Anatomy of a Fall: Some Thoughts

Maybe it’s because I identify so strongly these days with a woman unfairly and viciously vilified and who stands to lose everything that I loved this movie the way that I did. Also: the mother of an only child, a son, who is musical. Also: A writer whose husband is a writer and whose relationship with him has at times been volatile (though there has been no better support through the shitstorm I’m currently groping my way through than him). Also: I am not wearing makeup these days either and perpetually look as if I’d been backed over again and again by Jeremy Renner’s Pistenbully snow groomer. It was especially shocking to see my pig-eyed self onscreen yesterday during my only job interview to date. Note that Pistenbully is now the word I secretly use to refer to my tormentors.

Let's blame the woman

The movie hit on so many powerful and recognizable themes. The woman who relocates for her husband and then is blamed when things go wrong. The woman who must suffer for the fact that she’s more successful than her husband. The woman who is expected to give up sex just because her husband does. The woman who must somehow grapple with her husband’s lack of attention to the family in favor of artistic pursuit that, in this case, leads to tragedy. The woman not in control of her own destiny. The woman forced to humiliate herself to save herself. French people smoking cigarettes and drinking wine and flirting with each other. What more do you need in a movie, really, except a blue-eyed dog named Snoop? But then, I love crime stories and will obsessively bingewatch Forensics Files eps consisting of bad police video footage of ransacked trailers with Blockbuster cassettes and frozen food containers strewn on the floor and blood spatter on the walls

Making the invisible visible

A friend says she saw Sandra Hüller, the star of Anatomy of a Fall in which she plays a character also named Sandra, sitting alone in a bar recently and that she was so normal as to be nearly unrecognizable. She wondered if it maybe wasn’t even her though she eventually convinced herself it was. If I ever become famous for anything other than being unfairly and viciously vilified, that’s how I’d like to move through the world except at the Oscars, where I’d maybe wear the sparkly pinstriped pantsuit her character's creator wore rather than the winged Schiaparelli gown she chose instead. Not there’s any chance of that happening, though I do sometimes fantasize about writing a novel in which I’m the Sandra Hüller character.

Yesterday, I returned to the Center for Fiction with my friend to attend a writing event. The schedule was this: Grab a glass of wine, write for 45 minutes, take a break for 15 minutes, write again for 45 minutes. My friend and I managed to stay for the first session, during which I scribbled continuously like some Victorian widow communing with her dead husband in an actual notebook purchased at the on-premise bookshop (because I can barely remember my name right now, I forgot to bring the necessary tools with me). I wrote about my experience filing my first police report, which I hope might be a chapter in my novel about all of this.

Writing away the pain

Autofiction seems to be all the rage these days, though not everyone is a fan. (Wow, did this review dropkick a hornet’s nest into the literary world, and while I haven’t read any of Oyler’s work other than a review that made me aware she is another Maylis de Kerangal stan and a more recent piece that made me feel slightly less paralyzingly neurotic than I always assumed I was, she seems probably too prickly and maybe too judgy about the olds to meet me in a bar while glancing surreptitiously at Sandra Hülller. Anyway, I’m no Oyler but I did enjoy the exercise, which included some real details—a janitor using a plastic jack-o-lantern as a bucket with which to mop the floor—and some fake ones. So I suppose I am a budding practitioner of autofiction whether I like it or will ever be paid for it or not.)

But back to the movie. I cheered for Sandra at the end and for Snoop, who survived a near overdose, something I came closer to than I like to admit. It convinced me that the Pistenbully will one day stop (here's Jeremy Renner singing about almond milk as proof of that) and that there is life after trauma after all, life with purpose and laughter and fulfillment. Maybe I’ll write about that one day. To quote Sandra Hüller, I am not a monster.