Enduring 2021
I’m reaching the end of 2021 with an awful sense of deja vu. Last year, I wrote about white-knuckling it to New Year’s Eve alongside art that helped me to hold on. When we limped over the threshold to 2021, I felt raw and unpolished, and perhaps needlessly optimistic.
I still feel unpolished, although this year has taken off some of the edge. Maybe it’s because I’m dealing with a triple grief—of personal loss, still fresh; personal loss, looming on the horizon; and of the background hum of the ongoing pandemic as it continues to churn—but right now the fight has gone out of me. Last year I wrote about keeping the pilot light on; this year, whenever someone asked me how I was doing over a Zoom call, I would tell them that I was “enduring.”
This is the art that helped me endure this year.
-
I’ll start with the movies, because they’re the artform I come back to most often. This year I needed comfort, and I found it here, on the couch and in the theater, slow and frenetic, cold and warm. Most of these weren’t released this year, but they colored my experience of 2021 all the same.
The cold-comfort movies came to me when I felt most bleak, somewhere between winter’s depths and its last dying breaths, and I felt those movies harmonize with my own aching heart. I watched The Seventh Seal with my husband on Good Friday (“From out of darkness we call to Thee, Lord. Have mercy on us, for we are small and frightened and ignorant.”) This Is Not A Film gave me a window onto another person’s isolation at home. For its short runtime, Opera presented the pain of the world on a grand scale. The Invitation ground that pain to a fine point, confined mostly to the walls of a single house. Dead Pigs and Irma Vep both baffled me, but I keep turning frames from each movie over and over in my mind long after I’d finished watching them.
A good friend of mine recommended The Wages of Fear for my birthday, and it’s a testament to her ability to find the perfect movie for anyone that this movie worked as well as it did, as hot and sweaty and desperate as early February is cold and lonely. Early spring brought vaccines, and with them, a cautious return to the movie theater, where my husband and I watched Days of Heaven through foggy glasses and in between stolen bites of popcorn. The rich score by Ennio Morricone helped pull me, inch by inch, out of my shell, and I knew that although I didn’t yet feel comfortable in that hard wooden seat at the Music Box Theatre, I would again someday.
The warm-comfort movies were a blanket and a balm. When a friend of mine found out I’d never seen Grosse Pointe Blank, she told me it was a quintessentially Sarah movie. She was right: I couldn’t stop grinning the first time I watched it, and I returned to Grosse Pointe High twice more before the year was out. I had the opportunity to watch a few movies with my Zoom movie group, only in person: The Young Girls of Rochefort, Smiles of a Summer Night (Ingmar Bergman directed a romantic comedy, and it rips), Picnic at Hanging Rock. I cried in the theater next to my husband as we watched C’mon C’mon and Pig. I had the honor of introducing a couple of dear friends to The Matrix for the first time.
Late summer brought catharsis in two different modes: big-screen features, and insular horror. I saw Dune and The Green Knight on the largest screens possible, because I knew both movies demanded it. I returned to the Music Box for a weekend presentation of the Lord of the Rings trilogy on film with friends, and for a sneak peek at Licorice Pizza almost a month in advance. I watched Phantom of the Paradise at home alone on the couch with my dog, but I wished I’d seen its lurid maximalism on a much larger screen. Its mean horror-camp sensibilities should be experienced with a rowdy crowd. Most horror should be, really, although I saw most of mine at home: Saint Maud, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Manhunter (along with The Insider, which gave me further proof that I’ve never met a Michael Mann movie I didn’t like). I watched every Universal Frankenstein movie that came out between 1931 and 1948 with my husband, and the more of those movies I watched, the more I appreciated Boris Karloff’s physicality and his willingness to commit. (I found a box set of some of his non-Frankenstein horror movies at a record store this year, and I plan to watch those as soon as I get the chance.) After nearly a year and a half in quarantine, I finally came around on John Carpenter’s The Thing. I’d always thought of it as too cold and too cartoonish, too macho, but the more I talked about the movie after this rewatch, I realized I admired its unflinching stare into the frozen depths of the human heart.
-
Books have also helped me trace the mental pathways I took to change my mind. I didn’t read as many this year as I would have liked, but I read a few that knocked me over. Jesus and John Wayne helped crystallize my discomfort and dissatisfaction with evangelical Christianity, the religious tradition I grew up in. My first religious language will always be evangelical, even though I’ve been attending mainline churches for years now; explaining the thought patterns behind that belief system has always been frustrating for me and baffling for those who aren’t familiar with the tradition in the first place, but this book gave me the words to do it. I finally picked up The Mushroom at the End of the World again, a little over a year after I’d bought it, and finished it in a night. I devoured Men, Women, and Chain Saws, and it gave me a deeper respect for slasher movies (as did the novel My Heart is a Chainsaw). I felt a few stray pieces in my brain begin to snap into place as I read On the Spectrum: Autism, Faith, and the Gifts of Neurodiversity. Say Nothing gave me a deeper appreciation for a nuanced, painful story, carefully told, and No One is Talking About This gave me another delicate story that poured through me in one aching afternoon, until I thought I’d burst.
Most everything else I read was speculative fiction; as with last year, my will to read came in waves, and I chose to nurture it where I could in my genre of choice. I read The Seeds in an afternoon, but probably should have given more time to its spiky art style. I requested half a dozen Alien books from the library and they all came in at once; most were just fine, but Alien: The Cold Forge fundamentally understands what makes the Alien movies tick, and transposed it into paperback for that went by far too quickly. I finally picked up All Systems Red after about a year of a friend of mine telling me I’d love the Murderbot books; she was, of course, right. The book could have been written just for me. On a road trip this fall, I read Universal Harvester aloud to my husband when it was his turn to drive. He’d never read the book before. It was my third time, but the book’s compassion toward its characters—which they don’t often extend to themselves—caught me off guard once again, and I cried as I read it, though I hadn’t expected to.
-
My year-end roundups are always going to circle around to John Darnielle’s work, I suspect: I’ve been savoring Mountain Goats records a few weeks at a time, picking each one based on how curious I feel about the title, or the artwork, or one of the songs on the tracklist. Then I’ll listen to the record on repeat until I can sing most of the songs without having to think about it. I’ll gravitate toward different songs at different times in this process; the first song that catches my ear very rarely becomes my favorite, and I’ll turn the lyrics over and over in my brain until they wear smooth, like pebbles. I caught up with half a dozen records this way, but the ones that stuck to my ribs were All Eternals Deck (“rise if you’re sleeping, stay awake / we are young supernovas and the heat’s about to break”), Heretic Pride (“the heat drifts across the land / if I forget you Israel / let me forget my right hand”), and this year’s Dark In Here (“in a new universe / trying to find the mask that fits me”).
I was lucky enough to catch not one, but two Mountain Goats concerts this year: the first on a Monday night in Milwaukee, the second that following Wednesday in Chicago, each one with different friends with me, each one with setlists that fit the mood and the venue (John Darnielle writes a brand-new setlist the day of each show). In Milwaukee, the band played “The Slow Parts on Death Metal Albums” with a bassline that rattled my chest, and they played “Matthew 25:21,” a song whose lyrics made me sit down and weep in my chair at the show, and whose lyrics I couldn’t stop thinking about in the week following my grandfather’s unexpected passing (“and I’m an eighteen wheeler headed down the interstate / and my brakes are gonna give and I won’t know till it’s too late / tires squealing when I lose control / try not to hurt too many people when I roll”). In Chicago, the band played a version of “Tallahassee” at odds with the album version; on the record, the song ends with a softly sung line “but there are loose ends by the score / what did I come down here for? / you,” and then the song peters out, like a complaint. The performed version builds to a crescendo, with the final line hollered rather than sung. I scream-sang the lyrics to “No Children” and “Up the Wolves” with everyone else in defiance of 2021 at both shows. I was knocked sideways by “Against Pollution,” which comes from a record I haven’t given my complete time and attention to yet; I’ve been savoring the song by itself as a confession, as a statement of hope, as a prayer for better days ahead.
I went to other shows and listened to other music: we saw Josh Ritter in concert as well, playing his storytelling songs alone on the stage with a guitar and a single light shining onto him. I cried at this concert too, over “The Curse” and “The Temptation of Adam” and “Monster Ballads.” And I scream-sang at another concert, this one from the very highest seats at Wrigley Field, to songs I’d known in middle school by both Fall Out Boy and Green Day (although I had to Shazam the Weezer lyrics). As for newer music, I spun Blame Game by Beach Bunny, Screen Violence by CHVRCHES, Home Video by Lucy Dacus, Little Oblivions by Julien Baker, and I Don’t Live Here Anymore by The War on Drugs. Whenever I needed to focus, I put on my writing playlist full of movie and TV scores; one of the newest additions to that fold was Clinton Shorter’s score for The Expanse, a score that makes room for contemplative silence alongside its melodies.
-
I got into the TV show The Expanse right around the same time I got into its score; I adore hard sci-fi about desperate people, and this show is consistently smart about the physics of living in the depths of space, and about how those limitations will shape a person. (At least, it is up through the beginning of season 2—I’m trying to savor it as much as I can, and there’s enough plot that I don’t want to rush through the show.)
Most of the TV I watched was with another person, either physically or remotely. I showed my husband the first third of the original Cowboy Bebop. We tore through the third season of What We Do in the Shadows. He watched through the entirety of Mad Men with me, accompanied by Matt Zoller Seitz’s Mad Men Carousel as a guide. I watched k-dramas—first remotely, then in person—with one set of friends (as a Sarah born in the early 90s, I sympathize with the protagonist of Another Miss Oh! for having to share a name with a rival) I argued for hours over Midnight Mass with another set of friends (I liked it, although I have problems with the length and style of Mike Flanagan’s monologues). I got swept up in Vincenzo, and although I hated the ending, I loved spending time with each of the characters.
-
Character-based storytelling ruled my podcasts, as well. I kept up with Rude Tales of Magic, whose irreverence underlines just how deep the bonds of its characters—and the people playing them—run. Arden impressed me with its smart transpositions of stories I’ve always loved into the present day, and into a different format. Behind the Bastards made me howl with laughter when it didn’t make me want to howl with rage (the Action Park episode and this Christmas’s non-bastard two-parter are standouts). I haven’t finished it yet, but I already appreciate the critical nuance and humor of Aack Cast, which traces the cultural conversation of Cathy comics—a piece of art I never really liked or understood until now.
-
I firmly believe that it is our duty as human beings to preserve the lives and freedoms of others, and right now, the best way to do so is to endure: to be kind and considerate, even when it doesn’t make sense, to practice the self-denial of self-isolation, to reduce the risk of harming others wherever possible so that they—and we—may continue to live. I’m holding out hope against hope that next year will be better. Maybe we won’t need to endure quite so much.
Happy new year.
