The winds of memory
Aftersun, John 3:8 and the nostalgic temperament
On Tuesday I watched Charlotte Wells’ masterful debut film Aftersun. It wasn’t what I expected it to be, but I finished it knowing I just witnessed something both important and impenetrable. But that night, I had a bizarre dream about my father, who died in 2016. Unlike Calum, the young father in Aftersun, my father was fairly old when I was born. Regardless, I abruptly woke from the dream before sunrise with the images from the dream and the images from Aftersun burning their crossed wires into my mind which stripped my heart of all its defenses.
Earthly life is a lesson in impermanence. Cinema, at its most sublime, is an idealistic art form, one that seeks to transfigure Memory from its broken impermanent form into Art, something that connects Earth with the heavens. But the great films always fail at this somewhat despite their efforts, and it is this semi-failure that we perceive as Beauty. When films are too squeaky-clean and resolute in their pursuit of an ideal, we roll our eyes with the credits.
When I think of my most beautiful and heart-aching moments at the cinema, I always return to my favorite passage from the Gospel of John:
“The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” (John 3:8 ESV)
I’m sure the theologians and Greek scholars got this one all figured out, but I prefer to riff imaginatively and perhaps irresponsibly here. So, I wonder if by the “wind,” Jesus is referring to Memory. Winds carry smells, and smell is perhaps the greatest trigger of Memory out of all the senses. We have a whiff of an autumn breeze and are completely transported to a different time for a moment, before it quickly passes away. Such is the nature of Memory.
One of our greatest desires is to hold onto the memories which we hold dear. But our witness to Memory’s transformation over time teaches us more about life than any transitory embrace of a memory. First, it is boldly fresh like a ripe fruit or warm fire. Later, it is distant and missed like a Prodigal Son — or like in Aftersun, a Prodigal Father. Occasionally, by strange graces, by the winds, it falls back into our arms like an infant or a precious gem. And then, gone once more. We do not know where it comes from or where it goes after it leaves us yet again.
For Dante, Memory transfigured and purified is one of the desires of those in Purgatory, as he addresses the shadowy figures of the Envy terrace —
“O people assured of seeing light on high / sole object stirring your desire / so grace may soon dissolve the scum / that fouls your conscience, and the stream / of memory flows through it pure…”1
In earthly life, Memory is like air - transitory, chaotic, impossible to grab a hold of. In Dante’s vision, the heavenly light transmutes Memory into the element of water, which “flows” like a gentle stream, washing away the scum of sin. We can collect the water from a stream, but we cannot hold the wind. This stream, I imagine, is like the memory of the original unity in Eden. I imagine Eden filled with many streams and rivers which gave structure and direction, paths in which Adam can walk along as he explores the garden, and trace his way back to any starting point using the stream. Memory is fixed upon the ground. Nothing on Earth is granted that security.
In Aftersun, Memory is solidified not upon Edenic streams but upon camcorder video tapes, which an adult Sophie uses to piece together the lost recollections of her last childhood vacation with her youthful yet troubled father Calum. Scanning the old tapes for some answer as to who her father was, all she could find was the mundane — her 11 year-old self ironically poking fun at her father’s age (when he was only 30) and her father playfully, yet with a hint of solemnity, engaging with her tweenish boisterousness. Very little in the tapes themselves can be interpreted with the hidden grief that carries the atmosphere of the film for the viewer.
This becomes what is most stunning about the film itself — how mundane it seems, and how we are unable to witness any Memory (especially as depicted in Cinema) as merely banal. Part of the genius of Aftersun lies in the ineffable feeling throughout that something bad will happen, yet the fact that nothing explicitly “dramatic” or dire occurs illuminates something far darker — that not only do our memories refuse to have fixed resolutions, they refuse to have fixed tragedies. Often we are left, as adult Sophie is at the end of the film, turning off the TV playing the old video tapes, not in a cocoon of catharsis but in the banality and ambiguity of our blue-gray contemporary living rooms.
In a year full of nostalgic films — from the Boomer artist-as-a-young-man films of Armaggedon Time and The Fabelmans, to even the audience favorite Everything Everywhere All At Once (which was clearly nostalgic for the lost era of “instant classics” such as The Matrix) — I am impressed that Aftersun writer-director Charlotte Wells, a member of perhaps the most nostalgia-poisoned generation (millennials), opted to make such an anti-nostalgia film. I have spoken about the nostalgic temperament in a previous essay (especially as it relates to the development of sexuality), and everything about the innards of Aftersun makes it perfect fuel for the flame of the nostalgic temperament, yet Wells resists. One of the primary vices of the nostalgic temperament is to use the memories of youth merely as a tool to solidify and vindicate one’s adult identity and create continuity going forward. However, the film prudently pays zero attention to adult Sophie’s life. This allows the viewer to interpret the vacation memories not as “formative” but as incidental. Many of the memories in the resort depict the early signs of tween Sophie’s developing same-sex attraction, which is then confirmed in a flash-forward to the present-day Sophie rolling out of bed, seemingly emerging from a grief-stricken nightmare, her female partner by her side. But Sophie doesn’t look at her partner, despite her partner’s concerns. There is not a hint in this film of a sexually-repressed adolescence leading to a happy and relieved identity-driven adulthood, like many LGBTQ+ coming-of-age dramas like to preach. Sophie’s lesbianism is completely in the periphery, and perhaps even a distraction — a dust that the winds of memory blow away at the slightest recollection of a forgotten and ossified parental love.
The recurring sequences of the strobe-lit rave is one of the most affecting images I’ve ever seen in cinema. It is hyper-sensory, yet utterly unreal. It is like Memory, capturing freeze-frames of figures, where even the most accidental of poses is electrified with the lightning strikes of the strobes. But as soon as the figure on the dance-floor is electrified, it disappears into darkness. There is not enough time to discern any details about the figure. When adult Sophie sees her father on the dance-floor, there is a sense (at least from my first viewing) that the age of her father is ambiguous. He could still be 31, or 51. The strobe lights can make one seems to have gray hair or wrinkles, or not. He’s neither dead nor alive, but a secret third thing. Calum is like a soul lost in Purgatory, looking in all directions, mouth agape. And this all leads to the ending — oh my goodness. The stunning use of “Under Pressure” allows, for the first and final time in the film, the simultaneous collision of the past and the present as the original instrumental disappears and is replaced by Oliver Coates’ swelling strings, while Freddie Mercury croons “Why can’t we give love, give love, give love…. give love….” into a washed out reverb. At the collision of timelines, the memories flow like the Edenic stream. But as always, it ends in the present moment, Sophie in the rave looking to her side, and cuts to black. And finally, in a camcorder coda and stunning final shot, we are left with an ambiguous ending. We didn’t know where this wind came from — we still know so little about Sophie and her father, and what triggered Sophie to look through the old tapes — and by the end, despite all the anticipations through the film that we would be granted some sort of present-day clarification, the wind has left and gone where it wished. But we heard its sound — and damn. What an unforgettable sound it was.
Purgatorio Canto XIII, 86-90, trans. Hollander