Amy Ponds of the 99% (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
allchildren) wrote2010-06-06 10:52 pm
allchildren) wrote2010-06-06 10:52 pm
Entry tags:
a sort of prayer for some rare grace
I wish I could have posted after watching yesterday. That would have been better.
I was really apprehensive about "Vincent and the Doctor" because not only do the topics of depression and suicide hit extremely close to home, but I also, in my less dropout-y youth, planned on becoming an art historian.
And then they begin with Wheat Field and Crows.
I wrote about that painting once; I mentioned it specifically in this Office fic snippet about Pam taking an art class. It was, I think, the last painting we looked at in my Renaissance to Modern Art survey class. I loved my professor; she was an English lady named Allison and she spoke in the most soothing way with the lights off and the projected piece large and bright on the wall.
Knowing how close he was to his death at the time, it looked like a picture of pain. The wide, choppy brushstrokes and the dark, unfriendly sky -- it seemed so desperate. When I was a teenager, I fell in love with a boy, who I never met, bipolar and brilliant, a legend already when he died at age nineteen. I knew his friends and could meet his brother and read the words of his family, could visit his grave, but he -- the person, Nick -- he was out of my reach forever. I only had his art and that was how I knew him. Looking at the last gasp of Van Gogh's genius, I had that same feeling of listening to the final recordings by Nick.
I was on that side, then; the spectator, the helpless. (Of course, we all have those figures we're too-late spectators to. Vincent, Nick, Marilyn, Kurt, Jimi. Don't we?) I was lucky. Sometimes I didn't feel that way. I am luckier, now, that in my throes I am still safe. I feel less lucky. That's how I know.
I don't have a particular personal connection with Van Gogh, and in a way I'm glad for it. (As Curtis said in Confidential, the closer he became to Vincent, the less likely he'd want to add the monster. And I am close enough to Michelangelo especially but also a bit Picasso that even those few sentences were quite enough, thank you.) And I think Van Gogh is an excellent choice, actually, because how much of his pop cultural legacy is a series of "he so crazy he cut off his EAR" jokes? It is good to rescue him from a long line of derisive, ableist jokes; it is good that they didn't touch on that at all. It is good to make us feel the impact of his loss.
I was so scared, going in, that this episode would tell me that Van Gogh wasn't depressed, that he didn't kill himself, that the Doctor saved him, that depression is cute or romantic or necessary to genius. That it didn't -- such a low bar, when you think about it -- that it gave Vincent his moment without taking away his truth and the truth of so many others -- that's all I could ask for. Amy among the sunflowers and and perfect fucking casting made it good. And Vincent's tears of joy, and holding hands under a starry night, and Bill Nighy talking about reaching through pain to find beauty and even joy, well, that's what elevated this episode. It's something that will be remembered by people who watched it and felt television trying to give them a hug, for a long time to come.
And -- this is where I give up the ghost of pretending this is about Doctor Who per se anymore, who am I kidding, it's all me me me -- it's timely for me, too. Because, hm. There's that "tell me how my id manifests in my fic" meme that just went around. And I didn't participate for several reasons and one of is that, well, I think my fic is pretty transparent. I don't write from a sexy id place exactly (though pretty much all of my adult-rated fics are just that), but -- the more I thought about this the more clear it became to me -- I tend to write about exactly what I want to write about. The fic I'm working on right now is about language and the philosophy thereof; the WNW drabble I wrote a few days ago was about stories; I have Star Trek fics planned about politics and religion. The agenda is on the surface; one might even guess from my writing that I pick what I want to say and then find a canon I can express it through.
Of course, that's not what I actually do at all; in fact, these things do tend to come out in much the same way as the fic "id" -- without me realizing it till I'm finished, planned entirely in my subconscious. What really happens is that I glom onto stories that let light through, so to speak; stories where I can see my stories reflected. Some mean to do it (like, say, Princess Tutu), and some seem to accomplish it only by accident or by my own misinterpretation -- like Harry Potter. This is on my mind, you see, because in uploading my old fic to AO3 one of the first things I wanted to get up there was my first full-length fic ever, written in 2004 and well-nigh unreadable until now thanks to some fucking terrible formatting that my 20-year-old n00by self knew no better than to engage in. I finally fixed it up and got it posted this week, and then was faced with the bewildering question of thematic tags: do I tag for literal metadata-type content only -- Marauders' era, Lily/James, childbirth -- or do I tag for emotional content as well? The stuff that the story is built to house, for the reader to pry out?
No. I didn't tag for that. And if I had tagged it "depression," because it is, in my mind, a story about death and rebirth as portals to and from depression; because the reason Harry Potter got to me in the first place (circa OotP) was because it was, to me, a story about growing up and depression, because I thought after Sirius died his grief would be ever larger, not shoved to the side because JKR didn't feel like pursuing that mood beyond one book -- well. How could I explain why the fic is also about birth and joy and love and friendship? How could I single out one emotion from the others? They don't exist without each other; they don't negate each other.
It just is timely, you see, because I wrote that fic in response to a Frida Kahlo painting; really, I wrote it in response to Frida Kahlo's entire body of work, her whole life and philosophy. What Dr. Black says, he transformed the pain of his tormented life into ecstatic beauty ... to use your passion and pain to portray the ecstasy and joy and magnificence of our world, was not singular; had not never been done before, has been done since. It's easy for Richard Curtis to patly canonize Vincent into one of the greatest men who ever lived because he communicated that well -- but in a way he makes Vincent alone when in this one thing he never was.
This is what I look for in those story-cracks where the light seeps through. This is what I hope for, in all things. This is (although I do not claim to have done it well) why I'm here.
So, yeah, good episode. (You bet your ass I cried.)
I was really apprehensive about "Vincent and the Doctor" because not only do the topics of depression and suicide hit extremely close to home, but I also, in my less dropout-y youth, planned on becoming an art historian.
And then they begin with Wheat Field and Crows.
I wrote about that painting once; I mentioned it specifically in this Office fic snippet about Pam taking an art class. It was, I think, the last painting we looked at in my Renaissance to Modern Art survey class. I loved my professor; she was an English lady named Allison and she spoke in the most soothing way with the lights off and the projected piece large and bright on the wall.
Knowing how close he was to his death at the time, it looked like a picture of pain. The wide, choppy brushstrokes and the dark, unfriendly sky -- it seemed so desperate. When I was a teenager, I fell in love with a boy, who I never met, bipolar and brilliant, a legend already when he died at age nineteen. I knew his friends and could meet his brother and read the words of his family, could visit his grave, but he -- the person, Nick -- he was out of my reach forever. I only had his art and that was how I knew him. Looking at the last gasp of Van Gogh's genius, I had that same feeling of listening to the final recordings by Nick.
I was on that side, then; the spectator, the helpless. (Of course, we all have those figures we're too-late spectators to. Vincent, Nick, Marilyn, Kurt, Jimi. Don't we?) I was lucky. Sometimes I didn't feel that way. I am luckier, now, that in my throes I am still safe. I feel less lucky. That's how I know.
I don't have a particular personal connection with Van Gogh, and in a way I'm glad for it. (As Curtis said in Confidential, the closer he became to Vincent, the less likely he'd want to add the monster. And I am close enough to Michelangelo especially but also a bit Picasso that even those few sentences were quite enough, thank you.) And I think Van Gogh is an excellent choice, actually, because how much of his pop cultural legacy is a series of "he so crazy he cut off his EAR" jokes? It is good to rescue him from a long line of derisive, ableist jokes; it is good that they didn't touch on that at all. It is good to make us feel the impact of his loss.
I was so scared, going in, that this episode would tell me that Van Gogh wasn't depressed, that he didn't kill himself, that the Doctor saved him, that depression is cute or romantic or necessary to genius. That it didn't -- such a low bar, when you think about it -- that it gave Vincent his moment without taking away his truth and the truth of so many others -- that's all I could ask for. Amy among the sunflowers and and perfect fucking casting made it good. And Vincent's tears of joy, and holding hands under a starry night, and Bill Nighy talking about reaching through pain to find beauty and even joy, well, that's what elevated this episode. It's something that will be remembered by people who watched it and felt television trying to give them a hug, for a long time to come.
And -- this is where I give up the ghost of pretending this is about Doctor Who per se anymore, who am I kidding, it's all me me me -- it's timely for me, too. Because, hm. There's that "tell me how my id manifests in my fic" meme that just went around. And I didn't participate for several reasons and one of is that, well, I think my fic is pretty transparent. I don't write from a sexy id place exactly (though pretty much all of my adult-rated fics are just that), but -- the more I thought about this the more clear it became to me -- I tend to write about exactly what I want to write about. The fic I'm working on right now is about language and the philosophy thereof; the WNW drabble I wrote a few days ago was about stories; I have Star Trek fics planned about politics and religion. The agenda is on the surface; one might even guess from my writing that I pick what I want to say and then find a canon I can express it through.
Of course, that's not what I actually do at all; in fact, these things do tend to come out in much the same way as the fic "id" -- without me realizing it till I'm finished, planned entirely in my subconscious. What really happens is that I glom onto stories that let light through, so to speak; stories where I can see my stories reflected. Some mean to do it (like, say, Princess Tutu), and some seem to accomplish it only by accident or by my own misinterpretation -- like Harry Potter. This is on my mind, you see, because in uploading my old fic to AO3 one of the first things I wanted to get up there was my first full-length fic ever, written in 2004 and well-nigh unreadable until now thanks to some fucking terrible formatting that my 20-year-old n00by self knew no better than to engage in. I finally fixed it up and got it posted this week, and then was faced with the bewildering question of thematic tags: do I tag for literal metadata-type content only -- Marauders' era, Lily/James, childbirth -- or do I tag for emotional content as well? The stuff that the story is built to house, for the reader to pry out?
No. I didn't tag for that. And if I had tagged it "depression," because it is, in my mind, a story about death and rebirth as portals to and from depression; because the reason Harry Potter got to me in the first place (circa OotP) was because it was, to me, a story about growing up and depression, because I thought after Sirius died his grief would be ever larger, not shoved to the side because JKR didn't feel like pursuing that mood beyond one book -- well. How could I explain why the fic is also about birth and joy and love and friendship? How could I single out one emotion from the others? They don't exist without each other; they don't negate each other.
It just is timely, you see, because I wrote that fic in response to a Frida Kahlo painting; really, I wrote it in response to Frida Kahlo's entire body of work, her whole life and philosophy. What Dr. Black says, he transformed the pain of his tormented life into ecstatic beauty ... to use your passion and pain to portray the ecstasy and joy and magnificence of our world, was not singular; had not never been done before, has been done since. It's easy for Richard Curtis to patly canonize Vincent into one of the greatest men who ever lived because he communicated that well -- but in a way he makes Vincent alone when in this one thing he never was.
This is what I look for in those story-cracks where the light seeps through. This is what I hope for, in all things. This is (although I do not claim to have done it well) why I'm here.
So, yeah, good episode. (You bet your ass I cried.)