mourning arrogance

Everyone has cultural blindspots. It's inevitable. Between the boring job and the droning exercise and the reheated dinner, we get what? Two, three hours to ourselves a day? And God forbid you have a hobby, like phonebanking for that politician you see in all those Instagram stories or ceramics (everyone has that one friend who's really into pottery and talks longingly about 'the wheel' as if it's sentient. I look forward to becoming that friend) because that cuts even more out of your already fragile balance. So you have an hour, if you're lucky, to try to chip away at a mountain of unconsumed content, to cut into that deficit of movies unseen and music un-listened and books unread and so on and so on. Considering the day you've had, you'd probably rather just go to sleep.

Now, there's always the weekend. The weekend offers a vastness of opportunity (who's going to stop you from watching a miniseries as you smoke a 10 AM cigarette, truly?) that can feel limitless, which is dangerous in its own right. With that limitlessness, urgency evaporates. You make it through 25 pages when you could have read 100. You stare wistfully out the window while the movie goes unwatched.  And you go to sleep just a little more defeated each Sunday night, a little less confident in your capacity to muster the discipline needed to dent that increasingly cavernous collection of culture to consume. The blindspots get larger and they calcify - by a certain point, you're only paying off the interest. The feeling, strangely, reminds me of a rec center I used to go with my grandmother in Santa Fe. My favorite activity there was to get in the frothing whirlpool with the vicious current and hold on to the wall as long as I could before the swirling waters peeled off my fingertips one by one and sucked me away, tumbling head over heel, powerless over my own body. That's how the constant glut of new conttent to consume can feel, like you're getting pulled in every which way and you wouldn't know how to sit still if you were strapped in a straitjacket. From all directions, new things, glossy and fresh, fling themselves at you. I found the whirlpool thrilling, maybe because I could leave and swim over to the lazy river whenever I wanted. The overload - well, it just keeps coming. And it looms over you.

Similar to a voicemail from a grandparent not yet returned, Before Sunrise hung over me like a ceiling. It's one of those movies I felt I needed to see; one of those films that I had a nagging feeling would seep into my foundation and make me capable of thinking about things differently, of relating to others with slightly more grace, of laughing with a little more bounce. And it was there that I betrayed myself. Haughtily, I rendered it personal, assigned it the heavy burden of artificially imposed meaning, and elevated it into myth based off a couple glowing internet reviews and effusive praise from the kinds of friends who knew where to find peyote. The myth gets in the way of the real thing.

I watched Before Sunrise immediately after a date, which I do not recommend. It was a lovely date, with someone I find increasingly lovely with each passing rendezvous, but it was, after all, a COVID Date. A COVID Date is many things, spontaneous is not one of them. Before a COVID Date, you meticulously and masochistically overthink every moment. How will you greet each other at the beginning? Will you give her a kiss on the cheek? You'll sit outside of course - how far apart? Should you provide two blankets or is one enough? There is inherent structure and intentionality to a COVID date. All of this stress and planning is made worth it by, if you're lucky, a few minutes of slipping into a state of happy nervousness that overwhelms the psyche and lets you forget about the wretched world we presently inhabit. It is the opposite of Before Sunrise, which is a film about distancing so far from the mundane that things like street cleaners and daily commutes seem positively dreamlike. Before Sunrise elevates spontaneity from whimsy to religion.

I've long believed that the American empire peaked in 1999. There was a budget surplus, Y2K was the scariest concept anyone could conceive of, the dot com bubble had yet to burst: everything was fine (of course, nothing was fine), most things considered. Before Sunrise, which is a distinctly American film despite its Viennese setting, came out in '94 (close enough) and the entire movie rests on the inherent ease of Ethan Hawke's Americanness and the spontaneity it permits. He's gloriously young, those jeans hang on his hips without a care in the world, border-less Western Europe satisfies all his vagabond travel urges without any of the complications. He's a character as defined by his high cheekbones as he is by his flexibility and malleability, his wily willingness to put himself out there and - never with excessive arrogance, but the right amount - ask the beautiful French stranger he's flirted with for an hour on the train to disembark with him in a foreign town; or impishly approach a grizzled, neon blonde bartender and ask for a free bottle of wine in return for loosely guaranteed future reimbursement. The crux of it is really in the perfectly-keeled arrogance. Hawke is savvy but curious, knowing but also knowing of his limitations. He opens himself to the world around him - at times with less willingness than others, but still - and allows what wants to come in, to come in.

That balanced arrogance offers possibility. Without balance, the arrogance becomes ego and one deludes themselves into thinking they know too much to learn anything more. Without arrogance, one is absent of the confidence needed to plunge into new experience. The balance is so precarious that it feels inherently impossible. Was America ever possessing of this balanced arrogance (as much as any nation-state can be possessive of a shared outlook)? Certainly not in my conscious lifetime. But you have to feel that if our nation's always-fluctuating identity could ever be described as such, it was in 1994, when the world felt wide open and the Patriot Act was not yet law. Even if America never fulfilled on the collective level what Hawke satisfied on the individual, if you watch Before Sunrise at the right time, you can certainly be convinced.

Balanced arrogance (which I cannot keep repeating as if it's some kind of scientifically agreed upon concept), it seems to me, is both a direct product of and a reflection of ease and comfort. Many people never know the feeling. If you were a young American in 1994 (or a filmmaker with bohemian tendencies like, say, Richard Linklater), you were more likely to be familiar than most. But today? I struggle to think of a feeling more elusive. Both parts of the equation - balance and arrogance - are impossible to find in isolation in February 2021, let alone paired together. Our lives have become fundamentally defined by imbalance, made up of stretches of days indoors without a crack of fresh air, halting efforts at productivity that yield only self-criticism, and interaction with the same limited cast of characters. There's no mirthful, uninhibited discovery of the Vienna cityscape - there's very little discovery whatsoever. The same goes for arrogance - and this stretches beyond American borders. Very few among us have accomplished much at all over these grim last months (beyond survival) and even if you did manage Joe Biden's campaign, you could only be feted over Zoom. This past year has forced all of us to turn inwards for validation and confidence (or, I suppose, to Tik Tok) and if you're at all like me, the reservoir within is rather barren of sustenance. You can't be arrogant in January 2021 without being at least the slightest bit delusional. And after these past few years, you certainly can't be both arrogant and American without being a) a prick or b) an insurrectionist.

I said earlier that I don't recommend watching Before Sunrise after a date. I take it back. It is the very worst movie you could watch right now and yet you must watch it, even if you have already seen it. Its sickly sweetness seems engineered to coax violent nostalgia out of even the most numb, to render travel somehow even more appealing and desperately necessary than it already feels to people who go to bed early to make tomorrow's trip to the pharmacy come quicker. It reminds you, viscerally, that we should still make space in our lives for risk - both emotional and physical - in a moment where any risk feels political and litigious and something Anthony Fauci is warning us against. Most painfully, this precious, fragile movie reminds you of a different you who once existed, maybe last February, who was capable of cheeky impulsiveness that stretched beyond late-night Amazon orders, who was brazen rather than withdrawn and mischievously weaponized that brazenness to do that hardest of things: to open yourself less reservedly to the world. While the cost of COVID can only be truly measured in lives lost, these are real, tangible things to mourn as well. But our mourning process has been shallow and incomplete - because when we do consider grieving these lost things, we expect their imminent restoration and thus don't deem them deserving of deep emotional labor. And that is the wrong lesson to take. Before Sunrise lasts only a single day, which is foundational to its import. It teaches us that even a single day can provide a sense of vitality and being for two people, that lasts for the rest of their lives. It teaches us that even a single day without spontaneity and arrogance and discovery is one day too many.

There is no point in further lamenting the shittiness of the now. It's been done to death. But there is practical use in sitting down to watch a cheesy movie about how all of those missing facets of life can combine to create moments that feel positively suspended in time, recognizing the absences within, and then working to de-atrophy those muscles within oneself. Have I markedly changed who I am since watching Before Sunrise, rejiggering my pandemic coping mechanisms altogether and rediscovering the sense of possibility which has evaporated like an Algerian puddle since last March? Of course not, but I am thinking about things a little differently, which is enough. If I nurture those slightly recalibrated thoughts, the sentiment goes, they'll flower just as our world tumbles into a post-COVID (or whatever the 'new normal' entails) Spring. I'll wake up to myself walking, hand-in-hand, with a beautiful woman down the banks of the Danube and just maybe, I'll be ready for it.

I want to add one final closing note. We need not look only to external sources to rediscover the parts of us that are missing - we can look within and also find answers that hold meaning. That Sunday night, after my date went home, an impulse came over me. That impulse prompted me to pick up my computer and rather than continue scrolling - endlessly, mindlessly, hopelessly - I submerged myself within something that felt fraught with vulnerability, newness, potential pain. I watched Before Sunrise with the same sense of spontaneity I hoped it would deliver unto me. We might have fewer blindspots than we think we do.