by
Haley Mlotek
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Letter from an Unknown Woman is a story about love that can only exist beside an object of affection—love that takes shape around what’s possible, wanting more than what you have while lacking the bravery to live without it. The same month I saw the film for the first time, the critic Molly Haskell published a brutal essay about it, on the topic of soulmates and other betrayals of repetition: “The philanderer is like the serial killer, compelled to repeat his pattern,” she said. “The woman, too, shares the pathology of the compulsive criminal, her sacred love the equivalent of his sacred vice, both thrill to the sense of superiority it gives them over ordinary unsuspecting mortals.”
The theater was full of women in fur coats sitting in groups of two and three—most of them in their sixties or older—and I sat in one of the few remaining seats available by the front of the screen, all that was left twenty minutes before the movie even started. The audience for Unknown Woman was just like the audience at Waiting to Exhale—they knew every line by heart. Mine broke, again and again, thinking about the superiority and the stupidity of that sacred self-righteousness Haskell described. She ends her essay by warning how this form of romance will wreck any life it enters. “How better to own your passion, keep it pure and undefiled, and thus in line with image of self as selfless love than unrequited love?!” she writes, exclamation her own. The untried and the untested, to those lost in their own obsessions, at least mimic the transcendent. Sometimes I look at a couple and I think I can see what it was they thought they wanted—can see so clearly that to each other they represent great risk or great reward, even when the compromises they’ve made are just as transparent.
So I had been watched exactly the way I had wanted to be, like a character in a book—without my knowing but without embarrassing myself, by someone who cared what I thought as well as liked hearing what I had to say. I was too lucky, I thought, too lucky and so inevitably cursed. No one had ever wanted me before and the logic followed, I thought, that no one ever would again. Well, so what? This was all I wanted—this boy who already seemed way more like an adult than I was, solid and reliable and believing in a future I doubted would ever come for me. He got good grades, had fun with his friends, participated in extracurricular activities, and got his driver’s license. He wanted to be a filmmaker and so he made films. He talked about going to Los Angeles. “Maybe I could come with you,” I said.
“Maybe…” he said, and so I didn’t mention it again, but thought about little apartment complexes with palm trees bookending the driveway, getting a job as a makeup artist. Everyone had seemed to suggest that being with someone who wanted to be with you would result in some sort of life-altering change, some feeling of elation or belonging, and they were right. Now that he was there I could think about a future: his. I wanted to go into what was next if it meant I could do it with him.
When I did finally understand that there are two sides to every story, it required letting go of my previous understanding, which is that very basic version fit for kids and other precious idiots. It is not a maxim designed to teach you that no one is wholly right or wrong. It is only that no one ever believes themselves to be entirely one or the other. The side of the story that they tell depends on their ability to consider whether the same is true of other people. Whether you are married or divorced, single or committed, in love or brokenhearted—that, too, is just a list of qualities that can never be the sum total of what a person is. We are always capable of being more than one.
I thought I chose divorce as a subject because it was necessary, by which I meant there was still something unseen and unsaid about what was everywhere. I thought I chose divorce because of circumstances—my grandmother, my mother, my marriage. I had not chosen to inherit or live those stories of separation, but I had, and so the resulting calculations suggest: Shouldn’t I make use of them somehow? I took many small, precious objects that had belonged to my grandmother after she died, but the only one I keep on me everywhere I go, safe in a small zipped pouch, is her gold seashell measuring tape.
Divorce was the subject that chose me. Right inside it was everything I wanted and feared the most: decisions and choices, isolation and entrapment, loneliness and romance. The terror of wondering what story my life would be was a perfect distraction from wondering why life needed to be a story.
The achievement of the market consensus was to produce a mental world in which alternatives to capitalism did not seem conceivable - much less attainable. The key, it seems, was to make the principle of rapacity and plunder into a new catechism for economic policymaking, and then to watch our culture collapse into miniature idols and our technology shrink from prosthetic gods to prosthetic pals. Cutting taxes for the rich and slashing social spending, downsizing workers and deregulating financial [...] its cultural power has become so concentrated among our leaders that it's produced a nearly unbroken fog over the past twenty-five years, shrouding a tiny elite from the disasters inflicted on the rest of us.
Criticism bearing our abrasive tone and uncompromising stance is sometimes derided as lowdown or (worse yet) easy. But the truth is, this kind of criticism is the hardest thing in the world to produce if you happen to live in a culture ruled by the dicta of positive thinking and dread of the existential crime of being negative [...] your compliance is ultimately expected, and the enterprise of criticism of America has to contend with a culture of consensus that reduces conflicts over values to matters of individual attitude.
on the benefits of criticism - could be useful for syntax error. similar to culture at FB actually
(similar to logic mag, on criticism being the highest form of love)
A mix of big corporations and investor-backed startup enterprises gathers around the shared strategic value of innovation, operating in an environment rich with public resources. The triumphant arc is chronicled in the rapid development of some new product and said to be personified by a Zuckerberg or a Gates, a captain of coding brimming with cowboy grit, pressing onward into the computerized frontier and all. The hero is the one who creates something from nothing, thus resolving the eternal pundit riddles of American life like Can we keep our edge? and Are we still number one?
love how it connects the American desire for (and fetishisation of) innovation with what it means to be American in a world where its global dominance is receding. think about this more, draw it out
This, you see, is how innovation works. Mask political choices in the universalist rhetoric of the market. Purge the surrounding environment of social intelligence. Surge into the space with vested interests masquerading as public ones, and then call in the future for cover.
The Innovation Economy’s futurist model of urban development is, in other words, propaganda for the present system of power—it’s class interest presenting itself in the guise of prosperity, and it appears to be the best that these most liberal of liberal Democrats have to offer to the nation.
Where this fraternity of entrepreneurs and their municipal handlers travel to remodel society in the image of a private company, inequality is synchronized to follow, and liberalism, which once robustly opposed privileges and monopolies, provides cover for ushering out those who haven’t been given the password.
So come along, while there’s still time, and let’s tour the People’s Republic of Zuckerstan. Observe the residents fleeing, the acres being enclosed in office parks and laboratories, the moguls smiling, and the thought leaders humming tidings of the future. Be sure to notice all the ways in which the composite picture doesn’t add up to progress.
I like this writing style: the mix of the theoretical & concrete (in time & space), and the temporal scatteredness more generally
The market has been driving the poor and the working class out of these cities ever since, and the Innovation Economy is finishing them off, cleaning house for the new guests. The cost of housing in Cambridge and Greater Boston has zoomed, with rising rents taking a growing share of dwindling low- and middle-incomes. Partly by design, partly by accident, the corporate consolidation of the housing stock will wind up leaching diversity from neighborhoods by pricing residents out and installing corporate professionals in their place. Innovation means the price of existing goes up.