Studio Michała Łapińskiego

The true artist taps into the uncharted sources of internal truth. She attempts to capture it, and transforms it, so it becomes available — expressed through the imagery, narrative and the form of her work. In this way an artists conveys more that she consciously 'knows'. Patrick White, when commenting on various meanings attributed to his work, reiterated that what he created was coming from his intuition.  

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We find ourselves resonating with the artistic endevour on several levels, an important one being our inner intuitive understanding. In our interaction with work of art we form our own narrative/s which may be articulated and spelt out or not. Sometimes we try to understand the meaning of the work and end up formulating an interpretation. This is not dissimilar to what we do as psychoanalyst, but we have to also knowledge that we can learn a lot from artists and poets.

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I can see a possibility of adopting a view that at the whole film can be conceived of as a narrative, an artistic transformation (in Ferro's and Bion's sense) of the underlying emotional theme (an "ineffable truth"?). We can gather our responses to it and develop them into a narrative, or several narratives, and those could lead to an inner dialogue and to a general discussion. 

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I want to speak about one particular "narrative" that was evoked in me by watching the film.

I would call it “Do you see death when you look at me”.

 

We and the heroes of the film start from seeing death everywhere. It spreads further and further into the corpus of the film, and potentially into the Nick’s body. Death is shown as a part of ordinary family life, when it takes Nick’s and then Meryl’s father. Catastrophic death in the train crash forms a backdrop of daily news. But it can also happen in the middle of a sunny day under a “slow moving” but unstoppable “freight train”. 

 

Death is ever present in Meryl’s imagination and is captured in still photos of Nick.

 

Meryl tries to contain her unspeakable terrors and transform them through her art. She suffers from verbal inarticulateness and she uses her art to help her – as a “shock painting” that “is cheaper than therapy”. But art can be indeed “cheap’ when it offers only some comfort but lacks depth derived  from processed and shared emotional experience. Then its expression is closer to semi-hallucinatory flashes rather than to metabolised and transformed dream-like representation. Due to unavailability of such transforming function Meryl is still terrified of getting immersed into depth (of emotional relationships). It is where untamed terrors are lurking for her, like sharks, it is where she fears she could perish.

 

As a photographer, Nick observes and registers traumatic and often unspeakably horrible reality. He ends up with products which could be pictograms but which are more akin to undigested facts. Nick is unable to process and transform them. We are led to think that it is this traumatic and toxic material, combined with his pro-creative failure, that erupts in a concrete form as the cancerous growth in his reproductive organs. And, as this is accompanied by a failure of containment, there is danger of spread of the deadly force. The equivalent of a “carcinogen that is everywhere” is psychic negativity that proliferates and metastasises.

 

The main heroes – Meryl and Nick – are in a search for a loving, containing and understanding object. At the same time, they both doubt possibility and availability of such a relationship. They conduct anxiety ridden and awkward conversations, while implicitly asking, “who would want to love me with my insecurity and my terrors”; and then, “whose love could be available if a disaster struck.

 

They are both involved in representing through pictures the world that they live in, and the world that they try to inhabit internally. But they cannot, so far, make it safe and fully livable.

 

Nick is commercially successful in representing horrors of the world in direct images. But internally he cannot succeed in representing himself to the world, and in he is in danger “losing it” (“dropping the bundle”, like the woman he photographs) when confronted with terror of the ultimate loss.

 

Meryl questions Nick’s kind of representation. It is for her only a useless reminder of  “all this shit in the world”. But her own representations are not successful either. Her pictures don’t sell and she cannot “sell them” to herself – she herself does not believe in real value of her creations.

 

Each of the heroes needs to find the Other to make them believe in oneself, to validate them, to love them and help them live. 

 

Meryl’s representation of a helplessly drowning child which is discarded and rubbished, has to be picked up by Nick in order to gain significance through his interest, then love. It acts as a message in a bottle sent by a lost soul. Nick’s action is one of reception, mini-transformation and interpretation in action – it validates and gives meaning to the Meryl’s hidden and repudiated narrative.

 

But it all requires a more substantial emotional change for further development to take place. Stifled feelings have to start flowing, like long awaited rain after the scorcher weekend.  Meryl has to stop running away and go back to a possibility of encounter with love, life and death. Nick has to find and meet the Other=. Only then a repudiated= discarded, “toxic” “cancerous “part of Nick can acknowledged and embraced=  returned to in Meryl’s action of love and compassion. Concurrently, Meryl one of picture acquires meaning in the context of grief and compassion.

 

Meryl and Nick, as well as other couples depicted in the film, are tested in their capacity to deal in feeling and collaborative manner with life and death narratives. Loving understanding cannot be assumed or 'given'. It has to emerge out of mutual truthful commitment in which love can be embraced and awareness of death, endings, limitations is not run away from.  When such awareness - of horrors and wonders of life - can be faced together narratives of life can develop and prevail.  Paradoxically, the question 'do you see death in me' has to be answered 'yes', but not as an nihilistic acceptance, but as a confirmation of surviving love and affirmation of life that is looked at “both ways” – a life that encompasses the both narratives. 

 

By facing horrors of death and fears of life together, the heroes had to re-find one another in a new dimension. There is a relief in meeting a real life and sadness of losing the defensive protective shield.

 

Ending of the film suggests a possibility of transformation of the narrative dominated by death into a narrative of mutual healing through life-giving loving understanding. But is not a soapy happy ending. It confronts the viewer, in the fast motion, with a perspective of a productive life growing and telescoping into its inevitable demise. We are left wondering if the life’s ending still does not come all too soon. As we always do, when faced with a narratives of death, that is inevitable, and of love, which, however strong, is not able to eradicate it. But it makes life full, rich and worth living, providing that we are able to “look both ways”.

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