<sighs with embarrassment at repurposing The Silence of the Lambs in a Ravenous essay> I’m having an old friend for dinner.
I don’t sleep well. This sentence is being typed at 2am, Monday morning, with a fairly busy day ahead of me. Nevertheless, here I clack.
I had a VCR and television in my bedroom at some point in high school. This wasn’t the catalyst for my chronic insomnia, as I would often read books into the wee hours when I was younger, but it is telling that many of my hobbies can be pursued while everyone else is sleeping peacefully.
There were literary adversaries that sprung to mind as I thought about my fight with insomnia. Gibreel and Saladin in The Satanic Verses; Captain Ahab and Moby Dick. I think a better analogy would be that it is like Yossarian’s fight with the bureaucracy of war, as the enemy doesn’t need to recognize you as an enemy in order to trap you in endless battles over the smallest measures of relief. It has felt like a nightly battle for so long that I don’t remember when or if I ever slept well.
There have been attempts at remedy: CPAP machines and sleeping meds and serotonin and marijuana and alcohol and exercise and reading and a big meal and sex and breathing exercises and getting up until I feel tired again and—
Watching Ravenous was an experiential moment for me, like one’s first tattoo or the first time you have a cavity drilled out. There is the you before the event, and a different you after. You know the feeling, surely, of walking around hyper-attenuated to your environment. Colors are brighter, noises are louder, but everyone is going about their business as normal and one can’t help but be driven to the verge of shouting: “look at the sky! It’s extra blue today!” Or something like that. I imagine there is a banal psychosomatic or biochemical reason for this, almost assuredly something to do with adrenaline. I’m not a doctor; I only play one on TV.
But I remember the first time that I saw Ravenous was a rented VHS that I watched in my bedroom on the second floor of our house. It was timed perfectly such that the sun set during the movie, so that I carried that cassette into my room in daylight and left in darkness. The jarring film score and the final scene of Ravenous were filling my brain, but I walked down the stairs and into the living room and everyone else was going about their lives as normal. I had no one to share with, as I had watched it alone. All that terror and beauty and ugliness and weirdness just bouncing around my skull like that score. The movie is a cannibal horror movie set in the Western United States of manifest destiny days. Not dissimilar to how Dunbar has a near-death experience in the US Civil War which breaks his brain and frees his soul in Dances with Wolves, Guy Pearce’s Boyd leaves the Mexican-American War shaken and finds himself on the edges of American expansion into native lands. Unlike how Dunbar finds a home (however temporary) among the Sioux, Boyd finds no peace. Instead, he is confronted with the greatest of human taboos, cannibalism, and the peace given him in the final scene is a cathartic euthanasia.
Wild movie. I don’t know if it is a good movie, and I doubt that I’d like it all that much if I revisited it. But seeing it that one time has left indelible memories.
While I generally find the movie theater to be a communal experience, I usually experience movies by myself, and often very late at night. The ones that are experiential, like Ravenous, like Paris, Texas, like Hero, those I want to share, and it is frustrating when I cannot. I enjoy revisiting a movie, and seeing one with someone else who is experiencing it for the first time does give a little secondhand transcendence, but it is not quite the same as a shared thrill of discovery. (Relatedly: thrill of discovery is the biggest appeal to improv comedy and roleplaying games.)
I can’t help but think about my insomnia when I think about Ravenous. I think that the cannibalism/wendigo power in the film is a metaphor for giving in to the immorality of colonialism, but I also think about how I’d feel after a good night’s sleep, and wonder what kinds of lengths I’d go to in order to experience that if I were in less fortunate circumstances. CPAP therapy and a looser schedule have been godsent in my fight with sleep, but this remains a war of attrition.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go watch Klute. It’s only 2am: lotta time to fill before the morning.
Other 1999 candidates (one of the great years for US film): The Sixth Sense; The Matrix; The Mummy; American Beauty; The Green Mile; The Talented Mr. Ripley; The Cider House Rules; Office Space; 8mm; Summer of Sam; Drop Dead Gorgeous; Deep Blue Sea; Three Kings; The Limey; Fight Club; Bringing Out the Dead; Princess Mononoke; The Insider; Dogma; Sleepy Hollow; Galaxy Quest; eXistenZ
I turn 40 in December. To commemorate the milestone, I’m writing 40 short biographical essays pertaining to a movie per year of my life.