A Certain Slant of Light

This afternoon I popped over to the theater to watch Loving Vincent, which is an animated movie about Vincent van Gogh which was created, the first titles helpfully inform us, by over one hundred artists working in oil paint. It is the first animated movie ever done in oils, and quite possibly it will be the last - I imagine the costs involved were tremendous - which is too bad, because I would love to see oil paint animations based on the works of, oh, Monet perhaps, or Renoir. I could easily imagine some sweet dreamy fantasy set among Monet's works.

Also, although the animation is gorgeous, I do think they were still working out the kinks of the animating-in-oil-paint process and it sometimes gives the film a distracting jerkiness. But perhaps it's just that it's quite unlike anything else I've ever seen, and that in itself is distracting? Only more films would give me the opportunity to tell...

Anyway! The film is set about a year after van Gogh's death. Armand Roulin's father tasks him with delivering a letter that Vincent wrote to his brother Theo but never mailed - only for Armand to discover that Theo, too, has died. So Armand heads to Auvers, where Vincent died, in the hopes of asking his doctor where he might find Theo's widow - which somehow metamorphoses into an attempt to recreate Vincent's last days, and answer the question of why he killed himself. If he killed himself.

I must confess I felt skeptical when the film took this turn. I went through something of a van Gogh phase in college (his doomed friendship with Gauguin hit me where I lived), and nothing in my reading suggested that there was any controversy about how he died. He shot himself in the fields where he was painting, using a revolver that he brought along to scare away the crows, and then dragged himself back to the house where he was staying and died there two days later after telling everyone that he shot himself.

HOWEVER, upon repairing to Wikipedia I have discovered that in 2011 (in short, after my van Gogh interest waned) two academics published a book in which they argued that maybe van Gogh was accidentally shot by a rich spoiled teenage hooligan who liked to run around Auvers dressed as a cowboy and menace people with a gun - and van Gogh said he did it himself to... shield the miscreant, I guess? I don't know, I think this kind of theory was slightly more plausible when someone argued that Gauguin was the one who cut off Vincent's ear (in a fight, not just for funzies, I feel I should clarify), and Vincent said he did it himself to cover for him. At least we know for a fact that van Gogh was unhealthily invested in his friendship with Gauguin. Why's he going to cover for the random cowboy kid?

But I did like that the structure allows the filmmakers' to show Vincent from multiple angles (through the eyes of his paint dealer, his landlord's daughter, his doctor...) and forces Armand to think more about his own attitudes toward van Gogh - whom he didn't give a damn about in life. He saw Vincent as weird and kind of alarming, and now he wishes that he had seen his loneliness and understood and befriended him.

I have read other stories where the main character learns more about someone after their death (Olive's Ocean comes to mind) and goes, oh, I wish I'd known they were so lonely, we could have been friends - but I'm not sure that actually works; I'm not sure you can force yourself to be friends with someone just because you know they need a friend. I would think there needs to be something else there beyond just sympathy - some kind of esteem or respect or something - to make it a true friendship rather than just pity.

Also, I think that when people learn this sort of thing about someone who is still alive, their reaction is rarely "Oh, we should be friends!" - because the person is alive, that would demand a real investment of time and emotion and energy. This is why sadness makes fictional characters mysterious and fascinating but can be off-putting in real people: a fictional character is never going to stop speaking to you for three months because you said the wrong thing that one time and touched off a downward spiral and how dare you be anything less than a constant wellspring of undemanding support.

TL:DR, this movie hit me in a weird place because when I was younger I invested really hard in the importance of Being There for your friends during their mental health issues, which might have worked out better for me if I were better at setting boundaries, or had fewer friends with mental health issue, or knew when the fuck to just let someone go. I burned the fuck out and now when I watch Armand having this "Why didn't I see that he was in trouble? Why didn't I try to help?" crisis I want to shout at the screen, "BECAUSE YOU HAVE SENSIBLE BOUNDARIES, ARMAND, DON'T GUILT YOURSELF OUT OF THAT."

Van Gogh! One of my favorite nineteenth century artists, who I love so much that I watched both movies about him, even though one is slightly dull and the other unbearably terrible, Jesus Christ, just thinking back to Vincent and Theo makes me die a little inside.

The tragical tale of van Gogh and Gauguin’s disastrous artistic partnership! So van Gogh saw Gauguin’s paintings and was all “MY ARTISTIC SOULMATE.” I do not believe they had actually met at this point, but no matter.

Van Gogh: Gauguin! Come live with me in the south of France! I have rented a yellow house for us. We will live together and talk about Art and paint beautiful, beautiful pictures!

Gauguin: Van Gogh, I say this to you as a man with an ego the size of Saturn. It worries me how much you love me.

Van Gogh: I will fill your room with sunflower paintings!

Eventually Van Gogh’s brother Theo actually paid Gauguin to go live with Van Gogh, so Gauguin went to Arles, things went wrong in short order, and as we all know, Van Gogh cut off his ear in a fit of madness.

Or so the story goes! But there is a theory - which makes Gauguin looks like a terrible person, so naturally I like it - that Gauguin cut off van Gogh’s ear during an argument and then convinced van Gogh to tell everyone that he cut off his own ear.

And then Gauguin ran off to Tahiti to sleep with twelve-year-old girls, leaving van Gogh heartbroken, earless, and more unstable than ever. IT IS SO SAD.

Watched Lust for Life yesterday.

( Review )

Basically, if you absolutely must see a Vincent Van Gogh biopic, Lust for Life is the one to see.

1. My spinach plant has not yet sprouted. It isn't supposed to have sprouted yet, so all this means is that it isn't The Mutant Spinach Plant that Will Eat My Dorm Room. However, I am already fretting that I've somehow managed to kill the seeds.

2. I read Lust for Life, which is a novel loosely based on the life of Van Gogh - I should say "skimmed disparate parts of Lust for Life," because dear sweet Lord the writing is bad. Evidently no one ever told Irving Stone that he should show, not tell, because he manages to reduce the most interesting events to a few dull sentences, and manages, I don't understand how, to make a four-hundred page book out of this boring litany.

Also, the book's romances (of which there are many, although as the book was written in the thirties none of them are Gauguin/Van Gogh) appear to be in the weird thirties Freudian sex is violence violence is sex vein of eroticism. I think it's more common in books, but it's also in around the edges of films like It Happened One Night, where Clark Gable carries Claudette Colbert across the river, she compares it to the piggyback rides her father used to give her, and Gable spanks her, and it's all a bizarre mating ritual.

Actually a lot of screwball comedies are based on this equation, although usually they aren't quite that Freudian. I bet there's a really interesting book out there discussing the sexual politics of screwball comedies, because they're just bizarre. (I should add, there are a lot of thirties films that don't buy into this mode of sexuality - Ninotchka comes immediately to mind - this is one trend out of many, not The Defining Mode of the Thirties.)

But anyway! In the fifties MGM made a movie (this is the trailer) based on Lust for LIfe, and if the trailer is any guide it's absolutely terrible. And it won awards. I may have to watch it.

This afternoon I spent two hours making rice pudding, my mother's two-hour-long sweet, creamy, cinnamon-y rice pudding, the recipe that required three separate trips to the store before I gathered all the necessary ingredients.

This was a disaster. I put in a third of the necessary milk - because the recipe was mistyped, so this was not just operator error; but still, you'd think when all the timing instructions came out wrong (specifically, everything took about a third of the time it should have to heat up) I would have noticed that, oh, this is not working out, but no, I kept going to the bitter, burnt, YOU HAVE WASTED A PRECIOUS CINNAMON STICK AND DESTROYED YOUR CASSEROLE DISH end.

So I wept a bit, because that rice pudding was supposed to be my dinner, and then I sulked my way back to the kitchen and spent half an hour picking rice off the casserole dish with my fingernails because I didn't have any kind of scrub brush, and suppressed the hatred in my heart enough to remake the pudding.

And it's nice pudding. I like rice pudding, and I like my mother's rice pudding especially. But it wasn't worth four hours worth of work - and no one else thinks it was worth four hours of work either (specifically, they object to my beloved cinnamon) - and rice pudding isn't actually a very filling dinner, anyway.

:(

On the plus side, the whole thing put me into the proper bitter, vengeful mood to write the "Gauguin takes disgraceful advantage of Van Gogh's enormous neediness" fic, which is finally a month after inception almost done. Anyone want to read it?

A telephone conversation with my mother this morning:

Jin: …so when I get home one of my projects is figuring out a filing system for all the letters I've received, because there are too many for my old filing system.
Mother: Or you could just recycle them.
Jin: Recycle them? Get rid of letters? (beat) (beat) ….do you get rid of my letters?
Mother: Yep!
Jin: O.O
Mother: You write a lot of them, after all.
Jin: O.o
Mother: They’d take up a lot of space.
Jin: o.O
Mother: Honey? You didn’t walk out in traffic or anything, did you?
Jin: >.<

(My mother is like a reverse packrat. I remember once looking for our copy of Rebecca: “Oh, I gave that to the library. No one was reading it.” “Mother! That’s the copy of Rebecca you bought in Suffolk in 1978 on your first trip to England! It still contains your tourist maps because you used them as a bookmark!” My mother gives me a quizzical look. “It has sentimental value, Mom!”)

Anyway. As a result of the scarring conversation about the letters, I am now the proud possessor of a pen-and-paper journal, which no one will ever ever ever throw away. I agonized over stacks of journals (as well as the selection of blank thank-you cards. Who knew thank-you cards were so delectable?) in the local bookstore till I picked out one with a Hiroshige print on the cover.

Van Gogh, incidentally, was a tremendous fan of Hiroshige, which probably influenced my choice. He mentions over and over in his letters that he thinks Arles – Arles is the place in southern France where he lived with Gauguin for three months, and then sliced off his earlobe – that he thinks Arles looks like Japan, he hopes Arles will inspire him like Japan, and look at these gorgeous plum orchards! You could almost imagine you were in Kyoto!

I’m reading a book of his letters, Letters from Provence. It abridges the letters tremendously and doesn’t include any of the replies, which makes me sad; but it does have illustrations and is short enough that I don't feel guilty about reading it during finals week.

And the book is only possible because Van Gogh’s family saved his letters. *grumble grumble grumble*