Wertz's Drinking at the Movies embodies
what I find to be a chronic and very common condition of produced
distraction within contemporary North American culture. What I mean by
this is the simultaneous living with and beside, contributing to,
benefiting from, and being robbed and controlled by the economic,
political, cultural, and social systems that keep the pillars of this
society intact; which promotes ever increasing individualization (read:
isolation) and benefits only the very few. In writing this I am not
suggesting that Wertz should have created a different work with
different content (which would be to say that she should have had a
different life)... but it was this condition of distraction, of not
being able to look directly at the conditions of her life and/or the
society in which she lives that informs this impression.
For
example Wertz references a number of pivotal events that have shaped
recent American history: 911, the 2007/2008 Financial Crisis,
increasing civic bylaws within New York quashing nightlife,
gentrification, with fleetingness that feels ambivalent, and at times
like obligation, as though she is saying "Well, if I'm going to write about New York then these are things I *need* to mention." On page 15 she writes, "What I didn't foresee was the wave of political change and upheaval about to take place." And
as a reader I didn't see the ways in which she felt personally impacted
by these dynamic events. There is never a meaningful investigation of
these events. The world seems to float around her. The radio buzzes news
of terrifically horrible events as she sketches. Page 162 "The Way We Are" summarizes
this best and is the only time in the text that Wertz looks *directly*
at these issues while emphasizing her condition of distraction ie. "Hm, the US is waterboarding people like crazy and.... Oh look! Kittens!" As she writes "My political consciousness was rooted in skepticism and despair" (16) which promotes immobility and dissociation. Further when she writes "I'm actually glad to live in a society that expects me to be a fuck-up. That way I never have to act like a real grown-up" (85) she is speaking towards a culture that promotes lack of collective responsibility which condones again, turning away.
What
is painful about this distraction is the way in which it mirrors the
distraction or inability to look directly at the conditions of her
family's story and her own struggle with addictions. In the opening of
the work we are thrust into the moment that she comes "into
consciousness" (at that point we don't know about what) and then witness
her through the following pages spiral into addictions. The structure
of the work is interesting in that sense - it opens with a cliff hanger
that gets us invested and from there we travel with her as she arrives
at the bottom, noting all along the irony of the focus on her brother's
addiction while denying her own. I'm assuming Wertz structured the text
in this way to have her brother function as a foil. But even throughout
this spiral we rarely enter very significantly into Wertz's internal
register. The locality of event and description remains at a more
cursory region which emphasizes in many ways her distraction and looking
away. What punctuates this is the way in which her friends also
participate in this looking away - their attempts at intervention
seeming incredibly distant. Everyone seems willing to co-exist with
these challenging truths. We also only learn about incredibly pivotal
personal events including her parents' separation once we are deep into
the text and only through the interpretation of Holmes and Watson, which
again signals her unwillingness to speak directly. As a craft choice (which I assume these were) it signals again the profound looking away as a theme and practice throughout the text.
I found the surrealist moments, particularly Mystery Theatre
functioned powerfully within the text. The investigation that Holmes
and Watson undertake leads us to the context of her addictions -
primarily through the interview with the mother - and through this
device she makes sure to avoid catharsis. She also does a really
interesting and incredible job of interpreting what the process of
fighting with an addiction is like through the device of a runaway
brain. At the same time I wonder how much this strategy is symptomatic
again of the tendency within the text to look away and distract. Her use
of humor in this moment simultaneously leaves the experience perhaps
more accessible to those who do not know the brutal challenges of
addictions (and really those who do) and functions to hide the
narrator's direct ownership of the experiences produced as a result of
her condition and choices. This piece is a continual act it feels of
bottling-up and leaking "Anyway, I'm just gonna bottle this back up until it explodes in my future therapist's face." (117)
As I was reading this work I was struck about the way in which the Phantom Limb works
as a perfect metaphor for this condition of distraction centred in this
text - the sensation that something is wrong, but the training of the
eye/heart/mind/body to not relate to the sensation as though it is more
than symbolic utterance of something immaterial, but instead very real,
very present...
The implicit and explicit racism and classism of
the text were impossible to ignore. From the recurring use of the term
"bum" to describe homeless/street-involved people and her
characterization of these individuals as verbally violent basically
across the board seems to function as a method of asserting incredible
separation between herself and them, and reveals a kind of
disassociation with what perhaps made them more common than she wanted
to admit - ie. her own economic precarity (it at times seemed as though
she was just one paycheck away from homelessness herself). This
distinction of self from other is emblematic of white middle-class
Americanness, which she at times within the text acknowledges but does
not challenge. The very few moments that she talks about whiteness
(while honest) are problematic "I'm just sick of having to apologize for being white and in my 20s." (85) "So are they white trash or are we just snobby assholes?" (81) "As a white, middle-class American, I carry around a lot of guilt" (162) I do not write this to suggest that the text should
have been committed to an anti-racist project or a thesis on whiteness,
but to illuminate the way in which latent racism is communicated. She
is searching to locate identity often in this text through processes of
opposition that resist the undertaking of true ownership of the identity
she actually inhabits - ie. the assertion that she isn't a yuppie and
therefore doesn't have the same impact that yuppies have in the process
of the gentrification of neighbourhoods.
Lots more.
Looking forward to the conversation especially in relationship to graphics which I didn't touch...
ReplyDelete"The world seems to float around her" but waves do crash on her shore, she registers, she comments, she portrays her own reality, which is its own indictment of the times, her class, and her own distractedness. We live in a media indulgent over subscribed information age, and when the personal and the political become too much to bear, there is a danger of over numbing oneself, as Drinking at the Movies describes. Drinking at the movies is what Julia does to avoid a potentially problematic evening with a roommate's child. It seems like this is a perfect starting place for the commentary you begin here. The decision to remove oneself from anything complicated is the beginning of the end of intimacy. Isolationism never works for long, at any scale.
Lots of interesting and compelling thoughts here, Mia. I too was struck by how frequently she mentioned political events but remained ambivalent about them. Especially at the end when we see her packing, listening to political radio, and listening to the news. Plus, she is depicted throughout the text reading the paper DAILY; at one point she seems so committed to the news that she ignores her visiting mother. Based on her depictions of John McCain, Sarah Palin, and many others, I'm guessing she studied the news so she could use it as comical ammunition in her work.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing,
MargaretS
I was really puzzled that she was so disengaged with the world. Is this really common for Julia and her generation? Is avoidance really being touted as an answer? I wondered, too, with the references to current events and why little reaction.
ReplyDeletephew, when we are in pain, we really pound hard on ourselves and others--this is a portrait of depression, that is true Mia and addiction. The detachment and self-loathing, the attraction to the slimier level and interpretation is classic in the treatment of pain. sometimes in memoir, we have to change the protagonist to like the story.
ReplyDeletee
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ReplyDeleteI very much like your use of the term distraction- it fits very well. Wertz is simultaneously commenting on the embarrassments of her generation and on her roll within that generation- as an embarrassment.
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