DISCLAIMER: hello! i’ve been out the past two months, spending a lot of time brooding and not a lot of time writing. it’s nice to be back!
DISCLAIMER #2: this piece contains spoilers to the movie Drive My Car. viewer discretion is advised.
Some people can experience art and all its associated feelings and hold it in their body. Others, like me, are less capable and can’t help but whittle. Can’t help but turn to the artist interview.
Yesterday I watched Drive My Car. Afterwards, I watched interviews with the director Ryusuke Hamaguchi. I do this a lot, particularly when the art is moving. I need to listen to the creator talk.
The interview is something extra to take home, like a goodie bag, even if it contains only loose threads of conversation. Interviewers ask mostly the same questions, but the answers are always slightly different. A lot of Hamaguchi’s interviews revolve around the car. In one interview, Hamaguchi explains why the car is red. In another, he talks about how driving worked to juxtapose conversational silence with movement. He then reveals having hid in the trunk of the car to give his actors directions. The interviewer reacts with surprise and remarks that filmmaking truly is “a labor of love.” Interviews, like all conversations, bounce around different conversational rituals, between the inane and the resonant.
Ultimately, I want to know why I was taken by the work. Why did I cry suddenly for a character? When did I begin to feel sympathy, heartbreak, elation? I know I already have the answers to these questions, but watching interviews can articulate those answers through a discussion of process. By explaining the art-making, the art itself becomes a byproduct rather than the penultimate end. The art-making becomes something I can do too.
The artist makes art as a way to envelop the hard edge of survival with something amorphous and full-feeling. Then the artist leaves the art only to meet once again, the world as it is. The artist must give interviews. The artist must sell. The artist must participate in the act of exchange.
Regardless, the art is no less visceral. In today’s cultural milieu, we often hope that the art will make us “feel seen.” While such language is typically employed to describe the emotional effect of racial and cultural representation, I think that this phrase also captures one of the only ways in which we can counter this new digital world, where everything is preserved and everything is forgotten. Why wouldn’t we, the artist or we, the viewer, want to feel seen?
Perhaps what I want in an interview is to feel seen, for just a moment longer. I want to stay in the art, even though the art has been consumed. I turn to the artist, searching. But it’s not the same. Eventually, I return quietly to my own work.
The other day, a friend asked me why I’m seemingly obsessed with turning an experience into writing or art or simply anything that requires creating. Do you even enjoy what you’re doing? he asked, and at first I paused. I tried to explain that yes, I did enjoy what I was doing. But I didn’t know how to explain to him that the end goal wasn’t enjoyment – though I wasn’t sure why it wasn’t the end goal.
In Drive My Car, the protagonist, Kafuku struggles to speak truthfully to his wife. Instead, he spends all his time reciting the words from the play, Uncle Vanya, which he directs and stars in as the main character, Uncle Vanya. While he drives, a recording of Uncle Vanya, narrated by his wife, plays in the background. Kafuku then fills the gaps in the recording with Uncle Vanya’s dialogue. We soon realize that the dialogue is a shield, a way to process his emotions within a fictive state. Art becomes a way to process publicly without processing privately, until one day, his wife suddenly dies.
In the grip of grief, Kafuku finds himself unable to perform as Uncle Vanya. The dialogue that Kafuku recites becomes too real. In the emotional climax of an earlier performance, Kafuku doubles over backstage, physically strung out. He then begins resisting the art, and it only causes him further pain.
I should have been hurt properly, Kafuku finally admits near the end of the movie. I was so deeply hurt to the point of destruction, but because of that, I pretended not to notice it. Kafuku reaches catharsis by reckoning with himself, for the first time, away from the art.
But Kafuku’s heroic journey ends with his return: back onstage, Kafuku as Uncle Vanya tells his niece, Sonya that he’s miserable. He’s finally able to embody his true emotions. Sonya, in return, consoles him, promises him rest in the afterlife. Nothing in the art that can take the misery away. But the art will tell you whether you’ve been honest. The art only meets us where we are.
something i'll need to digest - "By explaining the art-making, the art itself becomes a byproduct rather than the penultimate end."