Let’s talk.

Yeah.

?

Talk about how Beau is Afraid?contributed to one of my calmest nights of the year.?

Starring?Joaquin Pheonix, directed and written by Ari Aster, this movie was his third. Man just began his journey but I doubt if I am ever going to see any more like this. Man just used up the trust constructed by his previous two with this attempt [Midsummer, Hereditary].?

So, what’s it about?

Hate to do the film synopsis, so I am just going to paste what is written in the IMDb:

Following the sudden death of his mother, a mild-mannered but anxiety-ridden man confronts his darkest fears as he embarks on an epic, Kafkaesque?odyssey back home.

Driven and propelled by strong personal sensations and delusions, this 3-hour comedy-drama horror provided a self-indulgent anxious yet hilarious experience for me.?

Though I have said that this movie brought peace in me, it is however, wrapped with figurative anxiety from the first perspective of Beau. From the sweaty dude about to drop on your naked body to the sound of an approaching naked knife-wielding maniac. Anxiety rings every single cell of me.?

And unlike other movies, there is no cutaway to how a normal person on the outside is perceiving and therefore no confirmation of what is really happening in reality. The whole movie experience is very much like doctors showing you a sound and image sample to get a designated neuro reaction from you.?

I can see so many people hate this movie, listing it as one of the Ten Worst Movies I’ve Ever Seen. I couldn’t care less but the point here is, I get it. This movie, for me, is very much like some of the modern temporary art displays. There will be people not getting what is the fun of a lady just sitting here cutting papers for hours when we already have a shredder now?[Sachiko Abe]. But for audiences already hypnotised by the director like me, it is a weird metaphorical existential journey yet one of the best catharsis that ever existed.?

The display of the heightened version of reality is no stranger to us. Here it is very much like a lucid version of Mulholland Drive, something I would call a Nightmare logic. And this instantly reminds me of another horror movie years ago:??I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020). Directed and written by Charlie Kaufman, this movie was based on the book by Iain Reid about a nameless young woman travelling with her new boyfriend Jake to his parents’ secluded farm. Or let’s just say it is where it starts from.?

Not going to do the overview, but Charlie Kaufman is a master of making puzzle movies. Different people have different theories and based on my take: It is a fantasized road trip inside the head of an older version of Jake the boyfriend but not exactly this Jake. Jake in reality is a janitor of a school that appears throughout the movie, while the boyfriend Jake is also one of the fictional characters just like the nameless young woman. The whole story is basically him recounting his regrets, obsessions, and memories before he dies. For that young woman though, it is a story where a character realises her fictional identity and tries to escape from the end of the world.?

Just like Beau’s world was delicately designed against him. The whole world constructed by Jake is packed with media like movies, books, poems, paintings etc.?from reality. Almost every key opinion is referred to and supported by such a second source. The most representative scene is when the young woman finally goes down to the basement, she finds a series of paintings with others’ names on the wall. They are the same ones that she claimed as her own when she shared them at the dinner table a few minutes ago. She then realizes that the paintings were never hers and nothing was ever hers not even herself.?

That is when she begins to ask where she is and who she is. However, there’s no escape for a creation when its creator decides it is time to end things and it is time for the trial. In the twisted and new versions of The Truman Show created by these two directors, the creations died in it.?

And we cannot say we are any better than that being a creation ourselves.?

Defined by what we consume and cultivated by someone else’s doing, we also are a product of everything and nothing.?

There is hardly any evidence suggesting it is merely a fictional idea. Influenced and constructed by what is given to us, we struggle with attachment types, bad relationships, mental illness, and so many things just snowed on us.

The pain became so big that we were utterly helpless in helping ourselves and we then turned to our own fantasies. When the clock stops in real life, no matter how hard we drive in our fantasized realm, all we see is going to be the same snow, the same landscape, and the same patterns. In the woods, Beau goes on a fanciful journey near the end, depicting the what-ifs when he can finally make his way out to the reality beyond the Truman Show. However, the oversimplified theatrical sets and the duplicating images with the audiences already indicate it is nothing but another illusional pity party.?

The only option then is to keep driving, keep running, until the path has been snowed over that it is impossible to travel, until the hyper-self-awareness covers up everything else that living became unbearable. But isn’t that exactly what we are doing now at this moment??

Driving.?

And when I realized that, I found peace in the nights.?