This piece originally appeared in 2004 in the publication formerly known as Salon.
But then, moviegoing is a rootless state to begin with. We sit in the dark, being led to wherever the images on the screen take us. If we're lucky, we find someone to share the journey, a traveling companion in the seat next to us -- though all the luck depends on whether or not our companion reacts in the same way that we do. And if they don't, we can feel more alone than if we were in the theater by ourselves. (How many nights out have ended in arguments over movies?) But to have any sense of being at home at the movies, any feeling of being found, we have to trust that we will discover it in the traveling.
The feeling of rootlessness, of being in a world where the only sense of home is to be found in a state of constant flux, has started to creep onto the screen in the last ten years. Implicitly or explicitly, it's been a subject in Lost in Translation, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, in the Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang's What Time Is It There?, in Olivier Assayas's Irma Vep and demonlover, in Michael Almereyda's Nadja and Hamlet. in Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love, in the lovely and underrated Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life, and in Michael Winterbottom's new science-fiction film Code 46.
It's as if our anxieties about the headlong pace of technology, of living unprotected from terrorism, of an economy that leaves most of us unsettled long past the age when most of our parents and grandparents had achieved some semblance of security, about being overwhelmed with choices we're not sure we even want to avail ourselves of, had risen from us like a collective ether and permeated the screen. We reach out towards the unfamiliar, like the hero of What Time Is It There? cuddling a pillow in the bedroom of his Taipei apartment late at night while watching a tape of Truffaut's The 400 Blows, warily, but hoping we can find something that feels familiar, reassuring, or at least evidence that someone else is as unsettled as we are.
We are schizophrenic toward engaging with the rest of the world. If we're liberal, we distrust globalization as a means of doing business, insist on multilateralism in our politics, and laud multiculturalism in the arts. World music and world cinema have become byphrases for the kind of liberal enlightenment once typified by folk music. We're likely to talk excitedly about how the Internet is shrinking the world, erasing boundaries that once impeded communication, putting us in touch with more people faster than ever before.
And yet the world doesn't feel smaller. If anything, the erasure of boundaries can make the world feel intimidatingly large, too large to feel at home in, the way we sometimes feel making our way through a strange city for the first time. These movies play on our unarticulated sense of that scary bigness, and they posit the feeling of being lost as the unavoidable consequence of a world in which we can go almost anywhere--instantly through virtual means, or in a few hours thanks to air travel. Some of these movies (Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, Irma Vep, Lost in Translation) feature characters in foreign ports of call; in others (Hamlet, Nadja, What Time Is It There?) the characters are just as lost in the cities they call home. These are not xenophobic films, not fearful films, not movies that preach the virtues of sticking close to safe, familiar surroundings. They are about a world where the safe and familiar are being erased, where any comfort we can find will have to come from something beyond the stability of our surroundings. There is, these movies hope, some grace to be found in such an uncertain existence. They attempt to wrest lyricism from the flutter of anxiety. Contradictory, amorphous states of emotion are a given in them. When Scarlett Johansson calls a friend in tears from Tokyo in Lost in Translation, she knows she can't objectively justify her crying. She knows, after all, that she's getting a free vacation in a great city. But the scene is about the gap between what we rationally know and what we can allow ourselves to feel. It's about walking a city street and being able to look up at the buildings without feeling that the buildings are looking down on you.
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