Last Words: Apichatpong Weerasethakul, SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY

This week’s Last Words feature comes, in keeping with this month’s cinema theme, from Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century. It’s in honor of the fact that Weerasethakul’s latest film, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, for which he won the 2010 Cannes Palme d’Or—apparently the first Asian director to do so since 1997, when Shohei Imamura won, sharing it with Abbas Kiarostami—has just come out in the city where I live.

The atmosphere for my Uncle Boonmee screening was odd. Apparently the screening just before the one I was attending was meant for people with crying infants (I did not know that this category of spectator existed beforehand, but I guess it makes sense), so as I was waiting, a stream of almost exclusively women came out, carrying mostly comatose-looking babies, in what seemed to be very uncomfortable holding positions, at least for the infants. Everyone looked very pleased; mothers pleased to be carrying so many babies, waiting spectators pleased to be suddenly seeing so many babies. Except for the babies themselves, who seemed dramatically, alarmingly exhausted. From crying the whole time? They all seemed to radiate the feeling of: “I am weary of this stupid world.” This being their only charm.

As for the people waiting with me for the next screening, everyone was white and over sixty. It was like being stuck between two Ages of Mankind. This is also something I have started to get used to, living in the UK but having moved out of London: being the only brown girl in the room. It shouldn’t hurt me anymore to be the only brown girl in the room. It still hurts me to be the only brown girl in the room. In any case, it turned out most of the people waiting outside the theatre with me were there to see The King’s Speech.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul is one of the filmmakers of my heart right now. He does things in his films that grab me like a lover; or strike me, not like a lover, but like love. What I wrote about Wong Kar-wai’s hyper-continuous collapsed universe, in which certain gestures time-travel, reproduce, repeat themselves, doubles appear, everything is a haunting or possession, etc.: much of that could apply to Weerasethakul, too.

Some things that appear in his films time and time again—things that also happen to obsess me personally, and have obsessed me since I was a child: ghosts, inhuman creatures, forest creatures, past lives, illegal migrant workers, medicine, chemical or pesticide poisoning, affective labor, shamans, the homoerotic/homoromantic, people with rashes, injured or disabled bodies, handsome monks, possessions, healing.

Apparently Syndromes and a Century was meant to be a kind of autobiographical film about his parents, both doctors, who fell in love in a hospital; though, in true Weerasethakul fashion, the film digresses, wanders, looks around. (Thinking about his emotional horror film, Tropical Malady, his emotional disaster movie Blissfully Yours.) The film itself is a kind of diptych taking place in two eras: one, forty years ago or so, in a Thai army hospital; the other set in present-day, also in a Thai army hospital. Both parts repeat almost exactly (but not exactly—not exactly) certain gestures, characters, scenes, landscapes.

My parents, too, fell in love in a hospital in southeast Asia. My father in particular had several other lives before I came into the world (he was born in 1930, and was fifty-four when I was born; twenty-two years older than my mother), most of them having to do with being an orthopedic surgeon in the Philippines, Indonesia and Nigeria. He specialized in children with polio: in rehabilitation, and especially in prosthetics.

Someone once told me that orthopedic surgeons are the scariest surgeons. And it takes a certain kind of person to be capable of sawing the legs off children, I suppose. What that certain person consist of, I don’t yet know. An extreme and painful tenderness, and an intimacy with the ways suffering lives in the body, even when the body itself is no longer there: these are both good starts.

(I often think of my dead father as a phantom limb.)

I’ve heard a lot of people say that surgeons are cold, because they have to be so matter-of-fact with the body, with how they interact with it; they have to be able to move around organs like they’re what they are, bags of blood and fat and cells. And also, that surgeons have God-complexes, are macho jocks, drive cheesy cars. That may all be so, and indeed my father had a very large, beautiful and melancholic ego (and a deep love for the cheesy car, which now abides in me)—but he was not cold. And you can saw the legs off a person and still remember that these are legs. That this is a person. How present you have to be, to see the body in its body and still love it. Still hallow it.

(Frankly, nurses—like my mother, along with nearly everyone else in my family—are often the cold ones. And they have to be, usually. How affective labor affects the laborer. A deep and pained love for the nurse, too.)

This was all in the sixties, the seventies. And because this all happened so far before I was in the body I live in right now, I have always wondered, dreamt about what those lives of his were like. So when I watched Syndromes and a Century, especially the forty-years-ago section, I thought I was glimpsing some part of those long-ago hidden lives. For one thing, the main actor looks a lot like the only picture I have ever seen of my father in his youth. But also: so much of it echoed the stories I heard growing up, the memoryscapes that were described to me time and time again, with their own gaps and lacunae, until I learned to live in them. In the gaps and lacunae.

There’s one scene in which a dentist is gently, and a little cheekily, flirting with a young monk. He sings a song while working, and it reminded me of a story my mom told me: that apparently during surgeries, my father and his anesthesiologist would sing, with great gusto, all sorts of love songs to each other, to the room.

“Can you imagine, they’re cutting through this little kid’s thigh, and they’re singing “Dahil sa Iyo,” my mom said.

In the contemporary section of Syndromes, three doctors are in a room. One of them is the main male lead, the other two are women. In this era the main male lead is not a surgeon, as he was in the first part of the film: now he is a hematologist.

The other doctors ask why he chose to specialize in hematology, as it’s rare field for men. He replies that his sister had alpha thalassemia; and he, too, carries the gene. How one becomes a doctor. Usually the dead body of someone you loved and failed to save lies behind it. My father also became a specialist in the kind of surgery that would have been able to treat the disease his mother died of, when he was a teenager. He said often, “If I knew then what I knew now—it’s very easy to treat. It’s very easy.” But you didn’t know then what you know now, I thought, and said. You were a kid.

After the doctor says that like his sister, he also carries the gene for alpha thalassemia, one of the other doctors goes over and does an impromptu check-up on him. I started laughing. This really is what happens when you have a bunch of people in the medical profession in one room. Can you imagine growing up with everyone either a nurse or a doctor in your family? It means constant diagnoses, constant evaluation of each other’s symptoms, progression of life, all manner of pilfered pharmaceutical drugs, fake friends who hover around hoping for free insulin and syringes.

“Is he pale?” one doctor asks. “Are you fatigued?” the doctor asks. Soundtrack of my life.

Then one of the female doctors says, “That’s why I always say: obstetricians live with birth. Oncologists live with death. But hematologists live with suffering.”

The other female doctor interjects: “Most are women.”

First female doctor: “Because blood diseases can’t be cured.”

Other female doctor: “A disease that can’t be cured.”

First female doctor: “The patient suffers a lot.”

Diseases that can’t be cured. To me it feels like these words mean something else. What can’t be cured even after the passing of time and the accretion of what passes for knowledge. The maturing of science. Between forty years. What can’t be cured. Memory. Some kinds of love. Some kinds of suffering. Some kinds of gentleness. These dis-eases. Gentleness, I find, is one of the most uneasy, and uneasy-making, things. When I myself was very sick, for example, or very sad, one of the hardest things to deal with was the gentleness of other people towards me.

In Syndromes there is a scene in which the male doctor is also gently flirting with a young man who worked at a car factory and is suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning. He asks to see the boy’s tattoo, just beneath the collar of his shirt (it says “Pandora”). They talk about sports, the future. The doctor asks about his girlfriend, the boy doesn’t answer. Something passes, stutters between them. The doctor’s gentleness and attentiveness produces a kind of sweet and fragile unease. In himself, in the boy, in the audience. In me, at least. Gentleness and unease.

Weerasethakul has an incredibly personal and intimate way of showing how the industrial systems and mechanisms that exist in order to make post-industrial nations possible, live inside people. How a manufacturing-based economy works upon the flesh of life. The young man with carbon monoxide poisoning worked at a Japanese car factory. How it remade his brain. He speaks so slowly. In Uncle Boonmee, migrant farm workers who work with pesticides on a longan farm.

(Also, I like how Weerasethakul’s production company is called Kick the Machine. There are a lot of ways of thinking about that, all of them tender to me.)

(There are also often people who suffer from rashes in his films. I need to write an essay on Southeast Asian people, and rashes, and the industrialized world, and the legacies of colonial power, but this is not that essay, and possibly nothing will ever be that essay, anyway.)

As for the ending. This is one more thing about Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s films that I love: his nearness to the sentimental. He has a way of using pop music in unabashedly romantic ways, yet with a sort of starkness or flatness, so that it ends up feeling fresh, unexpectedly poignant. Uncle Boonmee also ended this way.

Probably it feels fresh because Weerasethakul’s films are otherwise so sparing (not sparing, maybe: careful) with music, diagetic or extradiagetic; in Uncle Boonmee, until the ending song, mostly only an occasional melodic rumble, like the sound of being underwater; in Syndromes, until the ending song, mostly only a kind of echoing drone sound. (Plus an interlude in which the singing dentist performs for a fair, and then his guitarist performs a solo.) So when the rare song does show up, its force is compounded by the film’s preceding silence, stillness.

Which isn’t to say that this absence of music-music means the films don’t privilege sound. On the contrary, I would say that because of the lack of music-music, the films are able to emphasize sound ever more sharply. Something that often happens in a Weerasethakul film is that characters leave the frame, and the camera turns to focus on something else, while we continue to hear the conversation carried on by the characters out of the frame. This happens at the beginning of Syndromes, and it’s particularly wonderful because Weerasethakul keeps the soundtrack running even when it seems as though the actors have gone “out of character”: there is a pause, and then they start talking about the actual filming.

We look at a green field, as we hear characters turn back into actors turn back into people:

—I forgot to turn it off!
—This thing clipped to my pants.
—What are you talking about?
—We’re done.
—It’s kind of like—
—Like what?
—Like playing the same scene over and over.
—Damn it.
—At first it wasn’t so bad.
—You wanted to be an actor, right?
—It’s only been five takes.
—All together.

Of course, the idea of playing the same scene over and over is something the film is thinking about. Reincarnation means being a body again.

Back to the ending. The last ten minutes have that same stillness, patience, watchfulness until the very end. I’ve shown this ending to people who haven’t watched the entire film, and so far no one has been as moved by it as I was, so that probably means you have to watch the entire film, in order to be brought so far, this far, until you reach that place where the ordinariness of this last scene, and the ordinariness of its exuberance, can produce this really singular strangeness and surprise and joy. Where the joy isn’t something you feel yourself; which is to say, it isn’t something you feel because you, yourself are happy, or because the scene itself is particularly happy. Instead it’s a kind of ambient or environmental joy, the joy of a force, of energy moving through you. Joy like a fit or a forest. A space of its own. And you, dropped into it. The ending is not happy (though nor is it unhappy). You’re just put into the space of a happiness. It’s not yours; but it’s not anyone else’s, either. The film just opens it up for you, with very little warning, and there you are. To me there is something totally excruciating and shocking about this. Around 8:38, when I realized that this was really happening, I just started sobbing uncontrollably. This space was opened up for me and there I was. There I was.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Syndromes and a Century: