I am fascinated by the movement on, and of, the screen, that movement which is something like the leaving and swelling of the sea (though I have not yet been to the sea): and which is also something like the light which moves on, and especially beneath, the water.
— James Baldwin, “Congo Square”
Splish, splash
Marie hangs on to the pool steps as blue surrounds her: blue pool bricks, blue water, blue sky reflection, blue lights. She directs her eyes toward them—the water swallows their bodies leaving only their floating little heads, rippling through their motions and turning the sharp black lines at the bottom into floating ants. The sound of a distant conversation retreats into the background: they stir the water, and the water proudly announces its intermittent splish-splash. They are ballerinas in the water, each hand gracefully slicing through the air, into the water, up the air again. Trying to keep up with their movements, the water makes a wing out of their hands: they are now angels on the surface. Every traveler, and every cinephile as well, knows moments where, like a purloined letter, he is in the middle of a picture, both nothing and superimposed, a willing hostage to the movement which ignores him.[i] The water-bound ballerinas allure and mesmerize Marie—she is invited to indulge in her fantasy and desire of belonging and intimacy. After all, the nature of navigating relationships among young women confines her to awkward looking, but never touching. Marie hesitates, about to dive down.
Toni starts to also feel the weight of womanhood catching up to her. The music surrounding her is roaring thunder. It bounces around the spacious, well-lit gym, blasting through the white door separating Toni from the girls. The music invites Toni into sharing a desire—the desire to fit in, to have supportive peers and to successfully perform the role of a confident young woman. Toni takes careful steps toward the door, unsure of what to do next as her eyes linger on a poster announcing the Lionesses’ drill. The door with its two small see-through windows promises Toni endless possibilities: Toni can dive down deep into her desire with the safety of not being discovered. All attempts to repress our/black peoples’ right to gaze had produced in us an overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze.[ii] The girls on the other side can’t reach her, at least for now. She can look, but never touch. Toni hesitates, but she dives down anyway.
Gurgling, gurgling
The underwater bubbles neatly package the sound of burgeoning activity to carry it to the surface. Marie dives down further: blue engulfs her. It reduces the splish-splash into incoherent gurgling, creating a vacuum for Marie to freely roam about in her desire.Blinking her eyes to get herself familiar with the blue water, she immediately looks toward the ballerinas. They swing their legs fiercely underwater, flying. The black lines are no longer rippled ants, but their heads turn into red, white, purple waves instead. The whole scene feels surreal: their bodies are cropped out of reality and turned into synchronized floating legs. The water softens their speed: no matter how much they try to kick against the water, their bodies are frozen temporarily under the surface. They are dancing, floating, flying, fighting, all at once. For, the church and the theater are carried within us and it is we who create them, out of our need and out of an impulse more mysterious than our desire.[iii]
The roaring music is sucked out, leaving behind an incoherent gurgling: Toni delves further into a world of her own, giving her undivided attention to the dancers. One hand leaning against the poster on one panel of the door, Toni yearningly peeks through the hole on the other panel to see the girls practicing. She carefully listens and watches: their hair fiercely flies about, the sunlight outlines their face and shoulders, emphasizing their every movement. In a circle, most of the girls let their bodies be carried away by the beat of the music. All of their eyes are on Karisma and Legs, the leaders of the group. The two are not kidding around: their hand and leg movements are firm, absolute and full of energy. Contrary to the other girls, the two confidently take control of the beat: it is as if the music is following them, not vice versa. A touch of magic: Toni twiddles the golden glitters in her hand. “You coming?” Toni wakes up, jokingly bumps her fist against her brother.
“Why don’t you go ahead, I kinda don’t feel like it, you know?” Lips slightly opened, Zoé widens her eyes in disbelief. Zoé tries to hold on to Maggie, holding her hands and desperately trying to draw Maggie into her one last desire. “No… I know… Yeah, I know… But… I don’t know… Just…” Zoé’s eyebrows lower while the lights in her eyes gradually fade away. The two women are bathed in blue, but Zoé’s face slightly turns pale as the light throws itself onto her threadbare hair. This is it: for Zoé, this is the moment she knows for sure how Maggie feels. The more she yearns for Maggie, the deeper she delves into the pool, the more she wants her fantasy to be a reality. “Just not in the mood… I won’t be any fun…” Her voice still full of anticipation, Zoé tries to ask one more time, just five minutes? Just a bit? What if we joined our wildernesses together?[iv] “Nah… No.” Shaking her head with Maggie, Zoé hopelessly looks as Maggie goes in the taxi, getting further away from her. Overcoming a little bit of hesitation, she finally looks toward the tempting blue light. Has she reached the bottom? Possibly not.
Thumping, thumping
Endless blue surrounds Zoé: violent blue flashing lights, blue pills, blue roads, blue unknown passers-by, blue headlights brutally blinding her grasp on reality. I gasp for breath, feeling suffocated under a weight of images.[v] She frantically, hysterically, furiously searches through her bag in the glaring blue. She hunts and kneels and gasps and gives herself up to the light and drops the bag down the road and watches as the light jumps in and veers out and desperately roams her hands across the pills the handkerchief the wallet the various papers that she doesn’t even know where they are from while her breath hastens and panics and her heart thumps loudly. Her heart thumps loudly. Is to be in love with blue, then, to be in love with a disturbance? Or is the love itself the disturbance? And what kind of madness is it anyway, to be in love with something constitutionally incapable of loving you back?[vi] Time is running out as her mind races to find a small piece of buoy that offers her the slightest chance of staying afloat. The pill briefly glistens in her cold blue hand. Head slightly raised to let the pill in, she drowns herself in the crowd.
Marie feels suffocated. The hollowing blue fluorescent lights of the restroom lay bare the cold, washed-out rectangular tiles on the wall. Lipstick smeared across her lips, she hopelessly looks as Floriane walks away, returning to the party, returning to the world of endless fooling around and breaking hearts. Marie gathers her remaining strength to take in heavy breaths, her lungs trying to push out bulky exhales. She is using up her remaining strength to not break down. Maybe this is the consequence of letting her desire be known. Her mind is racing, trying to catch up with her breath. Her nose starts to pinken, her eyes softly closing to suppress the rows of tears about to overflow her eyes. The cold tiles press themselves against her back and head as her hair softly hugs her neck. The brief moment of ecstasy is followed immediately by immense pain and regret. At the deep end of the pool, the inviting blue toward the surface turns into a sickening pale white, pressing her, containing her, leaving her no room to breathe. All of these formulations drain the blue right out of love and leave an ugly, pigmentless fish flapping on a cutting board on a kitchen counter.[vii] She is drowning soon, what is there to hang on to?
Whirring, whirring
A bundle of air bubbles follows where Marie has been, piercing through the water: it sparkles under the pool of light, resembling fairy dust as Marie falls down. She acknowledged the power and depth of suffering, of conflicted feelings and ambivalence while also seeing in that very human dimension of susceptibility the counter-capacity for laughter and life.[viii] After being pressed down to the bottom of the pool, Marie finally catches up—her hands flap against the water, flying up to the surface. Her hair slightly swings around her neck, her face looks up, her legs sway back and forth to propel her upward, dangling her shoelaces against the light. She is determined to see beyond this endless pool of unfulfilled desire and discover something more—something that she has missed out on all along. Like feathers on the water, Marie and Anne let their hands and legs freely float as their clothes tingle around them. That the body, the life, might carry a wilderness, an unexplored territory, and that yours and mine might somewhere, somehow, meet. Might, even, join.[ix] Heads resting on each other’s shoulders, Marie briefly touches her cheek against Anne, lovingly looking at her best friend. The water gently swings them side to side as their hair falls on the other’s hands and chests while their eyes look up toward the ceiling. In this ecstatic moment of camaraderie and intimacy, they truly become one, floating and floating, letting the water carry them however it pleases.
Standing at the bottom of a waterless pool, Toni looks up toward the sky, follows the bird. She takes her time: when she enters the hallway, her feet take careful steps on the hard cold floor. Each muscle relaxed, her feet levitate. She walks on a weightless staircase made of air, gravity can no longer hold her down. The walker is the one who accepts that the show has always already begun. His slowness insists upon it, like the fact that everything he will discover happens according to its own rhythm.[x] Through the corridors, on the threshold of the gym doors, she floats in front of curious, bewildered eyes. Arms outstretched, hands bent downward, shoulders jerked forward, hair flowing in the air, Toni is flying with euphoria. Her nose, mouth, shirt and hair sparkle in the limelight. No longer affixed to the ground, she staggers for a bit at the unfamiliarity, but soon enough, she smiles her way through her newfound freedom. Her breath hastens, the beat thumps increasingly loud and clear.
The terrifying blue light of drugs and strangers turns into a soft warm crimson light of the apartment in what looks like a dream. What if after a ghastly trip, instead of the cold concrete road where her pills and papers are scattered, Zoé got a chance to float like Toni, Marie, and Anne? I will pause here to offer a false etymology: de-light suggests both “of light” and “without light.”[xi] What if Zoé goes back to another possibility, another moment, another state of feelings? What if she can reverse the chronological series of events? Locking the cold night air outside, the apartment lights up with laughter, chatter and endless glasses of wine. “Tell me what happened. Don’t brood all night!” Surrounded by clouds of cigarette smoke, Zoé gets herself comfortable in her bright red sweater. “It’s been done. Why do it again? You know what I mean?” Her friends agree: René is reinventing the wheel, leaving all of us confused and tired of his temper. “Let’s change the subject and have a drink.” The important thing is the glasses are being filled with wine and laughter, while the plates keep refilling with delicious food. One hand loosely holding a cigarette, one hand relaxed holding the lighter, Zoé opens up her hands freely as she speaks. Although the reality out there could be uncertain, at least for now, Zoé truly basks in the warmth of camaraderie, love, and friendship. Her hair softly glows in the hearty light, her voice excited and mellifluous mixed in with the cloud of smoke. She is unknowingly dancing in tandem with her friends. The back-and-forth exchange of words and body language unites all of them together, like a soft blanket against the frost outside. The echo of laughter and joy follows as Zoé brings more plates to the table. With a wide smile on her lips, Zoé rid of all the weight on her soul.
Crackling, crackling
Sometimes I worry that if I am not moved by a blue thing, I may be completely despaired, or dead.[xii] Blue is desire—just like blue, the deep, seemingly endless pool of desire is an excitingly dangerous allure. To be willing to take a step in, explore, allow yourself to be imbued, devoured, and saturated by such an unknown is a brave act on its own. Toni, Marie, Anne, and Zoé are movingly courageous, daring to reimagine and immerse themselves in desires that can instill hope, love, desperation, but also ecstasy. If the cinema magnifies feeling, it magnifies it in every way. Its pleasure is more pleasurable, but its defects are more glaring.[xiii] The cinema allows me to meet these girls and women, which inspires my acts of bravery, too. I share a state of desire with them, with the only difference being that they bravely show me theirs. I feel I ought to reach a hand out to them, filling in the sympathy and love the world owes them. “In the theater I am always I,” a perceptive French woman once told this writer, “but in the cinema I dissolve into all things and beings.”[xiv]
Author Biography
Linh Ngoc Bui is a student at Mount Holyoke College.
[i] Daney, Serge. Postcards from the Cinema. Translated by Ann Goldstein. Berg, 2007, p. 101.
[ii] hooks, bell. “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators.” Black Looks: Race and Representation, South End Press, 1992, p. 116.
[iii] Baldwin, James. “Congo Square.” The Devil Finds Work: An Essay, Vintage Books, 1976, p. 31.
[iv] Gay, Ross. “Joy Is Such a Human Madness.” The Book of Delights, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2019, p. 49.
[v] McKim, Kristi. “Moving Away and Circling Back: On Knight of Cups.” New England Review, vol. 39, no 2, 2018, pp. 61-72. https://doi.org/10.1353/ner.2018.0042, p. 64.
[vi] Nelson, Maggie. Bluets. Wave Books, 2009, p. 15.
[vii] Nelson, p. 18.
[viii] Pollock, Griselda. “Writing from the Heart.” Writing Otherwise: Experiments in Cultural Criticism, edited by Jackie Stacey and Janet Wolff, Manchester University Press, 2013, p. 24.
[ix] Gay, p. 49.
[x] Daney, p. 103.
[xi] Gay, p. 44.
[xii] Nelson, p. 14.
[xiii] Epstein, Jean. “Magnification.” French Film Theory and Criticism, edited by Richard Abel, Princeton University Press, 1993, p. 240.
[xiv] Kracauer, Siegfried. “The Spectator.” Theory of Film. Princeton University Press, 1960, p. 159.
