CBC, “The Revolution Of The Internet” (The National, 1993)

When I began to use e-mail pretty regularly, around 1989, I felt uneasy about not sending a reply message, and anxious when I did not receive one in return. Had my correspondent not checked e-mail? Or refrained from clicking on the reply button?

On the phone, or in person, you can provide cues when you want to ignore someone, such as changing the subject, or making a hurried departure. Not so online. There is no explanation for silence. We are left to speculate.

It’s possible I was overly sensitive to any unexplained parting of ways during online communication; this instantaneous, disembodied form of exchange was new to me. My sensitivity has since increased, but it’s also been diffused. We now have myriad ways to speak to each other online. The dialogic has become more rapid-fire, specific, contextual, and personal, but conversely, impersonal.

Social media and its “notification” services give us more plausible opportunities and excuses not to reply, to avoid goodbye, to sidestep questions, to refuse accountability, to abandon. Sorry, I wasn’t reading Facebook the day you announced your firstborn. No, I didn’t see that great article about Rupert Murdoch because it was lost in my 1000-following newsfeed.

Blackberry, “BBM Flirt D&R Commercial” (March, 2011)

Of all forms of online communication, texting (SMS, or Short Message Service) offers the most intimacy and exclusivity, but this freights the significance of not replying much more heavily. Not replying to a public posting or even a direct message on Facebook can be thought of as a decision of non-elocution. The same goes for opting out of tweeting or responding to a tweet. But in an SMS system like Blackberry Messenger®, when we are alerted the moment our text message has been read by the recipient, a non-reply could seem like an insult. And with SMS, it seems we foster a sense of presence and absence simultaneously.

The inability to see our interlocutor makes us vulnerable. It takes a little getting used to. In this scene from “Paris, Texas,” Nastassja Kinski stands as a metaphor for all of us, waiting for replies, wondering what our disembodied interlocutors really want from us. She sends out messages and gets no return. She goes along, tells the man she cannot see that it’s ok, she is a “real good listener,” a sort of “hey, not sure if you got my last email…”

Wim Wenders, “Paris, Texas” (1984)

Eventually though she asks him what he wants — the need for dialogue on her part is too great. But the man mostly refuses to reply; he even leaves the room unbeknownst to her. She doesn’t realize, of course, that the man behind the curtain is her lost husband, a once intimate who is now estranged. “Is there something I can do for ya?” she asks, offering to take off her sweater. She assumes he wants sex. He doesn’t want sex, and he doesn’t offer much conversation either. He is only there to determine if she is having relationships with clients outside of the peep show.

He wants to know, finally, if it’s even possible for her to step outside of the prescribed room. Can we step outside these disembodied rooms? How tangible can our dialogue become?

Will we look at each other’s faces again?

- Nyla Matuk

This above all: to thine own self be true
And it doth follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
— “Hamlet” (Act I, Scene iii)

When I scored a woeful 8/20 on the online Spot The Fake Smile test, I got worried. A friend of mine scored 17/20 and I couldn’t help wondering what details I failed to observe. Am I unable to discern a fake smile from a genuine one? Is there some aspect of the smile that reveals instantly whether it is sincere or a manufactured event?

In this scene from “Nashville,” director Robert Altman has conveyed a sense of undeniable sincerity. Or is it authenticity?

Robert Altman, “Nashville” (1975)

The expressions on the faces in the audience seem to show their thoughts. Their defenses are down and it’s something like: we see who you really are at this moment. And although the character Tom Frank, played by Keith Carradine, proves at the end of the narrative to be a rather self-absorbed prick (in fact the opposite of the vulnerable protagonist of his song), it’s certainly not to be seen here.

A few years ago, a friend lent me Lionel Trilling’s book of literary criticism, “Sincerity and Authenticity” — a compilation of Trilling’s lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1970 while he was Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry. It’s a heuristic, analytic text that attempts to establish a meaningful distinction between the two terms as they figure in hundreds of years of literary works and cultural history. The book is notoriously difficult to understand. I managed to finish it, though I don’t think I followed all of Trilling’s arguments.

Regardless, I’ve been thinking about the difference between these ideas ever since. On the second page of the book, he proposes that “at a certain point in its history the moral life of Europe added to itself a new element, the state or quality of the self which we call sincerity.” It refers, he adds, to “a congruence between avowal and actual feeling.” Thus, Polonius’ surprising speech in “Hamlet” (see above) shows him to have “conceived of sincerity as an essential condition of virtue” and he has “discovered how it is to be attained.”

I find myself categorizing people based on the question of whether they are true to themselves or not, and what repercussions — if any — such truth could have. Trilling further posits that sincerity (a word whose etymology can be traced back to sine cera — without wax; in French, sans cire) is a form of honesty in keeping with social mores while authenticity, on the other hand, is about being true to oneself. He also describes authenticity as the possibility of being true to oneself while simultaneously not betraying others. Authenticity came along “to suggest the deficiencies of sincerity and to usurp its place in our esteem.”

Ponderous!

Ang Lee, “The Ice Storm” (1997)

In “The Ice Storm” the two main characters — Ben and Elena Hood — are suburban parents in middle age who are bored with their lives. They seem authentic enough. But when Ben (Kevin Kline) is in bed with his neighbour’s wife, Janey Carver, and starts to chatter meaninglessly immediately following an afternoon sexual encounter, it seems he never really lets go of the charade of his life. The affair is perhaps merely sincere, as it repurposes escapist lovemaking and renders it commensurate with all his other activities, such as golf, and the endless narcissistic hang-ups and petty jealousies of his upwardly mobile life. Janey (Sigourney Weaver), on the other hand, seems authentic when she basically tells him to shut up. She knows she wants something more authentic than her current life, and she doesn’t want to revisit features of her marriage within the bounds of an illicit affair. Is there no escape from the chatty fakery of it all?

In “American Beauty,” a film that treats similar themes, Lester Burnham is the examplar of an all-out authentic narrator. Here he observes the sincere way in which his wife fits into the conventional lifestyle they have cultivated.

Sam Mendes, “American Beauty” (1999)

Authenticity finds purchase when he tells people to fuck off in various contexts that have proven to be very phony indeed. It seems being authentic rather than sincere changes his life for the better.

Both “American Beauty” and “The Ice Storm” are of a piece with Trilling’s characterization of early 20th century modernist literature: “No literature has ever been so shockingly personal — it asks us if we are content with our marriages, with our professional lives, with our friends…It asks us if we are content with ourselves, if we are saved or damned — more than with anything else, it is concerned with salvation.”

The paradox, he pointed out, was that modernist figures such as T. S. Eliot and James Joyce claimed that “the progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality” (Eliot), and that “the personality of the artist… finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself” (Joyce).

Sam Mendes, “American Beauty” (1999)

- Nyla Matuk

In May 2007, I traveled from London to the French Riviera. Intending to go about as anonymously as I could, I spoke French, and to my delight was mistaken for Moroccan or Algerian. I had developed a curiosity for the town of Grasse, a place where the great French perfume houses of the 19th century — Molinard, Fragonard — had their manufacturing headquarters. I was collecting fine French perfumes and wanted to see for myself the magnificent early machinery and industrial design for floral distillation and maceration, and the museums of fantastical rococo and orientalist bottles.

My small 2-star hotel stood in a shabby street near the Gare Nice-Ville. Every morning I saw from my window the peeling rosy surface of the building opposite, hugging a steep little staircase leading to the main drag and the louche promises of the train station. The wall advertised, pertly, couples coquins, along with a phone number; its desperate yet forlorn appeal reminded me of Maria Schneider in “Last Tango in Paris.”

I was told recently that I had a forlorn look on my face in a photograph, and wondered about the forlorn’s hold on me — did my experience of melancholia show on the outside, not only cut a window into my heart? Did I have a look, in those serious moments, of one who waits eternally for her lover to return, for life to begin at long last, once he comes back?

Jacques Demy, “Les Parapluies de Cherbourg” (1964)

I first understood the word “forlorn” from a children’s book, when I was a girl. My father would read to me from an anthology of German children’s folk tales translated into English — a book he bought me in an English language bookshop abroad. It contained a story called “All Good Things Must Come to an End,” and while I don’t recall the story’s plot, I do remember the illustrations of the “folk” — it seems there was great unhappiness about the end of some great feast.

When I was in my first year of university, I was desperately miserable about a boyfriend I had left behind in another city. I attended the premiere screening of Jean-Jacques Beineix’s film, “37.2 Degrées Le Matin” (“Betty Blue”). To this day, it is the only film I have ever watched in which I cried from beginning to end. On first viewing it, I was already forlorn, well before I discovered the tragic end. I do not know the precise trigger: the sunsets and the isolation of the couple in a pre-lapsarian love shack at the seaside, the sorrowful beauty Béatrice Dalle, or Gabriel Yared’s musical score.

Jean-Jacques Beineix, “Betty Blue” (1986)

It is not possible for me to watch even a short segment of this film without experiencing a flood of tears. Is it because I believe that nothing beautiful can last, that if it is beautiful, it must be fleeting? It’s the same mnemonic flood one has on smelling a perfume from long ago — some imprecise sense of loss, of a particular time and place (or person) possesses the mind. The forlorn runs deep in my imagination merely due to what remains, what lingers.

But another image presents itself, and another. One is of a helpless foal, whose legs are folded under, sitting in a field of hay, looking out to the world, perhaps (I imagine) waiting for its mother. Or Natalie Wood, exquisitely, in the role of Deanie Loomis in “Splendor in the Grass,” when she is unable to explain to her literature class how to accept loss. She cannot find strength in what remains behind, as Wordsworth counsels in the “Ode on Intimations of Immortality.”

Elia Kazan, “Splendor in the Grass” (1961)

Even as the flowers sit on the teacher’s desk in their glory, she cannot grasp the loss. They are dead in the vase; their glory, lost. Years later, at the end of the film, Deanie visits the high school sweetheart who had left, and he is happily married with a family of his own.

I was impressed recently as I looked through an old biography of the painter Raoul Dufy. We are seized with a strong sense of the forlorn on seeing his vase of flowers, “Trente ans, ou, la vie en rose” and many other paintings, such as families by the seaside, regattas viewed from the strand, a sunny frame of the sea from a hotel room, palm trees along Nice’s Promenade des Anglais, and so on. This is so because the forlorn intimates a span of time: thirty years or likely, much longer. Because he paints the joy between people though, he makes me believe that life is long and beautifully long; that there is strength to be found in what remains behind.

-Nyla Matuk

The American philosopher Harry Frankfurt opens his book, “The Reasons of Love,” with a discussion of the Greek philosophers’ engagements with wonder. He says that Aristotle provided a list of all the things that led the first philosophers to wonder. These included self-moving marionettes and certain cosmological and astronomical phenomena. Frankfurt writes: “It is hardly appropriate to characterize these things merely as puzzling. They are startling. They are marvels.”

Frankfurt tells us that for Aristotle, wonder “must have been resonant with feelings of mystery, of the uncanny, of awe.”

In his essay “Husserl’s Sense of Wonder” (2000), the philosopher Mark Kingwell writes: “Wonder sees the world of everyday as suddenly strange and mysterious, obtrusive, standing out.”

This clip from David Lynch’s “The Lost Highway” supplies us with a perfect example of a reasonably ordinary experience – meeting someone at a party – that becomes strange, mysterious — frightening.

David Lynch, “Lost Highway” (1997)

“We’ve met before, haven’t we?” There is wonder here: this stranger has all the unhome-like characteristics of the unheimlich (the uncanny) because he is both unknowable to Bill Pullman’s character yet also deeply involved with him.

It is an undeniable mindfuck, what could be called wonder. It is almost a metaphor for detached sexual congress: being known in one way, but not at all in another. The Bill Pullman character is being opened up against his will, raped.

Could an unsettling person with a friendly smile be talking to me at a party while at the same time waiting for me at my home? It is then no longer a question of going home/not going home with him. He is already there. He is the person who is friendly but invasively so. He is physically disturbing-looking but I resist pre-judging him on his looks, because then am I the one being unfriendly—behaving too readily like a stranger than a potential friend? Yet we do judge strangers on their looks, if not consciously, then subconsciously. If they look good to us, we may invite them into our homes. The stranger’s smile becomes a dispensation of the uncanny.

Where else do we find wonder? Inside love.

In the movie “The English Patient,” when Kip shows Hanna something wondrous, it is meant as an act of love and kindness. It is a way of getting close to another person, but decidedly not in the manner of the stranger at the party.

Anthony Minghella, “The English Patient” (1996)

It seems certain that Kip and Hanna could never be strangers again.

- Nyla Matuk

Discobitch, “C’est Beau La Bourgeoisie” (2008)

Recently I wondered what it would entail to “épater la bourgeoisie” today in 2010. I have a hard time locating the bourgeoisie that the 19th century Decadent poets wished to shock. Here in North America, it seems they are a species that generally lives in suburbs (though more and more their children are urbanites); they grow into adulthood setting their sights on marriage/monogamy, home ownership, and raising children. Sometimes they ennoble their own opinions and lifestyle habits in the form of a regularly updated weblog of narratives or witty aperçus.

In fact, middle class-ness is so repeatedly defined in terms of these life goals that it seems hard to believe there could be a decadent off-shoot. But the dancing girls in this “superbitch” video, talking of champers, under-30 nightclubs, and men with money is a good snapshot of the road leading to an ordinary life. A sort of starter-bourgeoisie. They are sporting in some cases very bohemian styles of dress; but what they’re really after, they’re saying, is piles of money, diamonds, champagne, and Hawaii. And following the money, the house, the car, and other conventional features of the family lifestyle can’t be far behind.

In “Metroland” (1997), a film based on Julian Barnes’ novel of the same name, a suburban husband and father, Chris (Christian Bale) is temporarily tempted into a life of sex and drugs when an unmarried poet friend — still decadent and freewheeling in his ways — makes an appearance after a 10-year absence. He questions whether Chris is happy with his decision to settle in suburbia. But the crux of the story also revolves around the figure of the bitch.

In the flashback sequences, Chris is 21 years of age in Paris, and trying to become a photographer, living in a garret, and having a passionate love affair with the openly sexual Frenchwoman Annick (Elsa Zylberstein).

One fine day, he meets Marion from England, his future wife (Emily Watson), but tells her he is firmly set against the bourgeois lifestyle—something she clearly has an interest in pursuing (e.g., settling down with a job and raising children in a single-family home back in England).

But watch closely as Marion’s behaviours toward Chris — measured, controlling, rational — somehow have him losing the French girl and the lifestyle he vowed to keep. He reveals himself to be too yielding and uninteresting to resist the “marriage trap.”

Annick his French lover had already understood his character with very few clues. Even at 21, she spots his essentially bourgeois lack of passion.

Philip Saville, “Metroland” (1997)

Later she will yell at him with her charming French accent, “How rational! How measured, how English you are!”

Marion perhaps knows something — even something distinctly bourgeois — that lands her the man and lifestyle she has always wanted. Is it mere bourgeois strategy, cold, goal-oriented, and calculated?

I suspect that this is a species of mothering superbitch that the “marrying kind” of middle-class man really wants. This is what “Metroland” would have us believe. It reminds me a little of the book, “Why Men Love Bitches: from Doormat to Dreamgirl.”

Of course, too much of the bourgeois life invites longing for an escape—as is the case for the wife in Claude Chabrol’s “La Femme Infidele.”

Claude Chabrol, “La Femme Infidèle” (1968)

What do the bourgeoisie do when too tired to have sex? They read novels of course, the literary form that has repeatedly been declared bourgeois. For the socialist, pseudo-bourgeois character in Whit Stillman’s 1988 film “Metropolitan,” you don’t even have to have read a novel to form an opinion of it. He reads the critics instead.

Whit Stillman, “Metropolitan” (1988)

One wants poetry, perhaps — to get to the heart of the matter without bothering with all the narrative, all the life goals, or indeed all the discreet charm.

I often feel that way — I almost never read novels these days. My novelist friends admit they don’t read them either. Too bourgeois.

- Nyla Matuk

I was at a party recently, listening to a young man’s marriage proposal story. It wasn’t particularly dramatic or romantic: they had been together for about seven years, were both in their mid-20s, and had discussed marriage beforehand.

They were having lunch at a mid-priced restaurant in Little Italy. He didn’t really ask but rather, stated: “I think we should get married.” It was so off the radar that he must not have been in the least concerned that the waiter might bob along at le moment propice and say something mundane such as, “How’s everything here?” or, “How’re you guys doing for drinks?” His future wife said: “Good idea.”

Of course, there is no guarantee that something spectacular might not happen during the proposal that takes place at the wedding ceremony, arguably far more disruptive than a waiter at a restaurant.

Unfortunately, the spectacularity of the proposal event — and our scopophilia around watching people fail when they scale such great heights — is rather the rule than the exception. Popping the question must be momentous, and one way to achieve the moment is to pop it in the company of strangers.

In this context, we find a pernicious and advanced form of Schadenfreude:

I remember a conversation I had with a girlfriend many years ago. She told me that although she wasn’t certain she wanted to get married, she knew for sure that she wanted to be asked.

I pondered this for many years afterward, because it struck me as a fundamentally sadistic desire. She wanted to be given the power, when asked such a thing, to accept or reject the offer. Her acceptance of such an offer — proffered from bent knee — would make the man profoundly happy; her rejection would make him likely very sad.

Imagine the narcissism behind such a desire! To want to be asked. It isn’t surprising that she is now the wife of a man whose particular aggregations of connections, power and money are perhaps the only sufficiently effective foils to her narcissism.

The male defense, seeing another man rejected, is to pause briefly, “feel bad for the guy,” and continue to call the game. Stiff upper lip, moving right along:

bjrobe71, “Rangers Fan Marriage Proposal Shot Down!” (2010)

The marriage proposal as public display or puerile stunt is clearly a recipe for disaster. Women don’t want their assent trivialized. It seems that those who might assay such tactics are referred to by Samantha Jones in “Sex and the City,” when she tells her friend Carrie Bradshaw, in an episode of the first season, “Don’t you dare turn into one of these married assholes, or I’ll kill you.”

I do wonder if the spectacle of success or failure is more important to these public proposers than the fact of getting married. If the marriage proposal is supposed to be considered a gift, why is it important that it be publicly displayed? If it is not to be considered a gift but an important life decision, is it more important that a stadium of strangers witness it, than that it should come to be, or not to be? Is it so necessary that one’s existential happiness or woe appear before an audience, and one’s availability or lack thereof, announced?

If pop the question you must, it’s possible to determine the scenarios that are most likely to fail:

The Young Turks, “Marriage Proposals Gone Wrong” (2007)

- Nyla Matuk

Recently, a newspaper columnist friend who writes about relationships from the male perspective surveyed a few of the women he knows. He wanted to know what words we love to hear during sex. He also wondered if our men were vocal lovers or, on the whole, mute types. And he asked us to say, specifically, what things can be said and in which manner to get us aroused.

The song and video “Swimming in Your Ocean” by the Crash Test Dummies came to mind. Brad Roberts sings to an audience of captivated women — who show mild surprise or motherly understanding — confessing what it is like for him to be her lover. Sex is swimming in her ocean (a euphemism like any other, such as the one for giving birth: look what the stork brought); he kneels before her bounty; he hopes his seed will find purchase in her soil.

Crash Test Dummies, “Swimming in Your Ocean” (1993)

Decidedly, these are not the arousing words women long to hear, even from a man with such a deep, masculine voice.

I told my journalist friend that there is a tipping point when too many words from a man during sex became a turn off; talk should be limited to intermittent but powerful and definitely profane information; arbitrary judgments, orders and directives. And I think it’s arousing to hear just how I, as his lover, make him feel like a man. But for “seed [to] find purchase in my soil,” to “kneel before my bounty,” and to “float aloft on creams and scented lotions”? These words are not admissible in the ongoing and limitless project of arousal.

Just as bad writing makes the reader cringe, bad sex talk is deeply embarrassing to the listener. Lover, I feel shame that you fail to make even one aesthetically correct judgment in your pillow talk. But I am equally ashamed by your poetry, by your lousy prose. Perhaps bad sex talk could be included in a film like this one, on the subject of bad writing:

Vernon Lott, Trailer for “Bad Writing” (2010)

Bad writing is attributed in this film to dishonesty and falseness, and characterized as under-confidence in the idea that what you are is good enough. It makes me think of the orgasm scene in “When Harry Met Sally.”

When Sally questions Harry’s confidence that women always have a great time with him in bed, and his belief that their orgasms have always been real, it’s a nudge. Sally’s performance shows that a woman faking it isn’t nearly as hard to accept as a man deluded about his capacity to give pleasure. It’s as if he’s being told he’s going to have to work harder (perhaps with words, with something more than braggadocio) to get women aroused—that it is they who have been lying to him all this time instead of the other way around. Deflationary indeed!

Rob Reiner, “When Harry Met Sally” (1989)

After all, if men walk the walk, they should talk the talk. Maybe it’s time they said something. Something good.

Captain and Tennille, “Do That To Me One More Time” (1979)

- Nyla Matuk

Unlike other judgments of taste, the cute is relatively little critiqued. Our conversations judge the beauty and ugliness of cities, sublime or terrible lines of poetry, mountain panoramas, but the degree to which something is cute, or not cute, doesn’t get much attention. And it is difficult to think of cute’s opposite the way it’s easy for beauty or terror, for example.

Like magazines on style, websites such as Kitten War, Cute Overload or Daily Cuteness select and judge for us what ought to be considered in the cute range.

“It is only a short step to see how the formal properties associated with cuteness—smallness, compactness, softness, simplicity, and pliancy—call forth specific affects: helplessness, pitifulness, and even despondency. There is thus a sense in which the minor taste concept of cuteness might be said to get at the process by which all taste concepts are formed and thus at the aesthetic relation all of them capture. For in addition to being a minor aesthetic concept that is fundamentally about minorness (in a way that, for instance, the concept of the glamorous is not), it is crucial to cuteness that its diminutive object has some sort of imposed-upon aspect or mien—that is, that it bears the look of an object not only formed but all too easily de -formed under the pressure of the subject’s feeling or attitude towards it,” says Sianne Ngai, who offers an excellent tour d’horizon of cuteness here.

Cuteness contains nuance indeed. Take Jowita Bydlowska’s curated video on the tickling of a slow loris, judged cute to the point of inciting in its audience an addiction to watching. What I thought cute was the fact of the slow loris’ constant enjoyment at its tickling; the animal itself, if I’d seen it just there on a sofa or in a zoo, not being tickled, I may not have found particularly cute.

Kittens in any context, on the other hand, offer an object lesson in cuteness. Or do they? I have found here a patently ugly collection.

Sometimes I am amazed at how personally people take judgments of cute, in a way that makes cute into a kind of goodness or a type of beauty. What is cute’s propinquity to beauty?

Is Nastassja Kinski beautiful and Kate Hudson cute? Are both women cute, or both beautiful? Does Kinski hold a gravitas in her face that Hudson lacks, and if so, does this make her beautiful rather than cute?

If someone shows me a photo of a new kitten, and that kitten’s features are spread across its head in a stretched, cartoonish manner, I won’t find it cute. Or if someone brings their boxer to a party—a dog I find so disgustingly ugly I can’t even look at its face—I will have a hard time joining in with the other party guests as they praise it and play with it.

So I say nothing. I know that if I made a negative aesthetic judgment about either of these creatures everyone would feel insulted. I may simply say I don’t find the dog cute. But even this would constitute a faux pas sans nom. The owners would rightly conclude that I was implying the dog was ugly. They would almost certainly also feel I am telling them that they too are ugly and, moreover, blameworthy.

“If they are ugly, I blame them. It’s their own fault,” goes the deliciously nasty line and moral judgment from Eva in “The Buddha of Suburbia.” Who can blame a baby for being less than adorable?

Yes, such restraint is a rehearsed social norm with respect to babies. Alas, babies are not universally cute; there are many ugly ones, hence the expression, “he/she had a face only a mother could love.”

Judd Apatow, “Knocked Up” (2007)

- Nyla Matuk

James Taylor, “Fire and Rain” (1971)

I guess it’s true, as Elton John says, that “when all hope is gone, sad songs say so much.” When I was in my 20s, if I heard a song like James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain” or Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle”—even muzak versions in a department store or public transportation hallway—a heavy, intense melancholy would cover me. I’d get a lump in my throat and be on the verge of tears. I’d have to get away from the music.

Although I’m a lot less sensitive to sad music these days, I have to admit these are pretty sad songs. Sad enough that they could still, on occasion, throw me into a brooding gloom!

Back then, my companion would laugh and tell me that if a song is sad, melancholy, or otherwise mood-altering, it ought to be embraced until it becomes comforting. With a measure of distance, the music could bring on needed catharsis.

Yet it only made me feel terrible. If I wasn’t already in a melancholy mood, I’d quickly step down into one.

Harry Chapin, “Cat’s in the Cradle” (1976)

Since then I have grown more accustomed to and less fearful of hearing sad music. Over many years I have cultivated tolerance and appreciation. A middle, semi-blue period saw me able to listen to Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now.” Still, even then I couldn’t brave songs from the “Blue” album.

Joni Mitchell, “Both Sides Now” (1970)

Now I find some music sad but not intolerably so, like Jackson Browne’s “Running on Empty” album. I believe I’ve achieved the level of cool aesthetic appreciation for the sad that my long-ago companion kept trying to encourage.

Jackson Browne, “Love Needs a Heart” (1978)

I never understood it then, but now listening to Browne’s “Love Needs a Heart” and “Rosie” I realize I’ve made peace with poignancy. I can even manage to listen to these songs of love and loss from beginning to end.

Jackson Browne, “Rosie” (2011)

Whatever’s in my heart—pathos, longing, hurt, despair, regret—these songs bring it out.

Maybe they’d be good for what ails you, too.

- Nyla Matuk

Donald W. Winnicott, psychoanalyst of the British Object Relations School, is one of my intellectual heroes. His theories on how our early childhood development shapes our later relationships and creative work are fascinating.

In “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena” (published in the “International Journal of Psycho-Analysis” and his “Collected Papers,” 1953 and 1958, respectively), he argues that the special possessions very young infants grow attached to—such as a doll, teddy bear or blanket—are transitional objects to help them distinguish external reality (or the “not me”) from their own “subjective omnipotence”—i.e., the belief that their wish for an object creates the object.

Watching this clip of Sesame Street’s Big Bird, I think of another one of Winnicott’s observations on the relationship with the transitional, which is that the object must never change, unless it is changed by the infant. Here Big Bird is like an infant involved in doing and undoing, showing omnipotence of a sort:

“Sesame Street”

Whenever I watched the television series “The Polka-Dot Door” I was on the alert for the rare visits made by another large, seemingly friendly creature, the Polkaroo. Transitionality is readily apparent in the clip below, Polkaroo quietly and stealthily sallies onto the set, but then disappears as quickly, like a slight breeze on a hot day or the flirtatious flits of a seasonal butterfly. It’s a different kind of transitional, one that reminds me of the presence and absence of a mother figure.

“The Polka-Dot Door” (1981)

Both of the show’s hosts are dismayed and a bit surprised by the Polkaroo’s coming and going, though the man’s saying he missed him again suggests that it is a recurrent fact of life, or perhaps an acknowledgment that imaginary friends do exist, even if adults keep missing them.

Big Bird’s imaginary friend, Mr. Snuffleupagus, only made an appearance on the street in the seventeenth season. Until then, nobody believed the mammoth existed—he was considered a figment of Big Bird’s imagination, always fleeing the scene much like Polkaroo.

In the clip below, Big Bird and Mr. Snuffleupagus go to Hawaii in search of what I think must be a maternal figure, a certain Snuffleupagus Mountain. As the scene opens, they have looked far and wide, and feel a bit tired of the search. Mr. Snuffleupagus receives a phone call from his mother, and although Big Bird expresses what a wonderful thing this is, Snuffy remains weary. Then Snuffy wishes he was back in his cave with his “Mommy” to take care of him. The absence of the mother is even felt in her voice, in her belabored motherly advice.

A final pathetic fallacy: As Mr. Snuffleupagus is given assurances that Big Bird will continue the search for the mountain, we catch sight of it in the background. Snuffy settles down for a nap.

Snuffy’s external reality is not fully realized. Big Bird is his best transitional object.

- Nyla Matuk

Usually he surfaces at the two-thirds mark, the point at which you, and most people, have moved out of the kitchen—your second spliff smoked, your third beer consumed. You end up in the big-cushioned, bohemian-couched living room, and there he is. The guy with the guitar at the party.

I’ve always gravitated toward this guy. As a matter of fact, he was usually my date or my boyfriend. The cliché that women are attracted to musicians? I’m afraid it’s true.

He’ll improvise an eclectic 1970s mix tape; a mélange as much about John Cougar Mellencamp as Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and Jackson Browne. He might get folksy—Joni Mitchell, Simon & Garfunkel, Jim Croce. Or rock out in a mellow way: something like “Chuck E.’s in Love” or better, “Baby, I Love Your Way.”

And depending on your city, either you gravitate to this guy, or are instantly repelled and return to the kitchen, where you hold court with the structural engineer and the law student. Or maybe you wander upstairs and talk to the girls sitting on someone’s bed, weighing the derelict dilemmas of a two-weeks old blind date.

Possibly, the musician is just a cheap showman. In that case, you might begin to feel the way the manager does in this clip from “The Office” when the Ricky Gervais character, David Brent, takes centre stage in the middle of a management coaching session and breaks into his homemade rock ballad, “Free Love on the Freelove Freeway.”

You might be the kind of person who bonds with others in denial—staring at each other in disbelief, wondering if this party minstrel shutting down all conversation with his Woodstock sincerity is really worth the guitar pick he fished out of the front pocket of his Levi’s corduroys five minutes ago.

Finally, you succumb. Despite your ironic and cosmopolitan ways, you enjoy it. You lose yourself in the moment; you stop trying to say anything to anyone anymore.

You start singing along.

- Nyla Matuk

Michelangelo Antonioni, “La Notte” (1961)

Two couples: the bourgeois husband and wife, their passion clearly on the wane, and the Other couple (the “sexualized, racialized” one, as a fellow YouTuber puts it), enacting an erotic ritual to the rhythm of a dramatic, mysterious jazz piece.

This emblematic scene kind of hits you over the head with a cast iron pan: desire itself—the glass of wine—is precariously perched between the dancer’s legs, then transferred to her forehead, while the beat moves ineluctably along, and we are held at attention, as if watching a tightrope walker 200 feet above a circus crowd.

Is there anything else possible here? I wonder if that glass of wine is a fragile or a powerful thing. But this famous scene only asks the question, and provides no answers. I often think Antonioni is telling me that it is both fragile and destructive.

If it is fragile, and it breaks, should I believe these dancers are capable of the eroticism they show on stage? And if it is destructive, I wonder if it will symbolically finish off that sexless union between Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni? That glass of wine, as desire, is like a thing whose loss signals the beginning of the end.

Prior to their arrival at the nightclub, Jeanne Moreau, the middle-aged bourgeois wife, has tried and failed to seduce her husband at home. The camera pans over her fingers dancing on the table, making their way over to her husband’s cuff-linked wrist. She pulls him toward her momentarily. What could still be possible between the two of them? But here she fails again.

The dancer has her skirt removed. She manages to drink the wine, posed in an elaborate back-arch bridge. Then, as her companion drapes her in a fur stole, she shoots him a triumphant, satisfied look. She takes her bows, happy and sated, and the bourgeois couple applauds.

And with the wine consumed, the scene ends. Something was had, but what is lost?

- Nyla Matuk