Sarang's latest effort, Don't Look Down, is one of his saddest and best movies to date. (The movie should not be confused with Eliseo Subiela's No mires para abajo, which is called Don't Look Down in its English translation.)
The movie centers on the relationship between Jason O'Neil, a law firm librarian, and his wife Margaret. At work, Jason is stressed out, barely able to keep up with his tedious work. At home, he is disrespected when he isn't ignored. In a revealing scene, Margaret tells him that her friends are coming over for drinks. There is an awkward back-and-forth until Jason realizes that Margaret is asking him to leave the house until her friends have come and gone. Margaret can be cruel, but she can't bring herself to acknowledge her own cruelty.
It's no wonder, then, that Jason finds refuge from both spheres of his life by taking long, unnecessarily meandering walks to and from work. Here, striding along the sidewalk, admiring his surroundings, Jason seems happy and in his element. He can name the types of the trees and the architectural styles of the houses. His sense of the city, its contours and rhythms, its impulses and pent-up energy, is encyclopedic.
When we meet the couple, Margaret is barely bothering to conceal her affair with Jin-woo, a real estate speculator. But things are more complex: through Margaret, Jin-woo has met Jason, who turns out to be hugely useful in Jin-woo's work. Jason can tell him, almost as an afterthought, whether a particular house is undervalued or overvalued. He has an instinctive sense for which neighborhoods are about to pop, and Jin-woo easily translates these insights into huge profits.
But it is more than that, and here Sarang draws down some of the audience's sympathy for Jason. When Jin-woo is selling a house, he arranges for the real estate agent to "bump into" Jason while showing prospective buyers around the neighborhood. Jason then poses as a neighbor and gushes about how much he loves the neighborhood. Jason has a gentle, avuncular appearance—a running joke throughout the movie is that people keep mistaking him for Cass Sunstein, even though Jason is in his early 40s. While Jason doesn't look like Margaret's idea of a good husband, he looks like almost everyone's idea of a good neighbor: earnest, enthusiastic, and ever-so-slightly disheveled.
But of course it's a ruse—Jason doesn't actually live in whatever neighborhood the sale is in—and it's a little hard to see what Jason gets out of it. Jin-woo doesn't give Jason a cut of his enviable profits, though Jason could certainly use the money. Perhaps Jason just wants to feel useful, even in such a tawdry and compromising way. But whatever the explanation, Jason's behavior raises interesting questions about Jin-woo's relationship with Margaret. Jin-woo appears to be losing patience with her. Maybe he is sticking around not because he wants Margaret but because he needs Jason. The three are locked in a triangle that is more transactional than any of them can admit, balanced at the edge of the precipice. And none of them dares to pull any of the loose threads because of what might be revealed, and what might be lost.
The only discordant note came not when I saw the movie, but afterward, when I sent a congratulatory note to Sarang about it. He must have thought I was being sarcastic, because he responded with a quick apology, urging me not to "take it personally." I have no idea what he thinks he's apologizing for. It is one of the best movies I have seen in a long time. I wonder if our correspondence is another one of Sarang's performance art pieces, like the time he published a Chrome extension designed to "improve the accuracy of the internet" by deleting the string "syncra" from all descriptions of me. I still haven't figured out what that was about, either.
Monday, October 19, 2015
Saturday, October 10, 2015
Dave's Tabula Rasa
Dave's latest effort, Tabula Rasa, marks a return to the intellectual but action-packed science fiction that launched him to fame in the first place. Charles Tully, an insurance company executive who has been convicted of embezzling hundreds of millions of dollars (leaving the company bankrupt), is given the option of an experimental new form of punishment: instead of serving the rest of his life in prison, he will undergo a procedure that will destroy most of his memories. On some level this is like the death penalty—little of his identity will remain when his memories are gone. On the other hand, the procedure will have no noticeable effect on Tully's body or his intelligence. He will be allowed to build a new life, in freedom and with no liability for the crimes of his "past self." He won't even be told that he committed a crime—the "new Tully" will be told that he suffered a trauma that robbed him of his memories.
Once the procedure is done, Tully is held for a few weeks. The procedure sometimes overshoots a little, and so Tully is monitored while the technicians make sure that he can still function in society. But Tully's "wipe" was clean, and soon he is freed. Legally, Tully is a new person, but before the procedure Tully chose to remain married to his wife, Susan, and so she picks him up from the prison. Tully doesn't recognize her, of course, but his reconditioning has prepared him, to some degree, to return home.
Here is where the story takes its first bizarre turn. A few weeks after returning home, Charles realizes that Susan is lying about something that happened in their previous life. The lie itself is not consequential, but Tully is shocked. He shouldn't have been able to recognize it at all. It appears that some of his memories are intact, though they are not accessible until something brings them out of the recesses of his mind.
Charles begins to find clues about his previous life, and they spark more memories. Susan tries to shield him from the facts about his previous life, but to the reader, some of her lies are inexplicable. Susan is hiding something. She packs Charles off to spend time with his sister, a federal judge, and we feel that we are on the cusp of discovering what her motives are. But then there is a knock at the door, and the stranger on the doorsteps announces that he is Charles Tully, returning home from an extended hospitalization. He tries to kiss her and is upset when she pushes him away.
"Real Charles," meanwhile, confronts his sister and demands an explanation for his patchwork of memories. She tries to evade his questions, but he has pieced together quite a lot, and finally she tells him about the embezzlement, the conviction, and the punishment. She also tells him about his previous life—his alcoholism, his depression, his gambling, his adultery. We realize that his marriage was essentially over when the FBI arrested him. And we learn that when he was arrested, the FBI found only a tiny fraction of the money that he had stolen. Susan's behavior begins to make sense.
Meanwhile Susan has managed, with considerable awkwardness, to convince the stranger who thinks he is Charles Tully to rent a hotel room, and the two order delivery food and eat it there. Unlike the "real" Charles Tully, this man has easily accessible memories of the time period that was wiped from her husband's memory. But the memories are patchy and mostly incoherent, and from time to time he pauses and loses his composure as inconsistencies crop up. He is clearly on edge, barely hanging on to the thread, and in his confusion he has become childlike and easily manipulated. Susan plies him with beer and coaxes his story from him.
Of course, what has happened is that the team responsible for wiping Tully's memory has intentionally done an incomplete job, in an attempt to track down the hundreds of millions that they assume Tully has hidden away. A smaller group of conspirators has tried to implant Tully's memories into another prisoner undergoing the procedure. The memories proved to be too fragmented to track down the money, and the team had no choice but to release the man on schedule.
That's about as much of the plot as I should divulge—I've probably gone too far already—but there's one interesting technique that Dave uses that, unfortunately, probably means that the book can never be made into a movie. In the last third of the book, Dave starts referring to each of the men simply as "Tully," introducing intentional ambiguity about which man Susan ultimately chooses. Of course this ambiguity is untranslatable to film, which is too bad in a sense. Dave has recaptured the vivid, cinematic feel of his early science fiction, and Tabula Rasa would make a stunning movie and a welcome break from the stream of comic book blockbusters and superficial fantasy movies that have proliferated in recent years. This was not to be—but the book is still a sheer joy to read.
Once the procedure is done, Tully is held for a few weeks. The procedure sometimes overshoots a little, and so Tully is monitored while the technicians make sure that he can still function in society. But Tully's "wipe" was clean, and soon he is freed. Legally, Tully is a new person, but before the procedure Tully chose to remain married to his wife, Susan, and so she picks him up from the prison. Tully doesn't recognize her, of course, but his reconditioning has prepared him, to some degree, to return home.
Here is where the story takes its first bizarre turn. A few weeks after returning home, Charles realizes that Susan is lying about something that happened in their previous life. The lie itself is not consequential, but Tully is shocked. He shouldn't have been able to recognize it at all. It appears that some of his memories are intact, though they are not accessible until something brings them out of the recesses of his mind.
Charles begins to find clues about his previous life, and they spark more memories. Susan tries to shield him from the facts about his previous life, but to the reader, some of her lies are inexplicable. Susan is hiding something. She packs Charles off to spend time with his sister, a federal judge, and we feel that we are on the cusp of discovering what her motives are. But then there is a knock at the door, and the stranger on the doorsteps announces that he is Charles Tully, returning home from an extended hospitalization. He tries to kiss her and is upset when she pushes him away.
"Real Charles," meanwhile, confronts his sister and demands an explanation for his patchwork of memories. She tries to evade his questions, but he has pieced together quite a lot, and finally she tells him about the embezzlement, the conviction, and the punishment. She also tells him about his previous life—his alcoholism, his depression, his gambling, his adultery. We realize that his marriage was essentially over when the FBI arrested him. And we learn that when he was arrested, the FBI found only a tiny fraction of the money that he had stolen. Susan's behavior begins to make sense.
Meanwhile Susan has managed, with considerable awkwardness, to convince the stranger who thinks he is Charles Tully to rent a hotel room, and the two order delivery food and eat it there. Unlike the "real" Charles Tully, this man has easily accessible memories of the time period that was wiped from her husband's memory. But the memories are patchy and mostly incoherent, and from time to time he pauses and loses his composure as inconsistencies crop up. He is clearly on edge, barely hanging on to the thread, and in his confusion he has become childlike and easily manipulated. Susan plies him with beer and coaxes his story from him.
Of course, what has happened is that the team responsible for wiping Tully's memory has intentionally done an incomplete job, in an attempt to track down the hundreds of millions that they assume Tully has hidden away. A smaller group of conspirators has tried to implant Tully's memories into another prisoner undergoing the procedure. The memories proved to be too fragmented to track down the money, and the team had no choice but to release the man on schedule.
That's about as much of the plot as I should divulge—I've probably gone too far already—but there's one interesting technique that Dave uses that, unfortunately, probably means that the book can never be made into a movie. In the last third of the book, Dave starts referring to each of the men simply as "Tully," introducing intentional ambiguity about which man Susan ultimately chooses. Of course this ambiguity is untranslatable to film, which is too bad in a sense. Dave has recaptured the vivid, cinematic feel of his early science fiction, and Tabula Rasa would make a stunning movie and a welcome break from the stream of comic book blockbusters and superficial fantasy movies that have proliferated in recent years. This was not to be—but the book is still a sheer joy to read.
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