THE WHOLE HISTORY OF MY LIFE

NAKED
page 2

christopher funderburg

As a result of his desire to truly understand, one of his driving characteristics is a driving dissatisfaction: with easy answers, with simple cliches, with life as he is supposed to live it. He can be exhaustingly clever, as when Sharp asks him how he ended up in her apartment: "Well, basically, there was this little dot, right? And the dot went bang and the bang expanded. Energy formed into matter, matter cooled, matter lived, the amoeba to fish, to fish to fowl, to fowl to frog, to frog to mammal, the mammal to monkey, to monkey to man, amo amas amat, quid pro quo, memento mori, ad infinitum, sprinkle on a little bit of grated cheese and leave under the grill till Doomsday." Brilliant cleverness is no consolation for such a tortured character, it's just another sympton of his disease. Other times his intellect drives him down absurd deadends, it fails him in a more practical sense. He meets a nightwatchman guarding an empty building* and the two strike up a very strange, meandering conversation about all of the big issues in life. Thewlis gets going on a tangent and can't reign in the paranoid, conspiratorial aspects of his general idea and the nightwatchman's pathetic optimism causes Thewlis' negativity to kick into high gear:

"Has nobody not told you, Brian, that you've got this kind of gleeful preoccupation with the future? I wouldn't even mind, but you don't even have a fuckin' future, I don't have a future. Nobody has a future. The party's over. Take a look around you man, it's all breaking up. Are you not familiar with the book of Revelations of St. John, the final book of the Bible prophesizing the apocalypse?

He forced everyone to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead so that no one shall be able to buy or sell unless he has the mark, which is the name of the beast, or the number of his name, and the number of the beast is 6-6-6. What can such a specific prophecy mean? What is the mark? Well the mark, Brian, is the barcode, the ubiquitous barcode that you'll find on every bog roll and packet of johnnies and every poxy pork pie, and every fuckin' barcode is divided into two parts by three markers, and those three markers are always represented by the number 6. 6-6-6! Now what does it say? No one shall be able to buy or sell without that mark.

And now what they're planning to do in order to eradicate all credit card fraud and in order to precipitate a totally cashless society, what they're planning to do, what they've already tested on the American troops, they're going to subcutaneously laser tattoo that mark onto your right hand, or onto your forehead. They're going to replace plastic with flesh. Fact! In the same book of Revelations when the seven seals are broken open on the day of judgment and the seven angels blow the trumpets, when the third angel blows her bugle, wormwood will fall from the sky, wormwood will poison a third part of all the waters and a third part of all the land and many many many people will die! Now do you know what the Russian translation for "wormwood" is? Chernobyl! Fact. On August the 18th, 1999, the planets of our solar system are gonna line up into the shape of a cross. They're gonna line up in the signs of Aquarius, Leo, Taurus, and Scorpio, which just happen to correspond to the four beasts of the apocalypse, as mentioned in the book of Daniel, another fuckin' fact! Do you want me to go on? The end of the world is nigh, Brian, the game is up!

His intellectual powers of synthesis and esoteric knowledge careen towards a very silly vision of the apocalypse: he's failed by his brain in very sad way that does little to convince Brian of the world's essential crumminess; he mainly just reveals the pathetic unhappiness at his own core. There's a helplessness and desperation inherent in all his attempts to articulate and understand, no where more so apparent than during his most fantastical, apocalyptic rants. It is at these moments that the potential uselessness of "thoughts" reveals itself. Thewlis himself says it best: "No matter how many books you read, there are somethings in this world that you will never ever, ever, ever fucking understand." This portrayal of a man who thinks too much, someone who just wishes he could escape his brain, still hits me hard. As a young, awkward, anti-social teenager who spent nearly all of his time thinking and reading and philosophizing to no useful end, it really killed me. In high school, I filled notebooks with treatises of political/philosophical discourse, plots for unwritten screeplays, analyses the people I knew, a constantly rising flood of efforts to think seriously about the world around me. At that age, I always thought of my restless, clever mind as something that would redeem my life: my intellect was my only source of pride. For Naked to show me just how brittle that notion was just annihilated me. The film was like a prophecy of my own future unhappiness.

Beyond that, the film devastated me for another, concatenated reason: it was the first time I had ever seen depression accurately represented in art. When talking about depression, I have a tendency to paraphrase Burrows the butler from Preston Sturges's Sullivan's Travels. In that film, Burrows talk about poverty with his famous movie director boss: "You see, sir, rich people and theorists - who are usually rich people - think of poverty in the negative, as the lack of riches - as disease might be called the lack of health. But it isn't, sir. Poverty is not the lack of anything, but a positive plague, virulent in itself, contagious as cholera, with filth, criminality, vice and despair as only a few of its symptoms. It is to be stayed away from, even for purposes of study. It is to be shunned." I would say that happy people think of depression in the negative, as in the lack of happiness, but it isn't. Depression is not the lack of anything, but a positive plague, virulent in itself with filth, criminality, vice and despair as only a few of its symptoms. I sure agree that it is contagious and to be stayed away from. Writing about depression and admitting that you have suffered from it throughout your life is possibly the only thing more embarrassing than writing about being a teenage film student pursuing an unrequited love. The problem with mentioning your own depression is that anyone who has any experience with dealing with someone with depression knows that a depressed person can talk about little beyond their depression: every thought, emotion, idea and conversation becomes an expression of this all-consuming state. It's hard to engage someone suffering from depression because its force sucks outward, a sinkhole into which everything slips. This is why depressed people are commonly seen as whiny and self-indulgent - as though if they could just stop talking about their pain, they would be fine. But they can't so they talk and they talk and they talk about it even when it has clear connection to anything. And they know they're boring everyone around them and seeming whiny and self-indulgent and it only makes things worse. It's no mistake that the theme of boredom and people's fear of being bored or boring runs throughout Naked: boredom is one of the clearest indicators of true misery.

As I said, I won't talk too much about Anna's personal life, but it is important to mention that she suffered from real, terrifying, consuming depression. And that it manifested itself in almost every one of her brilliant thoughts and ideas, that her cosmopolitan charms were imbued with a restless desperation, her dark sense of humor, unrelenting intelligence and total singularity frequently feeling like  symptoms of the disease. When I saw Naked with Anna, the film caused a terrifying thought: that my own brain would not save me from the blackness that sometimes consumed me. Thewlis' character is far more clever and determined than I was and what good did it do him? To this day, I think of the moment in the film when he says "Resolve is never stronger than the morning after the night it was never weaker." It's a dig at Cartlidge, but she doesn't even realize it - she laughingly says it's a load of shit. "Bollocks! Who said that?" "I did." It's a crushing moment because Thewlis has come up with something quite brilliant, a clever little one-liner as worthy as any ever written - something that surely deserves to become a cliche in its own right... and what is his reward? The casual dismissal of his insight from someone he doesn't respect, anyway. That's the thinker's nightmare: someone dismissing you by calling your ideas stupid and obvious. The sense that everyone else has it more figured out than you. The frustration that the world doesn't seem to be a mystery to anybody else. The things you worked to discover being laughed off as if they mean nothing. The worry that the best you can do really does mean nothing. It mirrors the sinkhole of depression: the struggle to get to the level that everyone else seems to achieve naturally. This continues to be one of Mike Leigh's continuing themes: the great cosmic unfairness that inexplicably renders some people happy and some people miserable. It's Poppy against Scott the driving instructor in Happy Go Lucky, it's Gerri versus Mary in Another Year, it's the pharmacy clerk contrasted with the hairdresser's daughter in The Short and Curlies.

Naked is an even bleaker version of this cosmic unfairness in that every character's misery seems inescapable. London has always cut a dreary picture in cinema and Leigh plays up its decrepit streets, over-cast skies, ugly inhabitants and general unpleasantness. Even if Thewlis could escape his brain,** he'd still be in London. Depression is dark night with no end, a long walk down empty streets towards no particular destination. But that's the strange thing about my relationship to Naked: I feel like a negative proof of its insights. At the moment in time during which I first saw it, I understood its truths in a way that I'm not sure would ring true to someone who has never suffered through the interiority of it all. In fact, many reviews critcize it for being a gauche horror-show - and Crutwell's section certainly doesn't help diffuse those accusations. But, truly, there are only a handful of films that capture what the film manages to capture; not just the darkness, but the fact that depression can coexist with humor, intelligence and an indomintable urge to fight through the darkness. There's no justice to the problem and no fair explanation. And just as easily, inexplicably, unfairly, it can dissapate. I suffered through serious depression as recently as two years ago, but now that state of being seems even more like a mystery, more like a mystery because the memories feel scarcely even like my own. When I watch Naked now I am reminded of a fear that my mind will someday lurch once again out of my control and my thoughts will take me away from any place I want to be. For someone who wants to think, it is an overwhelming notion that I could once again reach a point where I want nothing more than for my mind to shut down, for an escape from myself.

At one point when wandering the streets, Thewlis passes a parked limousine; the driver asleep, waiting for his passenger. Thewlis, with his bag slung over his shoulder, stares down at the sleeping man for a moment: suddenly, he wakes up and realizes that Thewlis is peering at him. He hops to his feet and, in a sonambulistic confusion, opens the door for Thewlis and takes his bag around to the trunk. Thewlis, amused, gets in the car and waits to see where he's going, but just as quickly as the driver realizes he's made a mistake: the disheveled (probably smelly) drifter in the car is clearly not his intended fare. He curtly demands Thewlis get out and stop playing around, Thewlis protests half-heartedly but gives up, takes his bag and leaves. The moment resonates with me because it's one of the most strangely hopeful scenes in the film: it engages the fantasy that even in a bleak life, there are unexpected turns and the possibility of stepping into another life that is not our own. Wouldn't it be amazing if there were a random limousine in which we could comfortably seat ourselves and for a moment become someone else entirely? Walking around New York City at night, trying to find a video store and pick up a copy of the film, I had the feeling that I was finally escaping myself, that I was in the process of becoming someone else. Of course, that sort of fantasy is inevitably fleeting and the driver rudely kicking Thewlis out onto the street somehow feels more cruel and deflating than just about anything else in the movie, even more than the failed human connections and violent assaults. As much as I have changed in my life, I am still someone who fills notebooks with half-formed ideas, who loses his temper and drops into depression; I am the sum of the same anxieties and fears and aspirations and failings. I will always be myself.

And I've even never said anything as devastatingly sharp as "Have you ever thought, right, but you don't know, but you may have already lived the happiest day in your whole fuckin' life and all you have left to look forward to is fuckin' sickness and purgatory?"

* It's almost impossible to resist quoting this movie at every opportunity: "You're guarding space? That's stupid, isn't it? Because someone could break in there and steal all the fuckin' space and you wouldn't know it's gone, would you? "

** Another quote: It's funny being inside, isn't it? 'Cause when you are inside, you're still actually outside, aren't ya? And then you can say, when you're outside, you're inside, because you're always inside your head.

- christopher funderburg
november 10, 2010

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