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I watched this movie before TIFF, and then I got busy with my “coverage” of the festival, followed by a vacation. But the film left enough of an impression on me that I wanted to circle back and write down a few thoughts.

I opted to watch this rather lengthy movie one hour at a time, over three consecutive days. It’s an unfortunate fact of life that it’s rare for me to be able to spend 3 uninterrupted hours doing any one thing.

As it happens, Drive My Car works really well as a kind of miniseries with roughly one-hour episodes. The film’s pace is definitely slow, with plenty of quiet passages where characters travel in—you guessed it, a car—but it didn’t test my patience, partly because I was coming to it fresh every day. There’s also a clear three act structure to the story, which lines up nicely at the hour marks.

The protagonist, Kafuku, is a stage actor and director, who is grieving the loss of his wife. His feelings are complicated, as he is aware that she was having a secret affair with another man. In an ironic turn, Kafuku heals partly by meeting and “befriending” the man who cuckolded him (although “be-frenemy-ing” might be a better term for it). In their tense conversations, the two men never explicitly mention the affair, but they both know that they both know.

Kafuku also heals by bonding with his driver, a young woman who, like him, is numbed by past tragedies. At a key moment, they decide to take a road trip, covering almost the entire length of Japan. Personally, I love driving, and I found myself envying her job as a personal driver. And if I happen to make a therapeutic breakthrough and self-actualize during an epic cross-country drive, that would be an added bonus.

Side note: I followed up my viewing of the film by reading the Haruki Murakami short story from which it’s adapted. I’ve bounced off Murakami in the past because I don’t enjoy his portrayals of women, and the pattern continues here. Check this out for an opening line:

Based on the many times he had ridden in cars driven by women, Kafuku had reached the conclusion that most female drivers fell into one of two categories: either they were a little too aggressive or a little too timid.

It’s to the movie’s credit that this kind of broad stereotyping is omitted.

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During my time with this novel, I experienced a few mornings where I woke up with a feeling of purposelessness¹, like there was no point in the work that I do day in, day out. While I’m not saying that I’m immune to negative feelings, darkness is not my default mode, and I’m usually able to motivate myself just fine. That is to say, I do believe that the despondent mood of The Bell Jar rubbed off on me.

I mean this as a compliment to Plath’s vivid description of her protagonist’s spiral into depression. It’s a harrowing journey which is accentuated by the fact that it sneaks up on you. When Esther’s story begins, the narrative reads like a fish-out-of-water story, of a suburban girl who’s slightly overwhelmed by the big city, but who has enough wit and intelligence to float above and see through the bullshit. Over time, it becomes more and more clear that her detachment is a sign of her struggle to belong in the world. Mental illness can’t always be explained, and the book doesn’t try to do it: it simply lets us experience it through Esther’s eyes.

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Footnotes

1. I can’t believe I used this word. It’s a joke from an old Rowan Atkinson bit. I’m sorry to make light while discussing a serious topic, but that’s what footnotes are for! ↩

This is a moody film, about a pair of friends who bond over a fantasy-action TV show as teenagers. As they enter adulthood, it appears that one of them has disappeared into the world of the show, leaving the other one “stranded” in a miserable suburban life. When I say “moody,” I refer to the creative lighting choices and surreal editing (👍), but also to the acting style, which is monotonous and mumbly throughout (👎).

I understand that the film is an allegory for the trans experience, and I respect it for that. The friend who lives out their life in the “real world” is filled with pain and regret because they didn’t get to exist as their true self in the world of the beloved TV show. However, if I didn’t know ahead of time what the metaphor stood for, I don’t think I would have made the connection on my own, and the film would have really dragged for me.

What I could relate to was being obsessed with certain shows in my youth. I’m reminded of the time that a friend called me for homework tips during Seinfeld’s Thursday night timeslot, and I got mad and yelled at him to get off the phone. Or the time when YTV aired a mid-season cliffhanger of Dragon Ball Z (right before Goku’s first Super Saiyan transformation), and I got so impatient for the next block of episodes that I used the new-fangled technology of the Internet to write a pleading letter to the TV station.

My point is, I know what it’s like to be passionate about a piece of entertainment. But in the film, the performances are so (intentionally) dreary that the emotion doesn’t come through. I was left feeling a bit empty by the film, even if I admired what it was trying to say.

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I was reminded of this movie when news broke about Scarlett Johansson’s dispute with OpenAI for using her vocal likeness without permission.

I recall being underwhelmed by my first viewing when it first came out. Back then, I thought it was a simply a riff on the rom-com formula, which swaps one of the couple with an artificial intelligence¹. In hindsight, I understand my lukewarm reaction as coming from my lack of relationship experience. At the time, any romance that I saw on screen, even between human characters, felt artificial to me because they were only characters, and I couldn’t see myself in them. The fact that one of the characters was a computer program didn’t make it any more artificial.

But now that I’m happily married, movies like Her work much better for me, because of course there’s a difference between connecting with a human and conversing with your phone. Of course the protagonist would be attracted to a personality that molded itself to his needs, after losing a marriage to someone he loved but didn’t love him back.

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Footnotes

1. In the film’s dialogue, they use the term “OS”—e.g. “My girlfriend is an OS”—which isn’t exactly technically correct 🤓 ↩

When I started reading this book, I was surprised by its breezy tone. I had expected it to be more serious, given the grandiose subtitle and premise (not to mention the hyperbolic blurbs on the back cover): the author would tell the stories of ordinary people during a single day in history (December 28, 1986), and these tales would add up to show us the universal truths of human experience. But the way Gene Weingarten tells it in the introduction, the whole project was in fact kind of a fun lark that he and his editor came up with over drinks at the bar.

I was enjoying the writing for the first few chapters, especially the one about a heart transplant, a procedure that was still somewhat experimental at the time. I learned a lot about medical history, and the events leading up to the operation are told in a compelling, suspenseful way.

After a while, though, the writing style started to get on my nerves. There’s a kind of clickbait-y rhythm that gets repetitive, in my opinion. A lot of it reads like: “This is Joe. Joe’s just a regular guy. But little did he know that his life was about to change.” Or: “Sue was just going about her regular day, but there was something dark hidden behind her routine.” It feels like there’s a mini-cliffhanger on every other page, and while it does hook the reader, I feel like the technique is overused here.

By the end of the book, I was questioning the ethics of the whole thing. Many of the chapters have some element of true crime. For instance, the heart in the aforementioned transplant actually came from a young man who had committed a murder-suicide, and the book spends a lot of time on how he was a tortured romantic with a dark soul. Isn’t this what’s wrong with the news media, that they romanticize and sensationalize and exploit the traumatic experiences of ordinary people?

There are also a few topics that are emblematic of the Eighties—for example, the AIDS pandemic, racial tensions in the US, and life as a closeted transgendered person—which I feel deserve a more nuanced treatment than a single chapter in this book. In fact, Weingarten’s punchy style makes his superficial coverage of these topics feel insensitive and almost offensive.

As a whole, I didn’t feel like the people in these stories were creating a snapshot of humanity; rather, it felt like they were exhibits to be gawked at.

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I was quite impressed with this short story by Tomas Hachard that appears in the Summer Reading issue of The Walrus. As the title indicates, it takes place in the future, and features a young girl named Clarissa who dives into an online historical archive, where she finds a journal of a girl living in our present day.

The future society that Clarissa lives in is rebuilding after a climate catastrophe called “the Deluge,” and the journal gives her a glimpse of life before the disaster: the people of that time didn’t know what would soon befall them, and they existed in a mentality split between fear and denial. Sound familiar?

But all is not well in Clarissa’s future either; as the story progresses, she starts to see the same signs of impending doom that she’s reading in the journal, and the two narratives kind of blend together in a way that I started to be confused about which was which, in a good way.

This story really triggered my climate anxiety, especially as I was reading it at around the same time as some horrendous flooding in Toronto.

The cyclical nature of the story is really effective in creating an ambivalent sense of the future. On the one hand, humanity has persisted, after the Deluge, and life seems to be relatively normal. But on the other hand, they don’t seem to have learned enough lessons from the disaster to prevent it from happening again.