My first love was not reading. It was gaming. My father had a cyber cafe in the 2000s and I remember spending more time than a teenager should be allowed to in that cafe playing video games like Grand Theft Auto Vice City, San Andreas, Counterstrike, Prince of Persia, Assassin’s Creed, etc., etc. My mother, rightly, deemed my addiction problematic and in an effort to teach me English and get me away from the cafe, set out on a mission to make me read books. She started with Akbar & Birbal stories, and I took to them fantastically. After moving from Khar to Vasai and not having a computer to feed my so-called addiction, reading was the second-best activity I could waste my time on due to my school’s library. The first book I vividly remember reading is Paulo Coelho’s Eleven Minutes; I will be exploring this in a different article if I get around to re-reading it. I read, wrote, plagiarized my first short story to impress my friends and life went on. Then the pandemic hit in waves that never seemed to end, and I could not get myself to read. And, ironically enough, the books, movies and games I consumed during those two years have shaped so much of my being that I sometimes question if any of the realizations I had during those years are authentic.
Thus, began my foray into films and games. I read, too, albeit sparsely. Let’s get into it.
A poet writing a novel has some perks and a lot of disadvantages. Vuong falls into the pitfall of not appealing to an audience that appreciates plot over prose, but it does not matter because I learned not only how to appreciate prose but also my body as a man because of Vuong. Precisely because of this excerpt from the book:
I turned the shower off and, instead of toweling and dressing before the steam on the door mirror cleared, like I normally would, I waited. It was an accident, my beauty revealed to me. I was daydreaming, thinking about the day before, of Trevor and me behind the Chevy, and had stood in the tub with the water off for too long. By the time I stepped out, the boy before the mirror stunned me.
Who was he? I touched the face, its sallow cheeks. I felt my neck, the braid of muscles sloped to collarbones that jutted into stark ridges. The scraped-out ribs sunken as the skin tried to fill its irregular gaps, the sad little heart rippling underneath like a trapped fish. The eyes that wouldn’t match, one too open, the other dazed, slightly lidded, cautious of whatever light was given it. It was everything I hid from, everything that made me want to be a sun, the only thing I knew that had no shadow. And yet, I stayed. I let the mirror hold those flaws—because for once, drying, they were not wrong to me but something that was wanted, that was sought and found among a landscape as enormous as the one I had been lost in all this time. Because the thing about beauty is that it’s only beautiful outside of itself. Seen through a mirror, I viewed my body as another, a boy a few feet away, his expression unmoved, daring the skin to remain as it was, as if the sun, setting, was not already elsewhere, was not in Ohio.
I got what I wanted—a boy swimming toward me. Except I was no shore, Ma. I was driftwood trying to remember what I had broken from to get here.
After reading this part that spans roughly half a page in the 250-page book, I came to the realization I had only seen other people’s bodies as beautiful and had taken the time to look, really look, at every nook and cranny and, woefully, ignored mine.
The process of looking at my body and loving it was not as straightforward as Vuong’s description of his. It came in bits and pieces. The first instinct was to criticize and despite all my attempts to simply look, criticism always came to the fore. I am still not sure when the change came into effect. After shower, right before starting to dry my body, the criticisms stopped, and I simply started to look and appreciate what I was looking at. This is the body I will be spending the next 50 years or so with. Might as well accept it.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a beautiful book. Go read it.
The title of the game comes from the name of the mountain that Madeline wants to climb. It is a challenging mountain that requires a lot of skill from you, the player, and Madeline, the protagonist. Madeline suffers from anxiety and low self-esteem which manifests as her alter-ego, “Badeline”, owing to the mountain’s mysterious powers.
Towards the end of 7C, the second-to-last level and arguably one of the most frustrating one, there is a cute interaction with the Granny who lives on the mountain and has helped Madeline climb it. Here’s the video:
What blew me away in this interaction is the irony of it. This is a game. You are supposed to struggle and then get attached to it! “Funny how we get attached to the struggle.” I admit I was attached; still am. If you look at the time counter on the left, it shows I have spent 86 hours playing on this particular save file. I have accumulated 250 hours in this game over the course of the last three years. I cannot move on from this game. I am still attached to the struggle. I will always be. I used to think that I hate life and all its tedious moments, the hardships, the heartbreak, the setbacks but then why not do away with all of them? Or, as Hamlet puts it, “take arms against a sea of troubles / And by opposing end them.” Because I, just like every human being, contrary to what Hamlet thinks, am attached to the struggle and cannot let go of it. I love the struggle as much as the results they provide. The realization came easily because this level had broken me down mentally and when this interaction was presented, I simply chose to accept it instead of questioning and I am glad that I did.
Celeste is a beautiful game. Go play it.
As you must have already guessed, the unifying theme of all the “art” mentioned here is about accepting parts of your life that are difficult to accept. This film taught me something that I had refused to understand despite my parents’ best efforts at explaining and still have some difficulty doing so: Life goes on. Your pet dies. Life goes on. The pain will fade. You fail an exam. Life goes on. There will be other exams to pass. You lose money. Life goes on. Money comes and goes. Beauty fades. And, still, life never seems to stop.
Even though this film particularly focuses on what it was like for a variety of men and women living in the twentieth century in the United States, you can watch it and still relate to the essence of the film and learn timeless lessons. Good art transcends geographical boundaries and Mike Mills has achieved exactly that.
20th Century Women is a beautiful film. Go watch it.
That’s it, folks. Thank you for reading and if you watch, play or read any of the above recommendations and want to have a chat my DMs are always open. Meanwhile, enjoy this song that I have been hooked on for the last month: