estike and the current of life
a scene in satantango that has stuck with me, retold with fictional liberty
this summer i watched the film satantango in the theater. if you are unfamiliar, satantango is a film with a runtime of over seven hours, and it’s about a small hungarian community after the fall of communism. after watching it i wrote this. i meant to edit it and really make it into something but i forgot. but i still like it so i’m deciding to share it now, just as it is.
a moment of life in a bleak world. a moment of life in a bleak world, witnessed by a girl. those on stage are unaware of their singular audience member.
they are drunk and dancing. dancing endlessly. the are exhilarated, but not happy (however still the happiest they will ever be)— nor are they sad; they are in a sort of third state:
for this long moment, they are beyond themselves.
they are drunk, they are sick, they are immoral. the men handle the woman with greed, and she feels somehow wrong, but is unable to pinpoint why. for a while they continue— messy people held together by a higher energy…
they have detached themselves into another existence, and yet, they have never left at all— this would be impossible— but they remain in their temporary third space: a space reminiscent of the moment when the sun sets and it is, shortly and precisely, at once both night and day.
their lives are behind them; they are drained of hope; and all that is left now is to drink the elixir of surreality and pretend that this escape is heaven.
is happiness disqualified if it is slightly artificial?
these people, their energy, and their movement back and forth— their endless departures and returns, like that of an ocean’s wave— are perpetuated by a repetitious accordian’s melody. lifting itself, again and again, despite one’s slight feeling that the most recent lift could have been the last. unquestioning, they allow themselves to be moved onward. there is always another lift in the melody, unwaveringly confident, almost too much so.
this moment, witnessed by a young girl, is fated to represent life— life as a enigma holding the good and the bad, the intentional and the unintentional, the moral and the immoral, all inextricably intertwined. it is the beauty of life, and it is the ugliness of life, and it is eternally inevitable. witnessed by a young girl. a young girl witnessing too much of life.
under the girl’s left arm is a cat. under the girl’s left arm is a dead cat— killed with a innocent yearning: for control, for love, for the thing that has been taken or enforced upon her by others, due to their guilt or selfishness— or innocence, depending on how you look at it— or how you choose to look at it.
and so she watches. the dancers are held together by one another’s movements; jumbled, intertwined. a desolate world surrounds them; them, confined in their energy, in the rhythm, in the dream of the night.
i suppose it all comes down to how much you believe dreams can be real.
