Rejection Synchronicity and Breathless

Lately I’ve been experiencing some of those events of synchronicity a’ la Carl Jung. No need to hop to the link if you’re not in the mood. In the way I’m using the word here, it means simply experiencing people-events that shouldn’t be connected but are not. Specifically, believe it or not, I’m going to get around about talking about the different ways people respond to books and cinema.

In the last few weeks, I had the same conversation with a number of passionate book readers. (Passionate about books,not about me.) “I can’t go to films,” she says (yes I was trying to get a date) “They put me to sleep.” Or similarly, sort of synchronistic way. “I can’t sit still. I have to go out in the lobby.”

Now I realize that this might not be a psychic synchronicity, but simply the way women are reacting to me these days, that they might really be telling me that it is I who puts them to sleep or I who makes them want to get up and run away, but it got me thinking. All three women are of the type who can read anything; who might just prefer immersing themselves into a literary narrative to anything else. (Including me.) Then why can’t they get into the narrative of film.

It can be observed that for intelligent people many Hollywood movies today are tiresomely predictable, particularly the thrillers and spy moives, but the ones that rely largely on CGI effects too. But there are still good films made occasionally, even by Hollywood, one’s that can provoke thought, but admittedly not in the way that a good book does.

But why? I asked myself. Today I watched Breathless, the 1960’s French New Wave film by François Truffaut. It was, in someway, like reading a book. I kept dropping out to think about things. Because I’m an intellectualy wannabe, I turned on the narrative, in which a professor of film explained to me that’s exactly what Truffaut was up to. In a kind of anarchist fashion, he emphasized naturalism, but at the same time, was always giving these little signals to remind the audience that they were watching a movie. Then would skip over the boring parts of action, say the shooting of a motorcycle cop, with what were called “jump cuts,” in much the same way a writer would just hit the high points to keep the action moving. Truffaut would also spend a lot of time focusing on two characters just talking, not just because they were pretty people, but to expand on their character development.

At the end of the movie, I felt involved as with a book, not absorbed. In other words, the movie made me think about things — people, their relationship to each other and their environment — while the movie was ongoing, not afterward.

In the end, as he lays dying, the anti-hero’s either says life is a bitch or tells his lover she’s a bitch for turning him in to the cops, depending on the translation and how you view the situation. Sort of anti-climatic. The director was saying, I think, that everything is open to interpretation and the time and place, even a woman telling you that she doesn’t want to go to movie with you because cinema zombie-fies her.

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