I didn’t know any better. My first day of graduate school I sat down in my advisors’ office while she poured me a cup of bitter tea that ended up tasting a little too much like bark. As she poured, she discussed the variety of classes that I could take in my first semester. After deciding my third class, she told me to take Asian Theatre, a subject that I knew very little about (you could say I knew “Noh-thing”). She said I’d like the Professor and I might have my mind opened up. Four months later, after hours of taxing study that blew my mind at least once a night, she was right. The class had gotten me through a rocky start to graduate school complete with three concussions, two hospital visits, and one dog attack. As the class came to an end my classmates and I each had to perform a selection from one of the art forms we had learned about in the course of the year. I chose Butoh, a spiritual-based, highly specialized form of dance that arose (almost quite literally) out of the Japanese ashes of WW II. The art form is quite difficult to define and covers a variety of issues including grotesque body imagery, taboo topics, and an artistic connection with “distress”. Artists are usually clad in white body paint, which can be quiet disturbing, and dances are filled with slow hyper-controlled, sometimes manic, motion. Somehow I was supposed to perform it.
Performing Butoh changed my life.
My performance lasted five minutes and thirty-two seconds and I’m pretty sure I never got up off the ground. Still, when I was done, I was physically and mentally exhausted, covered in pain, and on the verge of tears. It was the first and only time in my life that a piece of art had transformed into something else; something more. For me it was a religious experience. Somehow I had been transported from my body, like detaching your soul but still feeling both at the same time. It was something I’ll never be able to explain and it most certainly will never happen again. Or so I thought.
Last night it happened again.
And I was watching a science fiction movie about aliens.
Last night I saw God in an Iowa movie theatre and I cannot tell you why. Before you get worried about me, no, I did not see Jesus or a guy on a cloud with a long beard. I didn’t actually “see” anything other than a very good movie. The film is called Arrival starring Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner and directed by Denis Villeneuve. As I walked out of the theatre, after nearly ten minutes of silence, I turned to my friend and said, “that’s the best movie I’ve ever seen.” Honestly, that might be a tad hyperbolic. I’m sure if I watched the film from a critical perspective I’d find a few problems with the script, the plot-twist probably doesn’t actually make sense, and the soldier’s acting might have been a bit too stock, but critically and personally I know two things to be true. The first, critically, is that Villeneuve might be the best working director on the planet. Prisoners, Enemy, Sicario, and now Arrival are masterpieces in directing. Even though I was not a fan of the film Sicario, I still walked away from it saying that the director and writer are geniuses (no wonder by favorite two movies of the year are Arrival (same director) and Hell or High Water (same writer). The second thing I know to be true is personal. This film has changed my life.
By mid-way through the movie I was crying, and it takes a lot of me to cry in a movie theatre. Hell, it takes a lot for me to cry in general. In fact, I can count on two hands the number of times I’ve cried in five years. By the time the film was over, I couldn’t see because my eyes were filled with tears. This movie was a religious experience for me. I cannot tell you why. I can’t even explain it, but I know something happened to me last night in the theatre. It was like I was no longer in control of my emotions or my body or better put like I could swap senses. Like I felt language and I spoke feelings. Almost like I was inhabited by a language that transcends the ways in which we conceive that language. And if this all sounds weird (it is) something similar to my experience is experienced by a character in the film.
Did I have a cosmic connection with a movie?
Or am I just so overwhelmed by the events of the past few weeks that I cried while watching a film?
I’m not sure and I’ll never be quite sure.
One of the two founders of Butoh, Hijikata Tatsumi described Butoh as “a corpse reaching out for life.” The performance does not lie in the achievement of life, but rather in the reach. It is through silence and strife and pain that we reach out for hope. We don’t actually have to achieve our end goal to accomplish it; the reach itself is the goal. How does an artist explain such a complex thought/feeling? They can’t, so instead they create a spiritual dance that transcends words to create their own understanding of language and communication.
For me, Arrival was a more than a movie. It was a form of Butoh.
Or maybe it was just a film and I’m a rambling lunatic. Watch the movie and find out for yourself.
