Home and scary movies (page 90)
I get scared of scary movies. I was trying to watch Sleeping with the Enemy, about a woman who´s hunted down by her viciously violent husband. She learned to swim in secret so she could jump over a sailing boat and swim to shore, fooling him into thinking she drowned. Then she started a new life under a new identity in Iowa, but he found her. I got too scared, then, and I had to stop. But I wanted to know what happens. So I went and got the screenplay, read it, then watched to the end, feeling safer knowing that I now knew all the turns and twists, where the bad guy would jump out, jump up, try to grab at her, etc. But the feeling wasn´t 100% safe on my part, because the screenplay I read said “SEVENTH DRAFT” on the cover, and I didn´t know what changed between that and the final draft! So I was always nervous that where he wasn´t supposed to jump out (according to the seventh draft), he still does jump out and scare me! There were changes, but not of the jumping-out-variety. Some non-scary parts were indeed different, and that only added to the interestingness.
So, all in all, it was the right level of scariness for me: I knew all the twists and turns, but there was the frisson of some changes to the script not accounted for.
I really can´t watch scary movies, without reading them first. The music, the mood, the acting, I get too scared. Give me the words, typed and centered, numbered and paged, interior and exterior shots labeled and italics and bolds all in a line, giving me the instructions the directions the cardinal the ordinal. I want everything, before the clown jumps out, before the knife comes down, before the screams start, before the scrambling begins.
I´m fascinated by horror movies. In that, I read their Wikipedia entries, but I can´t actually watch them. Learning about them is great, and interesting, and all that, and I like doing it. But experiencing them is just too scary for me.
The Ring? Sounds terrible. (I don´t mean terrible as in bad — I´m sure it´s a great movie — I mean terror-inducing-able.) Midsommar? So, so terrible. Even the Wikipedia entry scares me. And you know I´m interested in Scandinavian paganism! How could these brilliant filmmakers do this to me? Don´t they know Viking stuff is supposed to be family friendly? Why is Swedish vampire stuff so scary!? Why is Norway so full of murder-mystery-set-novels? I would link but I can´t remember the title (probably from fear). Do you know it? A story of a Norwegian man who goes to India to find a bride, gives her a beautiful Norwegian silver brooch, brings her back to Norway, then she gets murdered (not by him). Read it a while ago, and that´s all I know of Norway. I liked the idea of the filigree silver brooch. I like the idea of brooches a lot, but in practice they leave holes in my clothes, so I don´t like to wear them. The hole is forever, it never reverts wholly to its original warp and weft.
For all my interest in the cold north, I think I´m not really suited for it. Maybe I like it more in theory, the way I like scary movies, but only in theory. I love the murder mysteries of Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, not to mention Edgar Allan Poe and R. L. Stine. But I think I´m reading them as romances, as historical fictions, as beautifully set-up windows into a charming tableau. I think I´m not reading them for the scary parts, but accepting the scary parts for what they have to say about the darkness of bad guys´ hearts.
Where I come from, where I´ve always come from, is kinda parallel with Rome latitudinally. Look at my hair, my eyes, my skin, everything about me is meant for a warmer clime! I know my fellow Ur-Asians have long settled and become the indigenous peoples of the Arctic. But I guess my branch stayed put.
It´s been snowing all day, big, down feather snowflakes, the kind shaken out of Frau Holle´s pillow. And I´m feeling Heimweh. I remember reading Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans by Ronald Takaki. I remember reading it so many times, and learning about the Philipino Americans, the Japanese Americans, and of course the Chinese Americans, and trying to figure out a history to hold onto, though none of it fit me exactly. But there was closeness, there was familiarity, there was being seen and being understood, being portrayed and being revealed the way Amy Tan´s books always did, always disclosed, always touched my heart, the way dim sum is named dian xin, to touch the heart.
Do you, too, feel like a stranger from a different shore, perhaps a wine dark one, or a sun baked one, or do you feel rooted to the soil? Home is where the heart is, and my heart is here, under the duck down thick snow. I love here, and my blood is here, my mind is here, my soul, my labor, my everything are here. And yet, grateful as I am to be allowed to be here, for the privilege of being here, for the luck that in so many ways is mine to be here — oh! I feel so alien at the same time!
And I don´t know where is here. In Sleeping with the Enemy, Julia Roberts´s character throws stones at a street lamp by the beach, breaking two of them. It was a mystery why she did it. Until later, she knew where home was by the darkness, the hole in the line of beach-side lamps, and she could swim to the right place by heading for the broken lights in the night. And for escape she takes a Greyhound bus to Iowa, where the author lived.
I took my kids to see a puppet theater, Frau Holle. I love the logic of stories, how Goldmarie could fall down into a well, but land up above all the towns, where she shakes out Frau Holle´s pillows and causes the down feather snowflakes to fall. And I love how in Journey to the Center of the Earth the expedition finds a whole underground world, with its own ocean, its own clouds, its own light, its megafauna, its own way of life totally separate from our core of factual magma.
Maybe today´s a bit more discursive than usual, a bit more disorganized, a bit more out there. I love that you are with me, as we go through wells and up tunnels, down slides and topsy-turvy into the opposite side of the world. Through stories and our languages, our hearts and minds, through you and me.
There´s a lovely song from the 2008 Olympics times, “Beijing Welcomes You”. The lyrics are truly beautiful, by Lin Xi. I welcome you into my heart. Thanks for welcoming me into your time, your life.
May we all be home. Another song I love, “Home on the Range”:
Oh, give me a home where the buffalo roam,
Where the deer and the antelope play,
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word
And the skies are not cloudy all day.
Home, home on the range,
Where the deer and the antelope play;
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word
And the skies are not cloudy all day.
Where the air is so pure, the zephyrs so free,
The breezes so balmy and light,
That I would not exchange my home on the range
For all of the cities so bright.