Theme de Camille
Song of the Day 09/14/2022
Theme de Camille by George Delerue
‘Cinema shows us a world that fits our desires.’ This Andre Bazin quote is narrated at the beginning of Contempt, a film by the now-late filmmaker Jean Luc Godard. Godard then goes on to say that Contempt ‘is the story of that world.’
I get up this past Sunday at 3:45 am after two hours of sleep to catch a cross-country flight from Montreal to Los Angeles to spend three weeks with my family; one of my sisters just gave birth. Coming with me: my girlfriend, my dog, four suitcases (we’re traveling more afterward), two carry-ons, a blue Nalgene, a bottle of Ativan for me, a bottle of Ativan for the dog, snacks packed that I’ll be too nauseous to want, this all including the baggage unseen but always hanging over me, the terrifying presence of the past and the future. All is routine. We go through security, customs, buy something at Starbucks, board the plane, take off, land at LAX.
When sensitive to surroundings, everything becomes dark and dismal when exiting Canada and entering the United States, no place glummer than Los Angeles, which to me, for whatever reason, reeks of murder and decadence, desolation and narcissism. I could go on, but you get the idea. It’s also the place where my family spends quite a bit of time.
I become very concerned about going to Los Angeles. There are environmental issues: a severe drought and wildfires. There are people issues: everyone seems to me to be lost in a nonsensical cloud, as if all the inhabitants of LA have been possessed by an evil spirit through the force of the Santa Ana winds, the desert heat, the destructive Hollywood culture of simulacrum and false hope, false dreams. In Los Angeles, I feel there’s no here and now, no reality, just presentation, performativity, a disquieting sense of portrayal, an uneasy crisis of identity running rampant through the city’s populace. I know this sounds harsh, judgmental. Los Angeles also has some brilliant qualities in that certain areas are very pretty to look at. Its aesthetic has a vast, foreboding significance like nowhere else.
I should also mention that I don’t drive, that in my 28 years of existence, I’ve never once driven a car. This makes LA all the more shitty and dark.
We arrive at the house in the Valley that my parents are renting, we go to my sister’s in Culver City to visit the baby, who is two days old. There are my cousins, their spouses, their parents, their children, my parents, my oldest sister, fresh off a plane from Europe. Hello, Hi, Wow, I know, Isn’t it crazy? We’re all here. Lost in a daze already, I go to the bathroom to puke, before washing up and holding the baby, becoming acquainted with my first niece, my immediate family’s first grandchild.
I don’t remember what I ate for dinner, which is rare for me; food is usually of such importance. At night I can’t sleep, tossing and turning in the heat of the San Fernando Valley, the AC in our room isn’t working. My dog won’t eat. He spends his time sitting by the front door to the house, looking at me nervously whenever I come near him. Every walk he’s been on since arriving has been to a Starbucks in a parking lot near a Walmart. There’s also an empty tennis court where he takes shits.
The next day my oldest sister, my dog, and my girlfriend get into an ‘Uber pet’ and begin the hour-long drive to Culver City. The driver’s name is Jonathan. He’s 400 lbs. The car is filthy. That’s fine. He tells us of all the shootings and stabbings that have been of regular occurrence in Los Angeles, this great city, in California, this beautiful yet lost state. He tells us about how a man cut off a woman’s head with a samurai sword on the front lawn of her house following an argument about something petty. Luckily her kids didn’t witness the attack, although they did see the disembodied head. I’m not lying when I say that the car in front of us dawns a bumper sticker that reads: GOD IS DEAD, but I could have been hallucinating. We pass a car on the 405 that’s flipped over, three people on the side of the road crying, shaking their heads, two large ambulances, a fire truck, two cop cars. That’s nothing compared to what you normally see, the driver adds.
We finally get out of the car, my dog and I are relieved, my sister and girlfriend feel sick. We enter the apartment, see my other sister, her husband, and the baby once more. Welcome to the world little one. An hour later, we do the hour-long ride back. Time for dinner. Dog still won’t eat. My dad, once a great artist, now suffering from Lewy-Body Dementia and taken care of by my mother, spends most of the day sleeping on a chair in the living room, CNN on in the background.
Tuesday arrives. I wake up and go with girlfriend and dog to Starbucks. Girlfriend takes dog home, I jog to a 24 Hour Fitness nearby to lift 20 lb weights in a consistently vain attempt to build muscle mass. The gym costs $29.99 per month. It is clear how several people who are homeless spend most of their time there, using it as a de facto shelter. At the chest-press machine, a man in a dirty, dark-gray shirt sits sleeping, his arms hanging down beside him. Though the gym is full, no one dares go wake him up. It’s the same in the bathroom. Several of the stalls are locked, snores are audible. Failed city planning and the poor appropriation of personal taxes permeate this institution meant for the physical optimization of the Los Angeles citizenry.
Back at home, my sister and her husband come over with the baby. We make lunch. They leave. Another walk with the dog, who post-flight still won’t eat his kibble, only his treats. We make dinner. I’m the last in the house to go to sleep, reading The Adversary by Emmanuel Carrere, the story of a psychopath who murders his wife, parents, and kids in cold blood, all to avoid being caught in a multi-decade lie of pretending to be a doctor for the World Health Organization. I normally detest true crime, but this book is pretty good in its own literary way.
I wake up this morning, make my dad tea. Walk the dog to Starbucks. My girlfriend puts food out for him, he doesn’t touch it. My oldest sister, who is here from Berlin, hands over a letter addressed to me saying that I owe the German government 400 Euro for a hospital bill from 2020, when I was in the ER for several days due to a mysterious chest infection that was not covid. The hospital is threatening to sue unless I pay them in the next month. This is a bill I’ve already paid. In my broken German, I’ll have to call and somehow get that message across, present the record for my previous payments, a receipt that I probably no longer have.
I sit down to write this piece. The trip so far has not been as bad as it may seem. There have been lots of moments of joy, warm feelings of sitting around the table with my entire family for the first time in a while. It’s just that when you connect certain occurrences, certain sentences, without all my imaginative interpretation, any sense of positive perspective, it all seems pretty bleak. When you think about it, all pieces of narrative non-fiction contain elements that are chosen. One will never know the specific parts of life that are left out of the story, only what is included. There’s no full truth in literature, just partial facts that can, if written well enough, allow the reader to fill in the blanks. I have not written this well enough. There are more beautiful, positive blanks that I would guess cannot be envisioned here. But maybe, hopefully, I’m wrong.
Other than the effect of the people we spend time with and the places we choose to dwell, we all live in our own heads, on our own devices, our own picks of what content to consume, what food to ingest, what time to go to sleep, wake up, what to do with the time in between. That’s where contemporary life takes place, I suppose that’s more or less where it has always taken place.