"Cultivation of Intimacy": Watched The Wrestler

Saturday 29 August 2009

Watched The Wrestler

Micky Rourke's bravura, first and foremost. My first reaction last night, right after seeing the film: the allegorical dimension is rather simple and transparent, as it seems, for a European outsider with an image of the USA largely filtered through film and television. "USA! USA!" the audience chants when Randy "the Ram" Robinson (whose real name is Robin Ramzinski, of course) meets Necro the drug addict or the wrestler with mohawk hairdo and finally the Ayatollah himself, waving Iran's flag. Sexism, consumerism, utter violence as entertainment, all the appropriate themes, the daughter's lesbianism, etc.; Ram as sacrifice and Christ figure with stigmata (including the direct and ironic reference to The Passion of the Christ), et cetera et cetera. Is it all too obvious, then?

When the first impression is followed by this certain unease, I know I may have encountered something that really touches me in a more profound way, beyond the beauty of the film as a film and beyond the angry "message" directed rather at the American society than the average outside viewer who feels he has "seen it all" already, not to mention the melodramatic and sentimental ingredients of whose power I find myself ambiguously "critically aware." At least the strong presence of the allegorical dimension invites me to attempt thinking more clearly about allegory – I also guess I will watch The Wrestler again some time.

(Above: "The official trailer" via YouTube.)

I have to point out that the "American culture" and "American society" are by no means geographically determined and bound by the borders of the nation. The American culture and society is everywhere. This pervasiveness allows us non-US citizens (I have never even visited America!) also to enjoy the humorous, ambivalently nostalgic references to the eighties' emphasis on partying to hard rock against "that pussy Cobain," an incarnation of the nineties, who ruined everything, etc.

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I will return to The Wrestler some time, after watching it again. Some time, probably not very soon, though.

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Why "Cultivation of Intimacy"? And why in English?

Why am I writing this weblog in English? The reason for anticipating this question is that my "native language", my "mother tongue", is Finnish. To be exact, in English the language is called "Finnish", but the Finnish-speaking Finns call their native language, in their mother tongue, suomi.

The Finnish name of Finland, namely the Finnish-language name of Finland, is Suomi, and the Finnish name of Finnish is suomi. Why's that? What does it mean? Etymologies tend to be uncertain, of course, but the name Suomi might refer to "fen" ("marsh", "swamp", "bog"; in Finnish, suo). Finland would be fen-land, which it also is, to be sure. And Finnish would be not only a Finnic but also a fennish language, suomi would be "swampy". Suomi Finland, i.e. Swampy Fenland. (See the OED for all this, if you will, entries fen and Finn and fennish and so on; including the entry on the postfix -ish.)

But on the other hand, suomi might also be the past tense, third person singular of the verb suomia, "to whip", "thrash", "flog" ([hän] suomi: "[he or she] flogged [someone]"). In modern use, this verb is most often used "figuratively" or "in a transferred sense", more or less equivocal to "to reproach", "to abuse (verbally)", etc.

The verb form suomi could also be the second person singular imperative: "Whip!" "Thrash!" "Reproach!" "Abuse!" The noun suomu means "scale", so that the verb suomia might even refer to an activity of "scaling by flogging", "removing scales by thrashing", "whipping so hard that the scales (and fins?) drop".

Why don't I suomi, then? Why don't I whip (in) my "mother tongue"? Well, one thing should be clear, to say the least, namely that I could not have written all these words about Finnish in Finnish.

My working language, as a researcher, is English. I enjoy writing in English. It's not only work but also play. Which is fortunate, too, since "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy". A quote from my favourite film.

Another rhetorical question: Why "Cultivation of Intimacy"? To put it briefly, this journal intime originated when I had to put down a few marginal comments on my own Ph.D. thesis, which did not leave me alone after I had finished it (in English, indeed), entitled Counter-figures. An Essay on Antimetaphoric Resistance: Paul Celan's Poetry and Poetics at the Limits of Figurality, and I quote the expression "cultivation of intimacy" quite a few times in the dissertation, in a critical manner. Sometimes words of critique have an ambivalent potential.

Journal intime, and a personal notebook of sorts. It's a game. A game of cultivating intimacy, with the maximum exposure offered by doing it in English. A game and an offering; a game of offering. Giving darkness the light of day: journal intime.

Enough with games, enough with jokes now. Exposure of darkness, introducing words to a shadowy realm of reluctance and pathos. Ploughing the black bile of melancholy. No such thing as an interior monologue, however. A weblog, written at the coast of a half-dead sea.

Scroll down, if you will.

"Cultivation of Intimacy"

Saturday 29 August 2009

Watched The Wrestler

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Winter 1971-1972

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