Love, compassion, attention, David Lynch, and the finest of modern Finnish cinema

i. 

 

Sister Sarah Joan: You clearly love Sacramento.

Christine 'Lady Bird' McPherson: I do?

Sister Sarah Joan: You write about Sacramento so affectionately and with such care.

Christine 'Lady Bird' McPherson: I was just describing it.

Sister Sarah Joan: Well it comes across as love.

Christine 'Lady Bird' McPherson: Sure, I guess I pay attention.

Sister Sarah Joan: Don't you think maybe they are the same thing? Love and attention?

 

 ii. David Lynch is not someone whose work I've really appreciated, in that I have watched most of most of everything he's done and it leaves me, universally, pretty cold. But he's very clearly an artist making art. The thing that keeps him near the front of the mind is the very sincere humanity that comes through in all the work he does: it's dark and macabre, it focuses so much on what is evil and bad, and somehow in the end there's hope, humanity, and good people who never stop being good in the midst of all of it. A person can be morally compromised and come through it, and be a good person again.

One thing that strikes me is the presence of a lot of odd-looking people amidst all the beautiful people, but that might be just the same: you have to get beyond your initial reaction and actually look at them. Log Lady is a joke, except she is very much not, and great benefits accrue to the people who treat her like a human being, but you must first treat her like a human being without expecting anything in return. Well.

iii. Aki Kaurismäki's The Other Side of Hope is a great movie even amongst his many great movies because of the very simple premise operating in the background: why not just do the right thing when given the opportunity? We can make the question of what to do very complicated, if we want to, but it's actually quite simple to do the right thing when it comes down to it.