Maybe it’s not a movement, or one I have only incomplete access to and knowledge of, but if you take a closer look at Per Petterson’s 2005 novel Out Stealing Horses, and Kelly Reichardt’s 2008 film Wendy and Lucy (now on DVD), it seems as if there’s a coherent style in both of them. It’s quiet, and leaves a great deal unspoken, and generally stays in the interior spaces where we plan our next move. Most clearly, the style of storytelling avoids climaxes, and rarely gets heated, to say nothing of overheated. It’s the Still Style. If it were a drink, it would be a cup of green tea.
Of course, as Susan Sontag wrote, “by the rules of fiction, where (unlike life) something has to happen,” something does happen in both of them, but it’s held in check somehow, as if the writers know that epiphanies may strike in fiction, and that emotional clarity is a construct, but that thunderbolts rarely strike in real life. So the action and intrigue and fallout that comes from stealing horses in the novel, and the robbery of Michelle Williams’s character Wendy, while terrible, don’t throw the stories onto the plane of melodrama. Instead, they appear as unfortunate events that the characters have to respond to.
Reichardt provides the clearest realization of this, probably because a movie shows its methods more easily than a novel does. (Backstory: Wendy is a poor woman driving from Muncie, Indiana, to Alaska with her dog Lucy. She plans to get work in a fishery in Alaska since work is so hard to find elsewhere. Wendy and Lucy shows how heartbreakingly cut off from normal society the poor and homeless are.)
Michelle Williams
Throughout the film, when we watch Wendy move alone through Portland, Oregon, where she’s been waylaid, we hear Williams humming a snatch of melody that could pass as a lullaby if the scenes it overlaid weren’t so pitiful. It runs like leitmotif of reassurance against the dejection of her character, like some sort of mantra, of, not exactly keeping her spirits up (which is too trite for this film), but of stoic hopefulness. (The melody, incidentally, was written by Will Oldham, who also stars in the movie, and it’s among the most touching things he’s written. I’ve searched high and low for it, and can’t find that it’s anywhere but in the actual film. Some things still resist internet’s dirty tentacles, apparently.)
The point of this hummed soundtrack isn’t that it’s pretty or compelling, which it is, but that it keeps the emotional temperature down. In one scene, Wendy has made a makeshift bed in the forest, and is wakened by an insane man who’s stealing what she has, and letting loose a crazy philosophy. She’s near the train tracks (and clearly on the wrong side), and a freight train rumbles by, and the camera focuses on Williams’s terror-stricken eyes. (Those eyes are the greatest silent acting since Robert DeNiro’s priest is told of the horrors at a boys’s school in 1996’s Sleepers.) But after, as she’s frantically trying to calm down, we hear her humming this plaintive little melody, and the distance between the distress onscreen and the hollowness of the music paradoxically brings Wendy’s fright and tension closer to us.
Lucy
Petterson’s equivalent of Will Oldham’s melody for Wendy is an adage dispensed by the main character’s father (as translated by Anne Born): “You decide for yourself when it will hurt.” Whenever the boy, Trond, faces a dilemma, he’ll come back to this, and since he’s now 67 in the novel, and retiring some society to live far out in the rural wilderness, he has plenty of time to ruminate on that adage, and how it’s played out in his relationships with his ex-wife, his daughter, and the friends he’s known his entire life, down through the stealing horses episode. (Also like Wendy, Trond is accompanied by a dog, this one with the evocative name Lyra.)
As with Reichardt’s film, Petterson too keeps the drama – such as it is – to a minimum, and the story stays on the most even of even keels throughout. As an exercise in literary craft, it’s eye-blinkingly awesome to comprehend, but Petterson cradles your attention the whole way through as we see Trond always through his own eyes, and seeing his family and memories in his own unsparing mind. His daughter can’t understand his withdrawing, his reluctance to install a phone, but Trond doesn’t try to explain himself.
As we listen to the sound of his mind forming thoughts and remembering his memories, it’s with all the exhilaration of the highs and the despair of the low points evened out. The metaphors accumulate, with the geographical distance between where he once worked and where he now lives standing in for temporal distance, and it begins to feel like you are in a boat at anchor: You feel the boat moving up and down, and yet the shore always remains in the same place.
Put these two works side by side, and you see a subtle way of depicting life, one that cuts through the complications and the sensory onslaught of 24/7 life: the minute-by-minute updates of news (POSTED 14 MINUTES AGO), facebook updates, twitter feeds, text messages, and email. (Three works if you include the short story collection by Jon Raymond which Wendy and Lucy is drawn from, which I haven’t read.) It’s as if they’re creators recognized the Noise, but aren’t going to play by its rules; they’ll go around it, and find a way to you in some other way. Perhaps that’s why they work so well.
As I went back to Out Stealing Horses, I found a note I’d scribbled inside the back cover: “Something must happen, but nothing happens in this book.” Of course, something did, it’s just that Petterson, and Reichardt, don’t shake your collar to get you to see it.
Given the lapse in posting, I’m going to try this new ideal: Take one hour, and write an essay. A few extra minutes can be alloted for editing/tightening, and adding hyperlinks, but it has to be one hour and out. We’ll see if this adds to the blogging productivity ratio.