In the mood
Hello, friends!
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Recently I watched a very small, very charming British TV show called Detectorists. There are just a few seasons, and like many British shows, they're light on episodes, so I went through them pretty quickly.
Not much happens in the show. You could probably cram the entire series into a single two-hour movie and feel it was a little lean on plot. But I sort of loved that about it. I don't know about you, but during this pandemic I've found myself gravitating towards quieter storytelling in my movies and TV and books.
When I finished the show, I felt a bit of a hole where it had previously been. I wasn't ready for it to end; I could have watched these characters prowl the British countryside, searching for gold and often finding only beer can ring tabs, for months and months more. But I don't think that's because of the story, or anything that happened in the show; I think it's more due to the world of the show, a blend of its quaint setting, its low-key mood, its lack of ambition. I wanted to stay in that world a little longer. I was comfortable there.
In 2013, Martin Scorsese was honored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. As part of the event, he gave a lecture about filmmaking, during which he talked about the movie Vertigo. (Spoilers ahead if you haven't seen it.)
A man is hired to follow a woman. The woman appears to be haunted by the legend of her great-grandmother and that woman’s tragic life. She goes into trances, absences that put her in danger. She sees a vision of her own death in an old mission in northern California that has a bell tower. He brings her there to cure her. She climbs the tower, he tries to go after her but he can’t because he suffers from vertigo, and he just watches, helplessly, as she jumps to her death.
That’s just the first half of the film. And that’s only the plot.
But Scorsese goes on:
As in the case of many great films, maybe all of them, we don’t keep going back for the plot. Vertigo is a matter of mood as much as it’s a matter of storytelling – the special mood of San Francisco where the past is eerily alive and around you at all times, the mist in the air from the Pacific that refracts the light, the unease of the hero played by James Stewart in the lead, Bernard Herrmann’s haunting score. And, as the film critic B. Kite wrote, you haven’t really seen Vertigo until you’ve seen it again – so for those of you who haven’t seen it even once, when you do, you’ll know what I mean.
I like what he captures here, this summation of just what it is that pulls him into this film again and again. It's a little bit the cinematography, a little bit the performance, a little bit the music, a little bit the setting, all of which add up to a certain mood.
I know this feeling well. There are so many pieces of art who create, seemingly effortlessly, a mood that I just want to exist in awhile longer. It's very easy to discover in film or TV: In the show Station Eleven, characters move through the world as if in a thick soup of memory and worry, accompanied by gorgeous imagery and trembling music. In Mad Men, every character seems to carry around a novel's worth of backstory, every shot is filled with beautiful palettes and authentic props that sink you into a troubling period of history. The Master is a painting of a movie, boldly interested in its complicated characters. Her's set design and character costumes suggest a peaceable future, one that's rich with design choices pulled from an analog past. The Banshees of Inisherin is a movie as cold as its sweaters are warm, its simple village setting cupped by the beautiful Irish coastline and hills. Squish and I just watched Skyfall, the James Bond movie, and there's a moment before the action of the final act when Bond and M stand beside Bond's Aston Martin, parked on the shoulder of a road leading into the gray Scottish highlands, that I could have stayed in for an hour more.
But I have a similar feeling with books, too. Meet Me at the Museum describes a quiet, pleasant world, a gentle correspondence; 84, Charing Cross Road pulls off a similar feat. Emily St. John Mandel's novels, including Station Eleven, lay out such a beautiful and complicated world, then populate it with such interesting, tangible characters, that I just want to re-read each book as I finish it. Squish and I are currently reading The Martian Chronicles, which I've read twenty or more times, and I'm never not swept on by the poetry of Bradbury's red planet, its inhabitants with their golden-coin eyes, its canals filled with wine, its flying machines pulled along by flaming birds. And let's not forget Contact, Carl Sagan's complicated novel about science and faith and their collisions, in which scientists and theologians spend dozens of pages debating the existence of god without resorting to violence or threats; I want to live in a world where rational discourse is possible.
This is what I love about art, especially fiction of any kind: It can describe a world so powerfully real, so perfect in its complexities, in its refraction of the real world, that you can just sink into it, get a little lost, willingly drown and never come up for air.
What art does this to you? What do you get lost in?
✏️Until next time,
Jg
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