Drive My Car
Haruki Murakami, Takamasa Oe, and Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2021
#5,
2021 Skandies
So after watching 2021’s #8 film, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, I was not expecting a second Hamaguchi film to pop up at #5. Of the first one, I said that “even though intellectually I knew I was in my house looking at a screen, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was at a theater watching a stage play”, and it turns out that this one is about people putting on stage plays. It’s three hours long, but after the first hour was done, so was I. I can’t even say that it was a case of “too slow, gave up”, because actually quite a lot does happen in that first hour, including the death of a major character. But the movie just hadn’t given me the motivation to spend two hours of my life finding out what would happen next.
Vanessa Block and Michael Sarnoski, 2021
#4, 2021 Skandies
I was initially concerned that this would be a case of “too slow, gave up”, because it starts off looking like one of those “tone poem” things. A grizzled old-timer roams what looks like a forest in the Pacific Northwest with a small brown pig; it turns out that they’re hunting truffles. He returns to his rustic cabin and carefully prepares a mushroom tart to share with the pig. We see a bit of his solitary evening routine. Then we see how he earns his living, as a yuppie in a yellow Camaro drives out to buy whatever truffles didn’t end up in the tart. A meditative pastoral…
…until ten minutes in, when his pig is stolen in a brutal home invasion that turns the side of his face into a mass of gore. Determined to get his pig back, his quest takes him into the city, which turns out to be Portland, Oregon, where I spent a significant chunk of 2021–2023. But here’s the central gimmick of the movie: this is a version of Portland whose underworld revolves not around the traffic in cocaine and heroin but that in truffles and caviar. Cooking skill is treated like martial arts prowess, and our stoic protagonist, who turns out to have been a top chef back around the turn of the millennium before withdrawing from public life, is treated by everyone in Portland as a figure out of legend. (They’re so starstruck that few of them even comment on the fact that at the moment he looks like a corpse just plucked off a medieval battlefield.) And this is all played straight. To the extent that Pig is funny, it is funny because it is playing the premise straight. It is a melancholy, philosophical arthouse film about a blood-caked samurai chef venturing into the underworld of fight clubs and the opulent mansions of gourmet ingredient dealers in relentless pursuit of his missing pig.
We eventually learn that the protagonist’s fixation on recovering his pig is a straightforward case of displacement, as it turns out that he is a widower whose withdrawal from society was clearly prompted by his wife’s death at age thirty-nine. He says flat out that he doesn’t need the pig to maintain his livelihood—he can find truffles better than the pig can, through careful observation of the surrounding trees—but it is gradually made very clear that this guy’s frantic attempt to recover his lost pig is a way to work through the loss of his beloved. Back in my days as a classroom teacher, my AP Literature units were each focused on one school of literary theory, and when we got to psychoanalytic criticism, I had my students do presentations on its basic components. Watching them click through their slideshows on century-old theories of psychosexual development and the interpretation of dreams, I did wonder whether I should ditch or rework the unit. So much of psychoanalytic criticism was based on the work of Sigmund Freud, which Frederick Crews, at one time a big name in psychoanalytic criticism, had more or less exploded in his 2017 book Freud: The Making of an Illusion. But no—whether or not it has a scientific basis, so much of literature for the past hundred-plus years has been based on psychoanalytic models of human behavior: repression and psychic defense mechanisms, projection, acting on unconscious drives, the need to resolve issues that arose in childhood or were inflicted by later trauma, etc., etc. Watching Pig, I couldn’t help but hear a refrain that Ellie tells me comes up a lot as she and her colleagues observe the behavior of the children at her preschool: “Stop proving Freud right!”
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