from the pen of icarus blake

The French Dispatch feels like a lot of the Wes Anderson movies I’ve watched (regrettably, not all of them, namely Isle of Dogs and Fantastic Mr. Fox) in that the colors are warm, the cinematography acutely aware of shifting moods and personalities of the characters, and filled with a certain kind of cozy charm that leaves you homesick for a world you’ve never lived in.  Within the confines of the script, even the most minor of characters are gifted a level of near-cartoonish humanity as the stories shift from the perspective of one writer to the other, but throughout each thread an aspect of death ties them together.  Each story a skull on the mantle of a brightly lit sitting room.

The bittersweet tone of the movie comes at a pertinent time in my life.  This is the first movie I’ve seen in cinemas since the world received a collective and brutal reminder of humanity’s mortality.  Even now, as cinemas open and we gather together again, I can’t help but remember the people who suffer under the grip of illness and dread the omnicron variant as it bears down for a third wave.  In the French Dispatch, each character grapples with death through their writing.  Their marvelous and unique tone shines through in each: a lecture series punctuated with personal interludes regarding the author’s experience with a double murderer, a report made with all the journalistic integrity possible when dealing with the idealism of youth, an action-movie like crime sequence with additional comic style.  In each, we see the characters in their words as much as we see them on screen.  In their writing rooms.  In each, someone dies.

I couldn’t bring myself to be sad about any of the deaths.  The plot moves on so quickly that it’s hard to mourn, but that’s life, isn’t it?  Life trudges on, we spill our emotions on to paper and leave them behind to feel the next thing.  Part of me wishes I had the physical feedback of a typewriter or pen while I write this, but so addicted am I to the ability to erase and rearrange with reckless abandon that I would never leave my computer.  

If you’re reading this, then you know I exist.  That I am a person writing to you beyond this screen with thoughts and feelings and experiences of my own.  I could write you in detail what it’s like to walk my dog.  You can read my words and feel a piece of me as a person behind this screen, and when I die (memento mori and all that) you’ll still know me by my words.  By what I’ve written to the world.  I will not be gone.  I hope that, at the end, I will have enough friends to gather around and write my story for the world to understand and know me and the impact I had after I’m gone, however small.  However fleeting.  We are so terribly human.