What happens when you don’t speak an unspeakable pain?
A worn-out couple drives into a seaside resort. He is a writer who substitutes the bottle for inspiration. She is a former dancer in New York. Both were once the “toast of the town.” Their boredom, their mutual distance, hides a secret which is growing like a poison in her body, slowly turning her mind. He, being a writer no doubt, pleads for speech. He knows what she needs to say, what the matter is, but she refuses to speak, preferring silence and a growing dependence on pills. He turns once again to the bottle. Both are, underneath this veneer of “quiet desperation”, very angry.
But the unspeakable pain insists on its own “speech” and if she won’t speak it directly, it will show itself in other, more mysterious ways that at first baffle him. There is a small hole in the wall to the next hotel room where a young married couple are “getting pregnant” in as many ways as possible. She surreptitiously watches them and soon, he joins her. This little hole becomes a portal to their vibrant past. His intentions are fairly straightforward. Perhaps this will awaken new life in them, now. Her intentions are much murkier, oblique, and less readable. He asks several times, “what are you doing,” “what’s this all about?” For example, she buys the young man a jacket that is identical to the one her husband wore when they were younger. So, when they peep through the hole in the wall he sees himself as a young man in the next room. When he looks through the hole another time, he is shocked to see his wife getting undressed for the young man. It seems she wants to hurt him, and destroy the new marriage at the same time and, maybe, insanely, get pregnant herself by this younger man. What was a simply a portal to their past transforms so that the past, their past, comes forward in time and begins to poison the present. In a memorable line, the writer says that the past doesn’t mean anything if you don’t remember it. But if the past is still alive in some sense, it can poison the present, if it remains unspoken.
One scene repeats throughout: a solitary fisherman goes out to sea at dawn, disappears, and returns in the evening to the inlet. She asks, how can you go out in the morning, come back at night, day after day, without losing your mind? What is it that we don’t know? A potent question indeed, that goes to the heart of the question of speaking the unspeakable pain. Being a writer, he is equipped to offer an answer. The fisherman goes out with the tide and comes in with the tide. He doesn’t fight it. She has been fighting the pain of losing a child, fighting the loss of being the mother of his child. So much loss, unspeakable pain, and she has fought it all by going against the tide. The pain still speaks; after all, it is the stronger, but it must now speak through her unraveling mind in twisted gesture and symbolic action.
This movie is an eloquent, artistic presentation of what happens to us in our increasing refusal of the speech of the living body, that body that speaks in pain, joy, or any of the other affectivities that constitute our lives as embodied beings. This living body will speak but our refusal to participate in that speech results in our minds unraveling and giving rise to an increasing cacophony of “crazy’ gestures and actions.
It’s all relatively simple. Turn to that living body; participate in its speech, no matter how painful.
Return to the living body and give voice to its speech!