La muerte no es el final

Retropost #1908 (17 de diciembre de 2007): Ójala fuera cierto

Ojala fuera cierto

Publicado en Cine. com. José Ángel García Landa

Es dudoso que valga la pena ponerse a escribir ninguna reseña de una película taquillera, cuando en la Internet Movie Database ya te ofrecen una colección entera de reseñas más amplia de las que te dan ganas de leerte—aunque siempre es entretenido cotejarlas, y de hecho también escribir otra. Te ofrecen además ya toda una página expresa para la intertextualidad de la película, bueno, lo que llaman las "movie connections" (aquí están las de Just Like Heaven), con lo cual el analista no sabe si agradecer el trabajo que se le evita, o si desesperarse y renunciar al ejercicio del análisis. Queda el consuelo de que cada crítica—supuestamente—nos ofrece un punto de vista personal e intransferible. Como por ejemplo el de ver esta película sobre fallecidos que vuelven a la vida justo después de tener una pérdida en la familia, supongo... aunque en eso no voy a entrar. Las escenas de hospital se ven de otra manera, apunto.

Ghost es aquí la referencia ineludible, siendo ésta una comedia romántica con aderezos para viudos y corazones magullados en la que hay una historia de amor entre una fantasma (Reese Witherspoon) y un hombre joven (Mark Ruffalo) que lleva luto interno por su esposa, que murió repentinamente de un derrame cerebral. Aunque en realidad es una película más bien como de Meg Ryan—Kate& Leopold también viene a la mente, o Sleepless in Seattle. Bien, pues el fantasma Witherspoon no es de una muerta sino de una médico que está en coma y con animación asistida en el mismo hospital en el que trabajaba. Era una chica que desconocía el amor y vivía para su carrera. Y resulta que el día en que la promocionan, y en que su hermana le iba a concertar una cita a ciegas... plas, accidente y punto. Y coma. Está bien llevado el giro del guión por el cual descubrimos que esa pareja que estaba predestinada a conocerse se conocen al fin, pues el psicoanalista/amigo del viudo era quien le concertaba la cita con la médica a través de su hermana, antigua novia suya. Este giro es un ejemplo de tratamiento del argumento que ayuda a crear trabazón y dar una impresión de inevitabilidad a las casualidades y fantasías de la película—que está bien llevada, como digo.

Alquila Ruffalo la casa de Witherspoon, con intención de llevar una vida de couch potato, y allí se conocen en escenas divertidas: ella convencida de que él es un intruso, y negándose a creer que ella misma sea un fantasma amnésico. Hasta que al final no sólo descubren que se gustan, sino que descubren el cuerpo aún vivo de ella en el hospital, y la salvan de ser desconectada por su hermana bien intencionada y por un médico trepa, rival de la comatosa. Naturalmente vuelven a la vida, y aunque vuelve amnésica otra vez, acaba recuperando la memoria y todo acaba felizmente.

Están muy bien llevadas las escenas de desencuentros, en las que cada una de los interlocutores copresentes está en una situación comunicativa distinta. Por ejemplo, sabemos que Ruffalo no es un intruso en el piso de la fantasma, pero se nos hacen ver sus respuestas (sorprendidas ante la situación) a través de la percepción aparentemente más racional de ella, con efectos hilarantes. Esto sucede también en escenas tipo "fantasma de Banquo" o tipo Ariel invisible en La Tempestad (Shakespeare innovó mucho en estas convenciones escénicas de realidades superpuestas). En estas escenas, Ruffalo interactúa a la vez con el fantasma Witherspoon, a quien es el único en ver, y con otros allí presentes que se pasman de sus incoherencias y sus acciones extravagantes.

Por cierto que cada vez nos vemos más en situaciones parecidas, con la gente que con teléfono móvil (o peor aún, sin él, al menos visible) va hablando con un tercero por las ondas y nos interrumpen la interacción y las reuniones con presencias fantasmales, y no sabemos si nos hablan a nosotros o a quién, o si están del bolo o tienen buena tecnología.

Aparte, la película explota hasta la desvergüenza las convenciones de la distorsión retrospectiva: las parejas que rememoran su encuentro siempre leen en el pasado que les llevó a juntarse una especie de oscuras pistas o ironías del destino—y una película romántica se basa en reforzar ese tipo de lectura retrospectiva con un argumento ya diseñado para inspirarla y reforzarla, y reforzar así nuestras supersticiones y rituales narrativos.

Tampoco se priva el guionista de hacer un uso indebido de la fantasía fantasmal para atacar a la eutanasia—entre eso y la imposibilidad de hacer el amor con una fantasma (que ni siquiera tiene la ocurrencia de desnudarse para el chico, a falta de pan) queda una película bastante neocón o neopacata. Aquí la paciente en coma aparente está bien viva en tanto que alma, o fantasma, movimiento tramposillo donde los haya, y se nos muestra además al médico partidario de la eutanasia como un interesado en quitar de enmedio concurrencia para favorecer su propia promoción. Y la hermana que daba su autorización era bien intencionada, pero estaba equivocada. En fin, que toda película de fantasmas parte de este axioma, la existencia de almas incorpóreas capaces de interactuar y comunicarse al margen del cuerpo, y de una providencia benevolente que organiza los encuentros y desencuentros a la manera de un guionista de Hollywood. No sé si decir que ójala fuera cierto—pero en todo caso no lo es.

Y resurrecciones, pocas. En todo caso se suelen dar las emocionales—y es ésa naturalmente la lectura más favorable de la película, una alegoría o patrón narrativo de las ceremonias de superación del luto.





 


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Just Like Heaven. Dir. Mark Waters. Written by Peter Tolan and Leslie Dixon. Cast: Reese Witherspoon and Mark Ruffalo. Dreamworks / Parkes/Macdonald, 2006. Spanish DVD: Ojalá fuera cierto. Dreamworks, 2006.

El ilusionista: Hidden in plain view

Etiquetas: Cine, Waters, Luto

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What Ceremony Else

A passage from Christopher Rush's biographical fiction on Shakespeare, Will (2007). It is a novel much possessed by death, as it is structured around a conversation with his lawyer concerning Will's final will and testament, and his life now all past and no future. But there are many other deaths to go through before the final one. Here (ch. 47) Shakespeare reminisces on the death of his son Hamnet—and on the traces it left in his work. Such traces are not in the least explicit: there is no elegy  "On the Death of My Only Son", something which has bothered a number of scholars.  Here, Rush's Shakespeare resumes work after the child's burial.

When I finally came back to my lodgings in St Helen's, I clumped heavily upstairs to find the script of King John scattered on the table just as I'd left it. I leafed through the pages till I came back to Act Three Scene Four, where Constance, bereft of her boy, takes comfort from the Cardinal that we shall see and know our friends in heaven. 'If that be true,' she says, 'then I shall see my boy again.'

The ink in the pot had dried up in the sweltering August heat. The room smelt foul and was like an oven. I opened the shutters to let London in again, re-filled the inkpot, and with three strokes of the pen scored out the scene. Then I sat down and re-wrote it on the spot. This time the distraught mother found no confort in the golden words of the church. As I wrote, I recalled those four empty walls in Henley Street that used to echo with his laughter and prattle.

Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form.

Stuffs out his garments. I was remembering that little pile of clothes. And how I'd sat for hours in Stratford, turning them over and over, holding them up, crushing them to my lips. My own garments were stuffed out now with a stranger. I caught a sudden sight of myself in the glass.

A ghost had come back to Bishopsgate to carry on the life of work and worry. There was nothing left for him to do. I knew he would throw himself into it, reap the rewards, bask in the glory, the honour, the fame. All of which he did. But he carried a long sorrow for his son and these were not the last lines he wrote for him. He spoke to him in his verses many a time to come. That's what the death of your nearest and dearest does to you, Francis — estranges you from yourself, from life. After the funeral you look at the world like the moon, with that vacant stare, and no one sees or knows what's on the other side.

 Ben Jonson's son died too, of the plague, seven years later (the child was seven at the time). I poured drink into Ben that night.

'His life may have been cut short, Ben — but in short measure life may perfect be.'

He looked at me with red eyes. And later stole the line when he lost a daughter and penned her an elegy. Never missed a trick, old Ben. But for his son he wrote a touching little lament of his own: Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy — my sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy.

My own sin had been the opposite. I hadn't thought of him enough. Not after that day I'd left him on Clopton Bridge. At least Ben Jonson didn't have that guilt to live with. But I buried my guilt between many lines. Ben's grieving love deserves to stand out clear.

Rest in soft peace, and asked, say here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetrie,
For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such,
As what he loves may never like too much.

It was nicely turned, don't you think, that verse of Ben's? But I don't believe Ben turned back to it after that. He moved on. Maybe I moved on too, or seemed to. But it didn't stop me, couldn't stop me turning back. Grief in its fullness doesn't always erupt at the time of death. It may take years to blossom, to burst into those blackest blooms of the heart. The black bile was always threatening me anyway, but Hamnet always kept it at bay, even when I only thought of him. And when I saw him, all too seldom, he cured in me thoughts that would thick my blood, with his child's matter made a summer's day short as a winter solstice. After he died came bleak December everywhere, every day; and every day after that, somewhere in every single day that followed, I felt the chill of that one awful day that would never go away. Every chill was that same chill, every day was that same day, the day we buried him.

What ceremony else? That's what I really wanted to shout at them that day, remembering my sister all over again, and those maimed rites. What ceremony else? The old rites were gone that could have comforted. We therefore commit his body to the ground. Therefore. It follows. Because we can no longer sing him to the saints with sage requiem and ministers of grace. Because we have taken away your old rituals, and therefore something of your beliefs too — for even beliefs are made of words.

Which leaves you with what? With a private knot of pain. Goodnight, sweet prince, I wanted to whisper — and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. But no more of that, if you please. Forasmuch as it hath pleased almighty God to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed, we therefore commit his body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life thorugh Jesus Christ our Lord.  Sure and certain? Nothing was sure and certain any more. They didn't even call him by his name, didn't even use a personal pronoun. Not a 'thou' was spoken. Dear brother? What brother? What impersonal being was that? Dear God, he was my son, my only son. They were throwing on the earth, closing up the grave, shutting off communion, sundering me from my dead child with their Puritan words, hammered like cold nails into his coffin. Must there no more be done? Can't we help them on, our lost lovely dead? Can't they be allowed to call out to us, to help us too, the ones that mourn? Can't we communicate? Must the bond be broke so entirely by death, and the starkness of that cold ground, those inflexible words? No, the dead boy is not in heaven, he is in the earth, he's dead, dead and rotten.

That's what you're left with on that terrible day, worse than the wrath of God. Dies irae? God's anger would be acceptable, divine ire heaped on your head, better than that emptiness, that coldness in the soul, and that rebellious anguish that makes you cry out in the bitterness of your heart. No, no, no life! Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, and thou not breath at all? Thou'lt come no more. That's the closest words can come to expressing the pain of child loss. And ten years later, in Lear, the pain was still going on.

It went on in play after play. Sebastian was plucked from the waves and restored to his twin sister, Viola, the sea of troubles turning to salt waves fresh in love, in my troubled mind. And Leontes sees the dead brought back to life, a miracle before his eyes, and all pain subdued. But not the son, not Mamillius. The son never comes home again. Good night, sweet prince. It's the father's fault, always the father's fault. John Shakespere's time was unjointed and I'd to set it right, an absent father, and I must be from thence, and Hamnet's life the price, aye, Will, lay thee down and roar.

So he died over and over as I lived on and wrote on and on, died in every play that filled up the space he'd left. He couldn't stop dying, even in the days of my best success. He had to keep on dying because I had to keep on burying him, laying him to rest — not in shattered Catholic rites but in the only rituals left to me, the theatre, the ones that plays provided. They could never take that away from me. What ceremony else? The play, of course, the play's the thing, once more, over and over again. It was a public burial, never ending, pulling in mourners from the globe, from the ends of the earth, but it was also deeply private too, it was that paradox of the self that only the player knows.

Hamlet se ahoga y renace

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Haunted by Mourning and Melancholia

The audio of a talk on ageing, traumatic frustration, and Melancholia—by Stephen Frosh, at the Birkbeck symposium on "Temporal Vertigo—the paradoxes of aging." Some times Melancholia Gets Ya in the end after so many years of discreet haunting.

And we're not getting any younger, nor any wiser neither.

Cárceles y mundos de la mente

 

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Mourning as Working-through

And melancholia as acting-out. Two ritualized relationships to traumatic memories. An interesting article by Dominick LaCapra on "Trauma, Absence and Loss." Ponder on these passages. For my collection of annotations on retrospection—mourning as retroactive repair work on a traumatic past.

I would also distinguish in nonbinary terms between two additional interacting processes: acting-out and working-through, which are interrelated modes of responding to loss o historical trauma. As I have intimated, if the concepts of acting-out and working-through are to be applied to absence, it would have to be in a special sense. I have argued elsewhere that mourning might be seen as a form of working-through, and melancholia as a form of acting-out. (Note 30: See my  Representing the Holocaust and History and Memory after Auschwitz). Freud compared and contrasted melancholia with mourning. He saw melancholia as characteristic of an arrested process in which the depressed, self-berating, and traumatized self, locked in compulsive repetition, is possessed by the past, faces a future of impasses, and remains narcissistically identified with the lost object. Mourning brings the possibility of engaging trauma and achieving a reinvestment in, or recathexis of, life that allows one to begin again. In line with Freud's concepts, one might further suggest that mourning be seen not simply as individual or quasi-transcendental grieving but as a homeopathic socialization or ritualization of the repetition compulsion that attempts to turn it against the death drive and to counteract compulsiveness—especially the compulsive repetition of traumatic scenes of violence—by re-petitioning in ways that allow for a measure of critical distance, change, resumption of social life, ethical responsibility, and renewasl. Through memory-work, especially the socially engaged memory-work involved in working-through, one is able to distinguish between past and present and to recognize something has having happened to one (or one's people) back then that is related to, but not identical with, here and now. Moreover, through mourning and the at least symbolic provision of a proper burial, one attempts to assist in restoring to victims the dignity denied them by their victimizers. (713)

When mourning turns to absence and absence is conflated with loss, then mourning becomes impossible, endless, quasi-transcendental grieving, scarcely distinguishable (if at all) from interminable melancholy. (716)

In acting-out, the past is performatively regenerated or relived as if it were fully present rather than represented in memory and inscription, and it hauntingly returns as the repressed. Mourning involves a different inflection of performativity: a relation to the past that involves a different inflection of performativity: a relation to the past that involves recognizing its difference from the present—simultaneously remembering and taking leave of or actively forgetting it, thereby allowing for critical judgment and a reinvestment in life, notably social and civic life with its demands, responsibilities, and norms requiring respectful recognition and consideration for others. By contrast, to the extent someone is possessed by the past and acting out a repetition compulsion, he or she may be incapable of ethically responsible behavior. (716)

The possibility of even limited working-through may seem foreclosed in modern societies precisely because of the relative dearth of effective rites of passage, including rituals or, more generally, effective social processes such as mourning. But this historical deficit should neither be directly imputed as a failing to individuals who find themselves unable to mourn nor generalized, absolutized, or conflated with absence, as occurs in the universalistic notion of a necessary constitutive loss or lack or an indiscriminate conflation of all history with trauma. (721)

A critique of the conflation of structural and historical traumas. And of the mythical projection of absence into a narrative of loss: When structural trauma is reduced to, or figuredas, an event, one has the genesis of myth wherein trauma is enacted in a story or narrative from which later traumas seem to derive (as in Freud's primal crime or in the case of original sin attendant unpon the fall of Eden). (725). The critical attitude will differentiate absence and loss, and the historical and structural elements in trauma.

(Importance of empathy): But empathy that resists full identification with, and appropriation of, the experience of the other would depend both on one's own potential for traumatization (related to absence and structural trauma) and on one's recognition that another's loss is not identical to one's own loss. (723)

Freud's conception of nachträglichkeit:

At least in Freud's widely shared view, the trauma as experience is "in" the repetition of an early event in a later event—an early event for which one was not prepared to feel anxiety and a later event that somehow recalls the early one and triggers a traumatic response. The belated temporality of trauma and the elusive nature of the shattering experience related to it render the distinction between structural and historical trauma problematic but do not make it irrelevant. (725)

Narrative foreclosure and epilogue time

 

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Luto por anticipado

  

El comienzo de El Séptimo Velo, de Juan Manuel de Prada:

Llegué a la ciudad de mi infancia apenas una hora después de que mi madre hubiese expirado. Cuando las personas que amamos son ya ancianas o llevan largo tiempo consumidas por la enfermedad, tendemos a representarnos anticipadamente su muerte, en un ejercicio mental preparatorio del trance que nos aguarda. Al contemplar su progresivo deterioro, el avance minucioso de las arrugas, la pérdida inexorable de facultades, los estragos de la decrepitud, en esos meses o años de convivencia previa con la muerte, apreciamos y valoramos lo que pronto perderemos y aprendemos a encarar ese futuo más o menos próximo en que faltarán. Nuestra piedad actúa como un mecanismo de defensa, previniéndonos contra su muerte; y así, las lloramos antes de tiempo, honramos su memoria antes de tiempo, nos atribulamos y desesperamos antes de tiempo, porque sabemos que ese dolor sostenido, consuetudinario casi, nos herirá más livianamente que el dolor abrupto que sobreviene a una pérdida que hemos preferido ignorar. Desde que a mi madre le declararan aquella metástasis cancerígena que interesaba los pulmones y el hígado y hacía inútil cualquier intervención quirúrgica, me había esforzado por asumir su muerte irremediable, convirtiendo su agonía en una despedida dilatada, asistiéndola siempre que podía en sus extenuantes sesiones de quimioterapia. Un espectador desavisado habría interpretado mis desvelos como una conmovedora muestra de entrega filial; pero yo sabía íntimamente que mi propósito era también egoísta, pues ya tenía experiencia de la muerte como golpe fortuito que nos desarbola y trastorna, y no me veía con ánimos para volver a soportarla.

Efectos retroactivos de la muerte atroz

 

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