On beginning again, again

and the seasons, they go round and round

I’ve been thinking a lot about young girls, and young boys who become adult men, and the issues of power and control this week.

“Oh, you should tell me about the film now,” says my spouse Janyce. We’re sitting outdoors at a restaurant in Harvard Square, catching bits of conversation as people walk by on the sidewalk right next to our table. It’s 5:15 on a Friday night in late October and warm enough to sit outside.

“So, the artist used a looped soundtrack with a man’s voice repeating the same phrase over and over and spliced this together with the sound of running water, footsteps, bits of classical music— oh and there was this high-pitched siren running in the background, too” I say.

I’m gesticulating with my hands a bit. Harvard students walk past our table. I glance across the street to the spindly tree trunks captured in the sidewalk concrete and catch a bit of the yellow leaves shaking and glinting in the sun. Earlier in the day, I stopped over at the List Visual Arts Center on MIT’s campus to see the new exhibition titled: “Beginning Again, Again,” a five-decade survey of the artist Leslie Thornton’s films and videos. She was a graduate student at MIT in the mid-1970s and this is the first retrospective of her work in a museum. I had time to watch just one of her very early short films. I was enraptured in the darkened museum, with headphones on, standing before a series of repeated images and sounds from one of her old 16mm films that she had transferred to video.

I used to make films like this.

“In Jennifer, Where Are You? (1981), ‘Thornton contends with the basic conditions of representation in film and how the camera itself wields power,’” I say, reading the website out loud to Janyce who is leaning back in her chair and sipping her cocktail.

“Here’s another one, ‘Thornton presents a carefully structured comment on the formation of young female identity.’ I say, reading from my phone. “Hmmm, I don’t know. The whole thing seemed much more sinister to me.”

“The formation of a young girl’s identity is sinister,” says Janyce.

“You’re right about that,” I say, just as the waitress places a large green salad with golden beets and pickled radishes in the center of the table.

A still from Leslie Thornton’s 16mm film “Jennifer, Where Are You”

“They found the remains of Brian Laundrie in that Florida reserve.”

“Seriously? It’s really him?” she says.

“Confirmed by dental records, only a day ago,” I say.

I’ve been thinking a lot about young girls, and young boys who become adult men, and the issues of power and control this week. Of course, like everyone else, I have my theories about what happened to this young couple who were traveling around the country this summer in a van and posting their adventures on Instagram. I think it was a classic domestic abuse scenario. A young girl diminishing what she knows to be true in her gut. A young boy unable to see the blind spot of his own control issues. And a horrible outcome, like a foreshadowed film loop full of sounds and images of power and acquiescence.

Last week, Janyce and I binged-watched an excellent series on Netflix called Maid. There’s a lot to like about it— a killer cast, stellar performances, and a great music soundtrack. It’s also a little bit of a dramedy, although nothing is funny about it. But some of the scenes are filmed with a bit of whimsy to them. At one point, the young female protagonist Alex literally sinks into the smelly couch and disappears into a deep pit. An apt metaphor for her return to the abusive relationship she had successfully run away from once before.

What really stood out to me was a scene with Alex’s father, a recovered alcoholic, and a born-again Christian. His character portrays a grown man who remade his life and started over with a new family. Alex has trust issues with him because she has flashback memories of how he was also abusive to her mom. But there is one arresting scene in the series when she asks her estranged father, who has recently witnessed a tense and frightening dinner-time scene between her and her boyfriend, to vouch for her in court. She says to him, “You can tell the court that I was abused, because you were there.”

Yet, he tells her that he can’t. Because he doesn’t see it that way. Instead he says, “I only saw a young couple going through a rough patch.” Wow. To me, this was the most pivotal and important moment in the whole series. Here was a white man, despite all of his own struggles and successes overcoming his addictions and past transgressions, who still JUST. CAN’T. SEE. IT. It’s his privileged and patriarchal blind spot.

I think I liked Maid so much because the female protagonist prevails in the end. Throughout the entire series, the female character is trying to begin again, and again, so she can finally go to the college she was admitted to years ago. I also think I am obsessed over the Petito/Laundrie affair because no one prevails in the end. There’s a Shakespearian-like tragedy to it all—two young lovers, both dead now, and a mystery never to be solved. This is maybe why it resonates so insistently in popular culture and in my mind. And I’m energized by watching an old film from an artist who years ago dealt with all of these same issues, the same ones I thought about, too, and made films with repetition, and about female representation. I’m still thinking about all of that now. Kind of makes me want to begin again, again.

In Thornton’s practice: an accumulation and repetition of images and language and a radically open-ended approach to observing, processing, and understanding.

Here’s an excerpt from Jennifer, Where Are You