The most despair I've felt recently, outside of Tuesday's loss, was when the Boston Celtics lost the 2022 NBA Finals to the Golden State Warriors, the ultimate proof that the experience of loss is utterly subjective. It was a luxury to feel sad over that outcome, as it really had no bearing on, was no commentary on, the world we live in. It was just a guy bummed out that the team he loved could not get over that last hump. (A hump they did make it over two years later.) Nevertheless, I remember telling my family, even a few days later, that I knew it would be okay eventually.
Ha.
The results of the presidential election should have thrown me into much deeper despair than that, and my intellectual mind knows that it's in there, somewhere. It may come out in some strange way later that I'm not expecting. I think of 2016, when I broke down sobbing while watching the very thematically appropriate The Purge: Election Year, an outpouring of emotion so profound that I ended up ranking the film in my top ten for the year just for touching me so deeply, something it likely never would have done in more even times.
But I've continued to do well with the "putting one foot in front of the other" pragmatic approach that I espoused in my last post. Mind over matter. Mind over matter. It's working, and my mind has been plagued by nothing worse than a distant sense of disappointment as I have been able to get joy out of the small things in life.
As you recall, I returned on Friday night to watching movies, and selected something that I thought didn't have much chance to be a great love or a great disappointment. On Saturday, I dared to go for a choice that had the potential to reach the same rarefied air as The Purge: Election Year, my year-end top ten.
But it couldn't be just any acclaimed 2024 film. I wanted it to be on-the-nose in terms of dealing with despair, for better or worse.
So I went with Daina O. Pusic's Tuesday, a film that deals exclusively with actual death. It also deals with Death with a capital D, as a character in the film in the form of a talking macaw parrot.
I'd wanted to see this for many months now, as at least one of the Filmspotting hosts listed in his top five films of the year as of the midpoint of the year, in a tradition they've been doing for several years. Actually it was their guest who for sure listed it, but at least one of the hosts may have as well as they all admired it greatly. It was also one of my potential viewings at MIFF this year, only the timing didn't work out.
But choosing this movie had other reasoning. For one, it seemed like an intentional echo to the movie I watched a few days after the 2016 election, Arrival, which also deals with the death of a child. And though that movie has never quite impacted me the way it has impacted other people, I recognized that watching it during a time of mourning was probably the best way of getting something out of it, not the worst way, as it might be with other films.
Then there was the fact that Tuesday stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus, a huge champion of progressive causes. I got a number of emails from Louis-Dreyfus during campaign season -- maybe even before campaign season -- and I know she's hurting right now, just like the rest of us.
Well, my reaction to Tuesday was similar to my reaction to Arrival. I was very impressed by its craft. I understood it to be touching without actually feeling my own emotions well up to the same degree. And I ended up on a mere 3.5 star rating on Letterboxd.
Movies that take big swings like Tuesday can impress you with their big swings even while failing to penetrate through in that way you are hoping. I find that a person's feelings about a movie can be boiled down most succinctly to "when you know, you know." In other words, you shouldn't have to convince yourself that a movie worked like gangbusters for you. Gangbusters is a state of affairs that cannot be faked.
And so although I toyed with the four-star rating for Tuesday, I decided this was a conflict between "should" and "did." I thought I should love Tuesday, but in actual reality, I did not.
Some of you would, and therefore, now is probably a good time to watch it. There's some really big ideas in here, and they are all in concert with how progressives are feeling right now. There's very direct textual material about coming to grips with an impending loss, and then when the loss actually occurs, figuring out how to soldier on rather than letting it consume you. In fact, the film's very final shot is probably the kick in the pants all liberals need right now.
The period of immediate mourning is not over for most of us. We probably need that kick in the pants a week from now, rather than right now.
But when you're ready for it, Tuesday is ready to give it to you.
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