Resurrection and sitting with the mystery

The other day I watched Resurrection, a new movie directed by Bì Gàn (毕赣). It’s a series of four dreams and a framing narrative, all about death, rebirth, and the end or new beginning of cinema.

Maybe? I’m still figuring it out.

It’s clear from the outset that the movie is About Something, but the continually unrolling mystery resists total analysis. You can catch fragments of symbolism and themes that fit together like a collage of mirrors, for me never quite resolving into a unified image.

This movie-going experience can be uncomfortable. It’s relaxing to see a movie that speaks in clear metaphors, like Nausicaä, say. And it can be satisfying to watch one that initially appears blurry before snapping into focus in the final moments, giving a feeling akin to the final scenes of a puzzle-box mystery like Last Night in Soho. If you’re expecting an experience like either of those, the ambiguity that a movie like Resurrection immerses you in can make you feel stupid, like you’re just not getting the point. It’s a little like buying a jigsaw puzzle, but getting a box of watercolors. Like what is this bullshit! What’s the intended way to put these together?

But if you release the movie from the obligation of communicating a single clear point, these movies can provide some of the richest experiences out there, extending off the screen into conversations afterward as you try to piece together not what the movie meant, but what it meant to you.

For that reason, I loved watching The Boy and the Heron when it came out two years ago. It’s a movie overflowing with themes and things that could symbolize emotions or events in the real world, but each angle of analysis I threw at it could only account for some different fraction of the events of the movie. Nothing I could think of would unify the many bits of strange synthetic folklore that Miyazaki balled up into the movie. In the end, my tin-foil hat theory is that the movie’s resistance to analysis reflects the unexplainability of the horror that is war.

I’ve never seen anyone else talk about this theory, and I doubt that it was Miyazaki’s true motivation in making the work what it is. But I had great fun grappling with what I saw and heard and felt and trying to anneal it into a crystal of thought.

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Best wishes to you in this second week of the second quarter of our century. May you find your peace with, what the heck, another immortal vampire born in 1601, where in the world are these things coming from, Artemis did you leave the back door open ---