An arrival on the way: 'The Stranger' (1991)
Satyajit Ray's last film makes me wonder what it means to get somewhere.
The Stranger (Agantuk) (1991), dir. Satyajit Ray, India
I see a number of arrivals—
A plate of lacy cookies, butterfly wings as big as my head, and a new tenor over lunch: “What are those!” “Fancy crisps.” They light the air, mutton cast aside, a bright yellow flame. Why do I have to watch the servant pass them under my nose? They don’t appear poof! in front of Uncle (Utpal Dutt) like the courses of an aristocrat’s dinner party, which relies on magic to signal opulence. Wealth makes things materialize, but the fancy crisps warn: watch out, something new will be here soon.
A big, square leather bag moves from hand to bedpost. An old-fashioned camera, piles of beaded necklaces from Delhi, a solid glass orb, and a dancing bronze goddess might tumble out. No, foreign coins! Greek drachmae and Peruvian soles. But once they’re safe back in their pouch, why do I watch the bag move, like the crisps? At least they will be eaten! It’s a gun that no one fires, or a plane taxiing around the tarmac.
Uncle arrives without ceremony but full of suspicion. He might not even be Anila’s (Mamata Shankar) uncle. When I get to my cousins’ house for the holidays, I pour a drink and plop on the couch. This is it—I’m here. Anila gives Uncle a knockoff Coke, “Thums Up” (“This isn’t how you spell ‘thumbs up,’ is it?”), and all the air in the room slumps over the furniture.
I met more of Dan’s friends from camp this weekend. They all asked if I would visit. Of course; I have such an image of what it looks like, I can’t wait to see how it compares. I imagined the bar I would meet them at as warm wood and pool tables. When I got there, I saw a pink neon sign on the wall that said, “Yes, I am a Rascal,” and everything was covered in lips. One of the friends told me that crunching up the road to camp fills his eyes with tears. I see him crying with the sun in his face, looking at the phantom camp behind me.
When Dan leaves for the summer, what will I feel? What emptiness will fill our house? It’s beginning to feel real now. That time—my lonely summer approaches. By calling it lonely I could say that it’s already here. This presence (of an image) and absence (of another, the “real” one) tears at the concept of arrival. I can’t use it as one does in “ETA”—a point—but as the French do: “J’arrive!” I’m on my way.
Sitting around a tree under a heavy sun, Satyaki (Bikram Bhattacharya) and his friends listen to his great-Uncle tell them about the magic of solar eclipses. Coins illustrate the idea:
Tell me, which is bigger, the moon or the sun? (The sun!) How do you know? Let’s say this is the moon and this is the sun. Up in the sky, they look the same size, don’t they? (That’s because the sun is much farther away!) How much farther? I’ll tell you.
The sun is 95 million miles away. And the moon is merely 500,000 miles away. (That’s why they look the same size!) What if the moon was not 500,000 miles away, but only 200,000 miles away? (The the moon would look bigger!) But that didn’t happen. The moon is exactly at a distance such that it looks just the same size as the sun. That is why when the moon moves in front of the sun, slowly covering all of it, it is like two matching discs. (A solar eclipse!)
How does it all work so perfectly? Can you tell me? You don’t have the answer. Ask the most learned man in the world and even he will not have the answer. Nobody knows. It is a mystery. I would say it is one of the greatest mysteries of the universe. The sun and the moon, the king of the day and the queen of the night, and the shadow of the earth on the moon. All of them, exactly the same size. Magic!
I had no glasses, so I watched the eclipse on Monday with my back turned. A new kind of light crept up over my sleepy hour before work, long evening shadows in white afternoon sun and a grim weightlessness. It came, punctured a hole in the rhythm of the day, and went, and I rode my bike to work just a little bit faster.
At a media studies conference this weekend, several panelists talked about the concept of non-arrival. We work towards things which escape us and our writing always seems incomplete. I asked the panelists how they manage to work despite the fact that their work integrates this concept. (I always smile when I think about Georges Bataille writing Inner Experience, one of the chapters of which he opens with an outline only to admit that, because his philosophy challenges project and endpoints, he couldn’t actually write past the outline’s first step.1) This is part of the process, they assured me, something which they all seemed to understand but which I have failed to grasp.2 A process: what happens outside of arrival? The end as a gaping void which I can’t fill when I intend to. The goal, or the elusive particle-wave.
Uncle reminds Satyaki, “You’ve promised never to become something,”—
Anila plays the tanpura and sings for her guests in the sitting room: “Who is playing the veena in such dulcet tones?” A resonance fills my head with strings. They multiply and scatter in dust. Uncle, Anila’s husband, his friend, Satyaki, the panelists, the sun and the moon, camp, my lonely summer fall—“my heart opens up like the morning lotus”—off the face of the earth. The blue god on red, the festival, then the procession. Easy does it. Mint green: “A fresh breeze blows,” time has not stopped but surged up from pure presence, “and fills everything with new life.”
—Anila tells Uncle, “Just promise to write when you’ve arrived.”
See other films from: 1990s | India
Cross Dissolve is my blog about film, how it makes me feel, and how I see it reappear in my life—how movies and living dissolve into one another. Please subscribe if you enjoyed today’s entry. Thank you for reading!
Love, Tyler
“The opposition to the idea of project—which takes up an essential part of this book—is so necessary within me that having written the detailed plan for this introduction, I can no longer hold myself to it.”
One panelist even called it erotic.
my favorite writer