. Sometimes I imagine I’m the only one who still knows all the words to her songs, maybe the only one who ever did. The 2000s were a heyday for pop princesses who were destined to fade into obscurity and remember-whens. Even Brie Larson, before becoming an Oscar winner and Carol Danvers, released an album in 2005 titled Finally Out of P.E. — and nothing else after that. (Unless you count Envy Adams’ cover of “Black Sheep” in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.)

I grew out of this teenybopper Radio Disney phase as the years passed, morphing into the kind of teenager who took herself a little too seriously and put a lot of stock into her so-called indie cred. I wanted to be cool, and cool meant quoting The Strokes’ documentary In Transit word for word, crushing on Cavan McCarthy from Swim Deep, and rolling my eyes at Arctic Monkeys’ “Do I Wanna Know?” because Alex Turner had finally drunk the Kool-Aid. I followed The Like’s Tennessee Thomas on Instagram and read Alexa Chung’s It. I was always keeping up with new acts from London or Chicago or New York.

When I was diagnosed with depression in my 20s, my relationship with music changed. It took too much energy to always be ahead of the curve, to still care about having a “music taste.” My obsessive tendencies led to heavy-rotation playlists of songs that either drowned out the sadness or wallowed in it, mostly Mitski, Big Thief, and Paramore’s After Laughter. After a while, though, I realized that there was comfort in pop music — maybe because it reminded me of happier days when I didn’t know any better, or maybe because the sweet mindlessness of the songs and the emptiness I felt were both complementary and dissonant, earnest and ironic all at once.

Whatever it was, it helped me cope. I turned to the forgotten pop stars of my youth; I looked them up on Spotify and was relieved and happy to find that tracks I thought were long-lost had somehow survived beyond Limewire and were right there, ready to stream. Not only that: some of them, like Aly & AJ and The Veronicas, were making highly anticipated comebacks and releasing new music.

There was also a freedom to choosing pop music. I was letting myself like what I genuinely like and enjoy what makes me happy regardless of the way other people feel about it. (Especially now that my definition of happiness is more complicated, holding more weight and more tension.) I was making this decision on my own, no longer so conscious or worried about being cool or different or a dud — the way I learned from Skye Sweetnam all those years ago.

It was at this point that I found my way back to Katelyn Tarver. When I was 12, her songs “Wonderful Crazy” and “Something In Me” were just for taking up space in my MP3 player and singing along to when I was bored. They were inconsequential, ephemeral. But her new music was refreshing, and it blew me away. The tracks were exactly what I needed to get through this difficult, scary period in my life. It was like reuniting with an old friend, or having someone read my journals back to me out loud — hyper-aware of time passing by, convinced every bad feeling would stay forever, lamenting if I knew then what I know now. Like Katelyn herself wrote on Twitter: “Depressing but still hopeful? My brand?”

What speaks to me the most is a track called “Don’t Let It Change You,” which goes, Do you remember how we used to be? What the world was like at 23? I was that age myself when I first heard it, and it’s become a theme for navigating my 20s and learning when to take charge and when to let go. According to Katelyn, it’s about “hitting that point in life where you thought things would look a certain way, and they don’t, and learning how to deal with that.” She adds: “But sometimes you just have to cry over a bowl of pasta in public and let it happen.” I’ve never felt more understood.

(I also learned while writing this that she is a Scorpio, like me, and all the world makes sense again.)

Mitski gets me like she gets anyone, but it’s different with an artist that I’ve grown up with, one that has seen me through the awkwardness of puberty, the dramatics of high school, the uncertainties of college, and the mess of young adulthood, even if it was just on the fringes, in the murky recesses of my mind. I’ve been listening to Katelyn Tarver since she was 16, and I can practically map out how she has evolved — the way I can trace my own steps and see how I have evolved in the same 14 or so years that have passed.

Somehow we both made it, somehow we’re both still here — and I believe her completely when she says we’re right where we’re meant to be.

Class rage goes to the movies

From Knives Out to Parasite, the past year’s most talked-about cinema explores every intricacy of the gap between rich and poor and, in some instances, turns it on its head.

It’s been quite a year for Bong Joon-ho’s Palme d’Or-winning Parasite. It has garnered a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination for Best Ensemble Cast, and recently won a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film.

It has been the first South Korean feature to reach such heights, connecting with worldwide viewers on a scale that’s unmatched and unprecedented. In his acceptance speech, the director posited that if more people were willing to watch movies in languages they can’t understand and put a little more effort into reading subtitles, they would open themselves up to amazing storytelling and filmmaking. Parasite, for its part, has certainly earned all the accolades. There’s a complexity and a twist to it that makes it hard to describe and a joy to watch when you go in not knowing anything about it, but it’s also plain in its stark depiction of class dynamics — which could be what makes it so resonant, even to “very local” (Bong’s words) Western sensibilities.

Interestingly, the line that divides the well-to-do and the rest of us who struggle financially has also been explored in other favorite movies from the past year, unveiling a possible pattern in what makes today’s audiences tick. This discussion was arguably brought to the table and anchored by Rian Johnson’s Knives Out, released last November and another awards season frontrunner.

The whodunit opens, like murder mysteries are wont to do, with a body: bestselling mystery author Harlan Thrombey’s (Christopher Plummer) throat has been slit in his gothic mansion. Initial investigation reveals he did it himself, but it’s hardly case closed. With his fortune and property up in the air, Harlan’s surviving family reveal themselves to be despicable and unpleasant in several different ways — daughter Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis), for instance, built her own business “from the ground up,” conveniently leaving out the hefty loan from her father, son Walt (Michael Shannon) refuses to give up control of the family’s publishing house and has raised a teenage neo-Nazi, and grandson Ransom (Chris Evans) is spoiled and jobless.

When the Thrombeys — who have been swimming in privilege and privilege-blindness — find themselves threatened with the possibility of losing their wealth, they prove themselves each willing to do whatever it takes to protect their own interests. Caught in the middle is Marta (Ana de Armas), Harlan’s nurse and friend, who is an immigrant and not exactly living in comfort. What she does have, however, is a pure heart, integrity, and fearlessness when it comes to standing up for what’s right.

Similarly, there’s bold and brash horror-comedy Ready or Not, in which Grace (Samara Weaving) marries into the Le Domas family, whose wealth comes from their board game empire. On the night of her wedding, she has to play a game with them as an initiation of sorts and ends up drawing Hide and Seek, which apparently now means they have to hunt her and kill her in ritual sacrifice to the Devil. But Grace is not so willing to die just for them to carry on with their elitism and their affluence, so she fights back and bursts their bubble (and maybe their insides) in the process.

Both Knives Out and Ready or Not depict the rich as the clear antagonist; the chaotic evil to Marta’s lawful good and Grace’s chaotic good. They’re both disruptive and subversive to a system that favors the upper class, and while this makes them far-fetched, it’s no less fun to watch some rich snobs get their comeuppance.

Mikhail Red’s Dead Kids, which premiered on Netflix in December, takes a more realistic approach. A group of misfits carry out a plan to kidnap the biggest jerk in school, motivated by revenge and the cool P30 million they’ll be receiving as ransom. The least well-off is Sta. Maria (Kelvin Miranda), who struggles to pay rent and couldn’t get a scholarship to the expensive university of his dreams. When they discuss what to do with the money, his co-conspirators talk about cars, and he only wants to get away from the big city and return to the province.

The movie comments on the drug war and how unfair society is and uses status symbols like Yeezys and AirPods to illustrate class differences, but perhaps lacks the tension and doesn’t simmer enough in the consequence for either the would-be kidnappers, the self-absorbed victim, or the corrupt cops to leave an impression or get a message across.

Parasite itself was criticized for its “failed revolution,” as the Kim family’s ruse of monopolizing the Park family’s payroll through taking different jobs without the latter knowing they’re related to each other — a scheme that would have made their lives infinitely more comfortable, if only it were sustainable — did not lead them to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, after all. But it’s a criticism that doesn’t really have merit when you consider how the turn(s) of events flow into one another and toward an ending that’s not only justified and believable, but also equal parts hopeful and wistful. It highlights that “work hard for a better life” is bullshit, and for the lower class, there’s always, always more to lose.

The main difference is that the Parks aren’t cruel. Kim Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho) observes that they’re actually quite nice despite their wealth, and his wife Chung-sook (Chang Hyae-jin) is quick to interject that they’re nice because they’re rich, because they can afford to be. What the Parks are, instead, is stuck-up and blissfully ignorant, and this cultivates a resentment in the Kim family that festers and boils over as the action continues to rise — which is the most radical, true-to-life part of all.

Filipinos are used to narratives that lay out the class hierarchy for us, but it’s mostly on teleseryes and in movies that depict being rich as something aspirational. But with billionaires amassing collective net worths higher than those of the rest of the world combined, more and more people have become uncomfortable with the mere idea of wealth, even for themselves.

Cinema has always reflected the times, and these days, people are driven by their anger against and frustration with a system that puts certain races, genders, and classes first and leaves them powerless. It’s refreshing and thrilling to see that filmmakers are pushing back on the status quo, and that the general public is actually here to listen. In telling, hearing, and sharing these stories, we can find ways to revolt and lay the groundwork for change — or at least see what change could be.