Disclaimer: Spoilers ahead.
The thing about reading and watching so many things at once is that they all start to make a muddle in my head. I am drawn to mixture and khichdi, so this might be a tragic flaw.
In The Talented Mr Ripley, Italy is a ripe orange waiting to fall. Blood spreads like a painting and the coffee drips in peace. You must watch it for the quiet madness of deception. For the need to feel needed. Marge, Dickie’s fiance, knows that Ripley did it. She throws herself at him, and Mr Greenleaf pulls her off him. He didn’t do it, Marge, he says. When she first breaks down he tells her — you are a woman, and a woman’s fancy gives birth to many delusions while you don’t know the truth that men (here, his son) are capable of. That Patricia Highsmith — a queer, racist, anti-Semitic woman wrote this is fascinating to me. She writes Patriarchy into becoming the gatekeeper of wrongdoing and letting a murderer get away.
For instances of her racist and anti-Semitic writing refer to this article. This is not a cancellation reading, and I’m drawn to something else here. I’d like to see why she creates characters like Ripley and Marge; the kind of men and women she writes; and how she designs their relationships in her stories. This article also tells me she was obsessed with the idea of the self — its duplicity, its need for contradiction, its need to create stories to hold onto a sense of an alternate reality.
It amazes me how much some people can lie to themselves when they want to protect their ego. How much they can lie and control the lives of others simply to feel needed. I know some of my discomfort with depending on people comes from the desperate need to never be that way, to impose or ever control another. What grips my arm with a soft crunch of skin, is the tiny difference between being one or the other. How people pleasers and narcissists can form gloriously toxic relationships.
I’ve also just finished binge-watching It’s Okay to Not be Okay. N tells me I must watch it. When I do, I realise she finds herself in Moon Gang-tae. I find many tears to collect in a jar while I unleash my love for the ones who love most purely, most simply, but don’t know how to smile at people. Sometimes, people don’t deserve it — trees, ducks and chickens do. Dinosaurs too. You can watch it for the dark fairy tales, Ko Mun-Yeong’s outfits, and the dark corners of her castle.
In it, a mad woman is mad for herself (not for/against a man). She is a writer. She wants her daughter to be cold and unfeeling so she can be strong and never depend on another. Her daughter is used to taking everything for herself. And suddenly drama comes along, and she finds warmth in leaning on others. I want to move beyond the heteronormative fantasy of finding a partner that could simply explain this. Her journey in finding warmth comes not simply from the boy she likes, but in others as well — reclaiming a female friendship that was distorted in jealousy, finding independence from a controlling mother, trying to forget an absent, mistaken father’s cruelty, and making peace with her nightmares.
The fairy tales she writes, are dark. They have a sad, horrific realness to them — boys who feed on nightmares, kid zombies who hunger for warmth, little girls who are thrown into the sea for not having arms or feet, three children who do not have real faces. Her stories for children morph into lessons I discover in the midst of living beyond my sadness. Somehow their lines become keepsakes against the traumas of the past — “a soul that doesn’t overcome nightmares, is a soul that cannot grow”, “a body that consumes in mindless hunger, is also a body that craves warmth”, “our facelessness, is our inability to find courage because of fear and sadnesses stacked on top of each other.”
The difference between the two stories is simply the way this madness grows, their darkness is nurtured. But this is not a moral fable. So I refuse to take sides between the stories.
What I’d like, is to destroy a certain idea with these differences of obsession with the dark and the sad. The idea of Cartesian duality. The cartesian idea of differentiating the mind and the body is a dripping male view that the concerns of the mind are superior to those of the body. It only follows that women and nature are banished to the realm of the lowly body, while male goals are supposed to reflect “cool, logical, rational” mental and therefore social development. Well, fuck that.
I stepped into the world of Ambai’s writing recently. When you read the body sprouting wings or taking root, there’s a quiet thrill that touches the tips of your fingers. She writes of a reality that comes from udal — the Tamil word she uses for the body. She makes the body the container of consciousness, of feeling, of a site of making meaning of the world outside. Here’s a glorious piece of soft, crumbling words from her pen, to place in your mouth:
“Kumud stood there until she was drenched to the skin. The rainwater seeped through her, with the chill wind. She felt as if she had been scoured clean. The barbed-wire fence she held, the withered trees accepting the rain, the pond which lay there like a thirsty mouth opening, Chunari with her little skirt, the small boy who had bought her bananas in that crowd-tossed bus station, anticipating her hunger, the snow-covered mountain peaks he said you could see when the skies cleared — everything entered her body and came out again, spreading, spreading everywhere and taking universal form. Her body diminished into a dot — a single dot among the several that were all strung together.”
I know with the surety of my heart that rattles in its cage while I drive, that this, these sentences, this vision is a female vision. It comes from a woman’s body and her way of seeing the world. And this is one step closer to grabbing that Cartesian bullshit and feeding it to plants that will consume and subsume its shittyness.
See how, in the two stories from the movie and the TV show, a search for the self, blurs identities of gender and sexuality. In Ripley, Highsmith says it is her own alter ego that she is writing. His obsession with men is their end and his sweet saturated expressions of love for women become ways to reassure their need to feel needed in a male world that is quite happy to ignore or “manage” them. Funnily enough, this is not a character who seeks to murder or rape women. This is a character obsessed with trying to find a self and keep it clasped. Perhaps it is a female mind that can create complexity like this.
In all of Ko Mun Yeong’s fairy tales, there is hunger, much eating, flowers and trees, water, seas, flight. It is easy to brush it under ecofeminism. But that becomes another way of brushing women under the cartesian dualism. One reason I absolutely adore K-Drama is for the sadness of the men. They are as unstable as women, as lost, as mad in love and living. And just like that, gender binaries are blurred, the need for warmth and leaning on another becomes a bodily need. Not exclusively male or female, simply of the body.
Butler says we must perform gender to subvert this duality that pervades even into the differentiating of sex and that it is all-consuming. I agree. Mad writers, liars stuck in the bloody need to find a self, and women who seek journeys felt in their bodies seem to do this best.
At least in the past week of my reading and watching.
words on water 