love: Wristcutters & Transatlanticism

Wristcutters: A Love Story (2006) takes place in some kind of afterlife where everyone who's ever committed suicide was put in, but it's really not that different from our own world, or at least how most sad people see our world anyway.

To quote, Mikal says: Do you guys like it here? Who the hell likes being stuck in a place where you can't even smile? It's hot as balls, everybody's an asshole. I just want to go home.

The charm of surreal movies like Wristcutters is how it's so different from ours yet so similar. The movie "made no sense" a lot at a rational point of view (there was a literal abyss at the bottom of a man's car, they have jobs in the afterlife, and cottage cheese, and there are miracles, and the political environment is really rather unsustainable), and yet it's familiar.

The setting is of a gloomy, dead-end afterlife. There are no stars to be seen. People can't smile. It's uncomfortable. Sad to say, a bunch of us in this reality live that way already. Like they're already dead. Wristcutters was sort of a case study of the multitude of ways we deal with that.

The film is about a dude called Zia who embarks on a roadtrip in this weird afterlife town, with his rocker friend Eugene and eccentric hitch hiker Mikal, to search for his ex girlfriend, who had committed suicide months after he did.

It's funny. But in a different way that Tom and Jerry is funny, or SNL. It's funny in the way that death is funny, (Peter Sagal had said in the podcast The Hilarious World of Depression) in that it's not, but you cope with it by laughing.

With dark comedies like Wristcutters, I don't think the objective is for it to be funny like how funny usually is. I think maybe the objective is just for it to be comforting. And Wristcutters was, for me. It's a love story, after all. It's about two people who fall in love, despite having killed themselves and getting stuck in this depressing void of an afterlife.

It's about two people who get a second chance.

For a film about death, Wristcutters is really surprisingly optimistic. What I think it's trying to say simply is that regardless of how low you are in life right now, you may still get a second shot at happiness.

Or a third. Or a fourth. Or a nine hundred and sixteenth. So on.



I would also like to share this wonderful album by Death Cab For Cutie which has been a companion of mine through days now of staring at the ceiling doing nothing.

It's called Transatlanticism, which Urban Dictionary says is about long-distance love with someone usually across the Atlantic Ocean. It makes sense because the album reeks with nostalgia. It seems everything is past tense. Everything is a memory.

I like it because I have a very bad memory. I easily forget things I literally had just said or done a few minutes ago. I can't remember where I read or heard it from, but you supposedly retain memories more effectively when you've attached a strong emotional response to it (e.g. traumatic events). So that means I have trouble remembering things because I have trouble feeling things? Tune in next week on The Weekly Science Show.

But yeah. Death Cab For Cutie. They paint such an accurate portrait of memories. My absolute favorite is Passenger Seat - I see the whole song unfold before my eyes everytime I listen to it. You'll see when you hear it.

Anyway. As someone who has horrible retention skills, it's truly a unique kind of joy to listen to memories in the shape of songs. I hope you give Transatlanticism a listen.


Until next Sunday,

Des