At age nine, Madelon Sprengnether watched her father drown in the Mississippi River. Her mother swallowed the family's grief whole and no one spoke of the tragedy thereafter. Only years later did Sprengnether react, and in a most unlikely place: in the theater watching the film Pather Panchali, by Satyajit Ray.
In the fascinating memoir Crying at the Movies, Sprengnether looks at the sublime connections between happenings in the present, troubling events from the past, and the imagined world of movies. By examining the films she had intense emotional reactions to throughout her adult life—House of Cards, Solaris, Fearless, The Cement Garden, Shadowlands, and Blue—Sprengnether finds a way to work through her own losses, mistakes, and pain.
At age nine, Madelon Sprengnether watched her father drown in the Mississippi River. Her mother swallowed the family's grief whole and no one spoke of the tragedy thereafter. Only years later did Sprengnether react, and in a most unlikely place: in the theater watching the film Pather Panchali, by Satyajit Ray.
In the fascinating memoir Crying at the Movies, Sprengnether looks at the sublime connections between happenings in the present, troubling events from the past, and the imagined world of movies. By examining the films she had intense emotional reactions to throughout her adult life—House of Cards, Solaris, Fearless, The Cement Garden, Shadowlands, and Blue—Sprengnether finds a way to work through her own losses, mistakes, and pain.
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Overview
At age nine, Madelon Sprengnether watched her father drown in the Mississippi River. Her mother swallowed the family's grief whole and no one spoke of the tragedy thereafter. Only years later did Sprengnether react, and in a most unlikely place: in the theater watching the film Pather Panchali, by Satyajit Ray.
In the fascinating memoir Crying at the Movies, Sprengnether looks at the sublime connections between happenings in the present, troubling events from the past, and the imagined world of movies. By examining the films she had intense emotional reactions to throughout her adult life—House of Cards, Solaris, Fearless, The Cement Garden, Shadowlands, and Blue—Sprengnether finds a way to work through her own losses, mistakes, and pain.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781555973582 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Graywolf Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2001 |
| Pages: | 252 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.38(w) x 8.49(h) x 0.76(d) |
About the Author
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Chapter One
I have no memory of my father's drowning when I was nine years old. I was present at the scene—along with my mother and two brothers—and I can remember things that happened immediately before and after, but I don't recall anything related to the actual moment of his disappearance.
I used to think it was because I was inattentive. Maybe I had my back turned. Or I had my mind on something else. I just didn't notice. But how can this be? How could I have missed an event of such significance?
Both of my brothers—one of whom was seven years old at the time, the other twelve—have memories (though they don't completely jibe) of what happened. Only I draw a blank. In the place of narrative, I have only an image. When I force myself to focus on this instant, what I see is a piece of overexposed film. There was too much light.
I knew I had lost my father, but I somehow missed the experience of his loss. The gap in my memory contained the terrifying feelings that flashed through me at the moment of his death. Where did they go? Am I even sure I had them? How to validate the existence of something you simply can't remember? Trauma, I have since learned, can induce this kind of amnesia. In trauma, the self is overwhelmed. Faced with the imminent threat of annihilation, it blinks, steps aside, opts out. What is not perceived, in turn, seems not to exist. Trauma, according to the psychoanalytic theorist Cathy Caruth, causes "a break in the mind's experience of time," the shock of which causes a temporary blank.
Yet, even if Icould, through hypnosis or some other means, recover a semblance of memory of my father's drowning, what would it tell me? Not much more, I think, than what I already know. That there was a violent rupture in my sense of reality, a dividing of my life into "before" and "after," and a consequent deadening of my capacity to feel—not just grief or sorrow, but also (more significantly and tragically) love.
My emotions, like migrating birds, fled the cold climate of my heart, alighting somewhere else, where, from a safe distance, I could sometimes view them. This was the function of reading, for me, in childhood. I devoured tales of orphans and sick or dying girls—books like Heidi, Little Women, and The Secret Garden. I couldn't get enough of such books, though I also didn't understand the source of my appetite. Eventually, this habit led me to a Ph.D. in English literature.
Yet the first time I truly encountered one of my lost and alienated selves was not in the solitude of my study poring over a novel of traumatic orphanhood, like Bleak House or Jane Eyre, but at the movies. I first wept, in a desperate and brokenhearted way, not over a loss of my own but that of someone whom I did not know, who didn't actually exist, and who belonged to a radically different culture. I had this sudden emotional breakdown at the age of twenty-six, while watching the classic Indian film Pather Panchali, by director Satyajit Ray. I wasn't merely tearful, I was convulsed. My crying was totally physical and out of my control. While the film deals with death, I had seen plenty of movies about death without having a reaction like this. Why this story, in particular, and why now?
For years afterward, I cried at the movies. When bad things happened to me in real life, I didn't react. I seemed cool or indifferent. Yet in the dark and relative safety of the movie theater, I would weep over fictional tragedies, over someone else's suffering. So deeply ingrained was this habit that I didn't think to question it until my convulsive reaction to Pather Panchali surfaced again in my mid-fifties—in a dramatic and ultimately life-changing way.
I was watching Peter Weir's Fearless, a film about the aftermath of an airplane crash. The hero, a survivor of the crash, suffers flashbacks throughout the film, but it is only at the end that his memory of the experience fully unfolds. In the midst of this sequence, which takes place in slow motion to the accompaniment of a somber musical score, I started to cry. Once I had started, I couldn't stop, seized by the same inexplicable force that had overtaken me while watching Pather Panchali, nearly twenty-five years earlier.
My husband Robert, who was sitting next to me, held my shoulders and tried to comfort me, but he didn't say anything. Neither of us talked about it afterward. I couldn't find the words to express what I felt, and Robert didn't ask. It was as though we had agreed to forget the whole incident. Several months later, we had a violent argument over the movie Schindler's List.
All winter we had been separated by our academic jobs. He was in Chicago on a research leave, while I was in Minneapolis administering a creative writing program. We saw each other every third weekend, In between these moments of respite, I entertained myself by going to movies alone. Without intending to, I found myself seeing a series of movies that made me cry: The Piano, Philadelphia, and Shadowlands. When Schindler's List came out, I knew I wanted to see it, but was afraid of going by myself. Robert and I talked about seeing it together, but the movie was so long that our timing was usually off. Finally, it looked as though we could make it. To my surprise, Robert resisted. He had been reading reviews that described some especially violent scenes. "I don't want to see this," he said bluntly. "I know about the Holocaust already. I don't need to watch a woman get shot with a pistol, point-blank in the head."
I was taken off guard. Because I had counted on Robert's company, I took his refusal personally. I thought he understood how much I needed him to go with me and couldn't understand his sudden display of insensitivity. He couldn't understand why I was upset. "It's only a movie," he kept insisting, at first with bewilderment and finally with exasperation. Eventually, he became angry and for a while stopped speaking to me.
What my husband didn't know—and what I was unable to convey to him—was that I was anxious about having another movie-theater breakdown. I expected Schindler's List to be so sad that I would cry the way I did at Fearless. I was afraid of being alone with so much sadness.
Robert and I never resolved our argument that day. We treated it the way we did my crying over Fearless; we didn't talk about it. Not long afterward, I slipped into a romantic involvement with someone else.
I'm not good at deception, and after three weeks of this relationship, I confessed. My husband was understandably angry and hurt. We did the usual things; we went into counseling, talked, fought, withdrew, made love. Neither of us had a clue. Finally, after four months of exhausting effort, Robert felt he could not go on in this way. He came home from work one day and told me he had filed for divorce. "When," he demanded, "can you move out?"
This was my second marriage, and I had expected it to last to the end of my days. When it terminated abruptly in my mid-fifties, I had to ask myself what had gone wrong. I had been happy—so I thought—yet I did something I could not account for. My affair was not just an ordinary dalliance, but an entanglement that shook my confidence in myself.
Twenty years before, my first marriage had broken off in a similar manner. While the circumstances were different, the underlying pattern was the same. I had an affair that dealt a fatal blow to my marriage. This realization unnerved me. Had nothing changed?
Twice I have had a love relationship so involving and intense as to throw my whole life into upheaval. Each time I have surprised myself—as though someone I didn't know were acting in my place. Who is this wild woman, I wondered, and why is she doing these things? My exploration of these questions led me to re-examine the impact of my father's sudden, accidental death in the summer of 1951—an event that not only traumatized me as a child and shaped my growing up, but cast a shadow of unresolved mourning over my adult life.
My father drowned in the Mississippi River, on a family boat trip, somewhere above St. Louis. We owned a cabin cruiser, which my dad loved and which we used at every opportunity for weekend outings and more extended vacations. It was the end of summer, the Labor Day weekend. Although we often took excursions with friends, anchoring off a sandbar for swimming; beach fires, and barbecues, this time we were alone. We had stopped sometime mid-afternoon. My older brother Bob was showing my father the new swimming strokes he had learned at the neighborhood YMCA, when he was suddenly carried out of his depth. He cried for help. My dad went to rescue him, pushing him toward shore, where my mother waded in to pull him out. In the midst of this confusion, my father himself suddenly vanished. His body was not found for two days.
During this interval, I didn't know what to think. The last thing I wanted to believe was that he was dead. I don't remember crying, nor do I remember anyone confirming for me the fact of his death. Perhaps I have eclipsed such memories in the same way that I effaced the actual moment of his disappearance. The result, however, is the same. Everything about the aftermath of my father's death seemed unreal. Time was no longer seamless, but double. One part of me lived in a present devoid of animation, while another remained locked in the past, flash frozen into place by the shock of my father's departure. This part, which also bore the burden of my emotions, was as lost to me as my conscious memory of that moment. As a consequence, I was not able to mourn. I suspect that the same holds true for my mother and two brothers. Instead, we stumbled toward the future, dazed by our loss.
The trauma of my father's death was such that it prevented us from grieving. Yet grief that is not felt or acknowledged does not dissipate; it goes underground, where it flourishes, like some evil plant, in secret and debilitating ways. Sometimes it sickens the mind, sometimes the body. Occasionally, it infects both.
The strategy I devised to cope with a world suddenly deprived of safety and comfort was improvised out of desperation; I developed an unnatural passivity. Being a quiet child already, I became even more watchful, obedient, and submissive. Having a disposition toward rheumatic fever (which I had suffered twice in a mild form before my father died), I succumbed to a third, more virulent bout. What I relinquished in the aftermath of my father's death was resilience. I lost faith in myself. What I had left (an inquiring mind and a desire to be good) was limited—just enough to get me through childhood and adolescence. But not enough to flourish as an adult.
Three years after my second marriage broke up, I decided to read my journals from this time, including the months preceding the argument over Schindler's List. What I discovered in this mountain of material was a double narrative—one describing the powerful feelings of sadness that certain films evoked, the other documenting the disintegration of my marriage. Neither made sense alone, but both acquired meaning when viewed as part of a process of deferred mourning.
My breakdown over Pather Panchali formed the template for many such experiences, all of which were keyed to my suppressed emotions. What I could see or react to on the screen, I could not feel in everyday life—except in the context of a life-altering affair.
Crying at the movies, I have come to understand, was a way for me to begin to feel the pain of my father's death. The loss I could not acknowledge in my own life I could recognize and react to onscreen. It was as though the sadness I had buried when I was nine years old lay deep within my psyche, waiting for its shadow image to appear in the dreamlike space of the movie theater. Each time this occurred, I felt seized by an emotion I could not control. I cried helplessly and shamelessly, as if I were an actor in the drama unfolding before my eyes. Having a disastrous love affair at two significant moments in my life translated these passionate feelings into reality. At these times, I experienced the pain and sorrow I was too frightened to feel as a child.
But what is it about movies? Why should I begin to recover through this medium? Why not music, painting, sculpture, dance? Or literature, my chosen field?
There are some obvious answers. The movie theater is a special environment, a liminal space, between dream and reality, where anything seems possible. It is a twilight zone, a place where we can be suddenly assaulted—or enlightened—by the shock of the unfamiliar. Stories and fantasies we normally labor to suppress or forget appear, writ large, before our eyes in Dolby sound and full-screen Technicolor. The movie theater is just safe—and just scary—enough to breach our ordinary defenses, permitting a relaxation of the boundary between conscious and unconscious awareness. For adults, the movie theater also recreates the world of play we once knew as children—where we could act out the full range of our wishes and impulses, without fear or consequence. Many of us give ourselves up to this experience, relinquishing our mundane identities, our composure, even our sense of interior inviolability.
Yet these are general explanations—ones that apply to nearly everyone. How to explain my particular and radical vulnerability to film? While I don't have a definitive answer to this question, I suspect that one may be found in the primary documentary record of my childhood before my father's death—our family home movies.
My dad was the photographer and filmmaker in our family. It was he who took the black-and-white snapshots, which (still unsorted) fill a drawer in my mother's house, and he who shot the miscellaneous reels of color film that show us awkwardly, shyly, but also spontaneously, in motion. For years, these films lay stored in a cabinet my mother never opened. I used to sneak a look at them when I visited her—as if, like Superman, I could penetrate their opaque tin canisters for a glimpse of my past, that hidden and inaccessible treasure. I was well into my forties before I was able to summon the courage to ask if it was all right to view them.
What happened when I did was heart stopping. Unfolding before my eyes, I saw the family we had been—playful, laughing, preening, mugging—wide open and completely unprepared for the tragedy that awaited us. We couldn't have been more vulnerable. The way my mother's face lit up when she turned to face my dad, the way my brothers and I broke up over his jokes—these things were not the product of directorial control. My father filmed what he loved, and what he loved was us.
Other things he loved: flowing water, shorelines and beaches, especially the Mississippi River; boats of any kind, speedboats, sailboats, paddleboats, our own cabin cruiser named "Sinbad" for the fictional wanderer and adventurer; flying, including the panoramic views of mountains, craters, and chasms afforded by such; his business, manufacturing seismographs, those delicate devices for sensing the smallest oscillations of the earth; good times, drinking beer, or eating barbecue with his family and friends.
Watching these movies—despite the fact that my father was mostly behind, rather than in front of, the camera—was the clearest way for me to remember him. It wasn't his image that I needed to recover, but something about his perfume or flavor, his sensibility.
One sequence is especially meaningful to me. Now transferred to video, the multiple, short reels are jumbled chronologically, but they end in a way that I can only describe as symbolic. Whether by accident or design, the tape concludes with my parents' trip to Hawaii (a business-combined-with-pleasure jaunt) in November of 1950—a mere nine months before my father's death.
My dad begins by outlining his trip—which included Australia and New Zealand, where he installed seismograph stations, after my mother returned home from Hawaii—by turning an enormous globe and pointing to his farthest destination. Then there are scenes shot from behind the wing of a propeller airplane: some badlands, a crater, the basin and range territory of the West, followed by a view from the ground, with scrub brush on either side of the road and steam rising from volcanic "hot spots" deep within the earth's crust. My dad made a living from studying the signs of the earth's inherent instability and volatility.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from CRYING AT THE MOVIES by Madelon Sprengnether. Copyright © 2002 by Madelon Sprengnether. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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