#20, 2021 Skandies

I like history, so when I saw that the Skandies’ top twenty in­cluded a movie about a Swiss banker visiting Argentina during the Dirty War circa 1980, I thought that sounded potentially in­teresting.  However, that potential was not realized.  I gave this movie forty minutes, but it was too inert for me to be able to push on beyond that point.

 The Worst Person in the World 
Eksil Vogt and Joachim Trier, 2021
#18, 2021 Skandies

This one is significantly better, but it did make me hearken back to my discussion with Colin Marshall about The Easter Parade:

AC: […] The Easter Parade is basically just a string of incidents in Emily’s life, and could go on pretty much indefinitely⁠—until she dies, or until we reach the present (i.e., the mid-1970s), or until Yates arbitrarily decides that enough is enough.  It’s more biographical than dramatic.

CM: […] Most of the narratives I enjoy do happen to fall under the “a bunch of stuff that happened” heading […].

That the organizing principle of The Worst Person in the World is also “a bunch of stuff that happened” is evident from the fact that it’s divided up into fourteen episodes of different lengths and styles; you never really know what’s coming next.  This is thematic, as the movie focuses on a Norwegian woman named Julie who is pretty directionless: she dropped out of med school, then dropped out of grad school, then dropped out of photo­graphy school, and now just kind of floats from one thing to another while working part time at a chain bookstore.  Story threads come and go and come back again, so what the movie is about varies quite a bit from one segment to the next.  But given that in college I did my honors thesis on generational polemic, it will probably come as no surprise that the thread that most interested me was about life stages and the the generationally specific experience of moving through history.  I have mentioned a few times that while most of my students write about The Great Gatsby as a meditation on the American Dream or about old money vs. new money, to me it’s about turning thirty, which is why I don’t think it should be the most commonly studied novel in American high schools.  Julie turns thirty in one of the movie’s fourteen episodes, and the narrator gives a very inter­esting rundown of where her forebears had stood in life at that point: her mother had not only already had Julie but was di­vorced and working a steady job as an accountant; her grand­mother had three children, and was an accomplished stage actress; her great-grandmother was a widow with four kids; her great-great-grandmother had seven, two of them dead of tuber­culosis; her great-great-great-great-grandmother hadn’t even lived to see thirty.  Meanwhile, Julie the thirty-year-old Millen­nial is still trying to figure out what she wants to do when she grows up.

At this point, Julie is in a relationship with a significant age gap: in her twenties, she had hit it off with a guy who was well into his forties.  His name is Aksel, and he’s an underground cartoon­ist⁠—sort of a Norwegian R. Crumb, whose signature character is a Fritz the Cat knock-off.  Their relationship is pretty strong, but there is some friction stemming from the unavoidable fact that they’re just in different life stages.  Aksel doesn’t seem that old to Julie, since he’s still living the life of a bohemian artist in the city, but his friends are all middle-aged couples with a bunch of kids out in the country, and visiting them is not a great time for her.  (When she tries to start an impromptu dance party at one of these outings it does not go well.)  At one point Julie decides to try her hand at writing an explicit article about sexual mores among her peers in the late 2010s.  This is Scandinavia, so there’s no prudery here⁠—her elderly relatives are as proud of her for her accomplishment as they are of her little sister for making a bunch of saves at her high school soccer game.  But when she tries to show her partner, he is hunched over his drawing board with his headphones on, lost in his own work.  She walks over and lifts up her shirt to get his attention, but he gives a little smile and shrug like, “Wow, what a pleasant sight! Thanks for showing me! But I’m in the middle of something right now.”  At his age, his fires are not burning quite so hot as hers.  When Ak­sel does read the article, he says it’s great, and Julie successfully pitches it to a Norwegian web magazine, but she confesses that the point was not to launch herself down yet another career path, but just to try to spice things up with some “intellectual Viagra”.  It works for a time, but ultimately Julie decides that she needs more excitement in her life, and leaves Aksel for a younger guy she’s been flirting with.

big spoilers
    start here So the movie focuses on Julie’s new relationship for quite a while, but returns to this one near the end, when Julie learns that Aksel is dying of pancreatic cancer.  And this is when Aksel gives a little speech about how even before discovering that he had no future, he’d found himself living in the past⁠—like, sure, he was still getting into music that was new to him, but it was music from his own youth.  (I looked at the tabs full of Devo and B‑52’s songs I’d been plowing through in the other window and went “ulp”.)  He explains that he doesn’t think of himself as particularly old⁠—not even fifty yet! recently shacked up with a hot twentysomething!⁠—yet everything changes so fast now that the world in which he grew up, unmediated by smartie phones and internets, might as well be the Viking Age.  He hasn’t seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, but he’s gone to a record store the day that a new CD by some major band has hit the new releases rack, and he’s picked it up and held it in his hands and felt the new dawn that it represented, and such mo­ments are now lost like tears in the rain.  He’s gone to a comic shop and felt like his culture was being built new issue by new issue, like a pyramid being built brick by brick.  And then came a day when some of those comics were his!  And he was taking the medium in a new direction, hailed as a pioneer within his chosen art form!  Except now it all seems like a waste.  His character was picked up for a movie, but the studio Disneyfied it; meanwhile, the Millennials have discovered the original comics, and it turns out that R. Crumb doesn’t really fly in the late 2010s.  And while I don’t really have a lot of sympathy for an aging edgelord grum­bling about cancel culture, I do think there’s something inter­esting here.  Carl Sagan once wrote about the miracle of writing, that it allowed us to listen to voices from thousands of years in the past and speak to “citizens of distant epochs” thousands of years in the future.  But Aksel has found that he can’t even speak to people twenty-five years in the future: as well as his stuff went over with Gen X, no one from later generations cares to listen.  So in a way, he reflects, he might as well be dead already.  Again, pretty fascinating to me given that I wrote the aforementioned thesis right as Gen X was finally making a cultural breakthrough.  I don’t know how things were in Norway, but American culture had revolved around the Baby Boomers for decades, from the time they were children up to the point that they were well into middle age⁠—a lot of ’80s media was about Boomers reflecting on the disparity between the world they’d thought they were bring­ing about as they came of age in the ’60s and the Reagan era in which they found themselves as adults.  But in the ’90s, we Gen-Xers finally started to hear from voices that reflected our own experience: the latchkey kids, the children of divorce, raised by television, speaking a language made up of sarcasm and pop culture references.  And in the spring of 1994, that’s where I left off.  But before the decade/century/millennium was even out, the cultural spotlight moved on to the next generation with their boy bands and helicopter parents.  New zeitgeist, who dis?  Anyway, I found this long disquisition on the fate of Generation X a curious inclusion in a movie that was ostensibly about a Millennial, so I looked up some birthdates.  Both screenwriters were born the same year I was.  The director and I were born twenty-four days apart.

(The other thing that reminded me of the Easter Parade conver­sation was the fact that the title of this movie left me scratching my head.  Julie isn’t the worst person in the world, nor does she ever think she is.  The phrase pops up once, in passing, when her new boyfriend says that he felt like the worst person in the world while breaking up with his previous partner.  And as we dis­cussed:

AC: […] When my brother was in junior high he once com­plained about how a book might be 800 pages long and on page 450 the protagonist might mention in passing that his shoes needed cleaning and then the whole book would be called My Dirty Shoes.  The Easter Parade seems like a prime example of this sort of thing, given that the only mention of an Easter parade comes when Sarah wants to skip one to go driving with her then-fiancé Tony. What gives? […]

CM: My best guess here is that the day of the Easter parade marks the final point at which either Sarah or Emily’s life seems uncomplicatedly promising.  Or maybe, needing some­thing to call his manuscript upon its completion, Yates just Dirty Shoesed it.

I may well end up thinking of this movie as The Dirtiest Shoes in the World.)

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