History is inseparable from the earth [terre], struggle is underground [sous terre], and, if we want to grasp an event, we must not show it, we must not pass along the event, but plunge into it, go through all the geological layers that are its internal history (and not simply a more or less distant past).
[...]
Between the past as pre-existence in general and the present as infinitely contracted past there are, therefore, all the circles of the past constituting so many stretched or shrunk regions, strata, and sheets: each region with its own characteristics, its ‘tones’, its ‘aspects’, its ‘singularities’, its ‘shining points’ and its ‘dominant’ themes. Depending on the nature of the recollection that we are looking for, we have to jump into a particular circle.
[...]
The visual image becomes archaeological, stratigraphic, tectonic. Not that we are taken back to prehistory (there is an archaeology of the present), but to the deserted layers of our time which bury our own phantoms; to the lacunary layers which we juxtaposed according to variable orientations and connections.
hi i'm josh o'connor and if a gay man takes my hand in a warm gesture of kindness that i am not used to because i've only ever known men to be dismissive or cruel i am going to blink my eyes at him so yearnfully and push myself to learn to ask for more
Something that always comes to mind when discussing Jud’s backstory is the ambiguous way Jud talks about his history with addiction and poverty in the prayer meeting scene.
The specifics of it are kept vague but one detail that I keep coming back to in particular is the fact that Jud never actually said he was sober. When he talks about facing addiction in the past he says, "Christ saved me" but he doesn't actually mention sobriety or the process of recovery.
It makes sense that he wouldn't straight up say he's recovered because addiction isn't that simple and neither is the process of recovery. The distinctions between recovered vs recovering are hard to define bc it doesn’t always align with how addictions actually work in the medical sense (elaboration under the cut)
He could've said ‘recovering from addiction and X years sober’ but he doesn't. Jud chooses his words very carefully and I think it’s an interesting dialogue choice if nothing else.
Obviously I’m not suggesting that Jud never went through recovery or whatever, because this part would just disprove that immediately.
Whilst battling addiction isn’t the overarching theme of the movie, it's definitely there and I think there are a number of details that are worth pointing out because it's a great foundation for exploring his past in fics or character analysis, even if he doesn’t live like that anymore.
If we suspend our disbelief for a moment and pretend the prayer meeting scene is real life instead of a movie, I don't think it's weird for him to brush over the details. It doesn't really raise any red flags or questions about his personality because he's literally at work.
Generally speaking, nobody would be expected to share such intimate details about their personal lives at work, especially in regards to private medical information. However, Perpetual Fortitude is not exactly known for being a well functioning workplace. The fact that Jud was able to just casually access Wicks' medical bills and find out about his radical prostatectomy is just insane on its own, so I can see why Jud might become cautious over time, if not a little paranoid.
(There's also the added element of the fact that Jud is a priest which is important to consider when disclosing details of his medical history because a Catholic church is obviously going to be held to very different HR standards than the typical rules you'd expect working at a Taco Bell or smth but I digress)
It's interesting how he uses this anecdote about his past to try to connect with people because it's quite a risky move, especially for a priest. The stigma of poverty alone is enough to make a lot of people uncomfortable at the the idea of 'a homeless guy' being their priest, let alone the fact that Jud struggles with addiction or that he killed someone.
I think he knows how taboo his very presence in the church is already, so he uses this story about his past to humanise himself and show his community that he's grounded and imperfect, just like they are. It's especially clear in this part:
He acknowledges his past struggles as being a crucial part of who he is now. He shows how he didn’t leave it all behind when he joined the seminary, and he chooses to carry it with him.
You can call that growth/maturity/trauma or even serendipity. Whatever it is, it’s important to him and he speaks about it with enough confidence and deliberate ambiguity to keep up his image of being an open book.
In the prayer meeting, he's attempting to emotionally engage with the flock and do some good priest work without inviting too many follow questions about his circumstances. Especially those that could make them question if he even deserved to be a priest to begin with.
Anyway my point is that when you have this context in mind, I think you could use a lot of these elements to infer that his relationship with addiction is much more loaded than he let on.
If done right, you could easily imply that substance abuse/risk of relapse is still an active struggle for him and it would be interesting to explore the how his role in the priesthood impacts this dynamic. And it has even more potential if you compare Jud's past to Samson and Wicks’ subplot about alcoholism.
Elaboration: It’s complex and this is a very simplified explanation but the reason "Recovered" vs "Recovering" is a hard to distinguish is because in real life, addictions don't really go away. So it's kind of hard to measure progress through recovery with such black and white terms.
Despite the stereotypes, addiction isn't just about willpower. People aren’t always addicts because they’re reckless and careless with their lives, it’s a chemistry thing more often than not. People can be sober for decades and not be tempted to turn back, but relapsing is still a huge risk bc addictions don’t really care about what we want.
In simple terms, the difference between an 'addict' and a 'non-addict' is that the non-addict’s brain could consume a substance casually and have no problems stopping, but an addicted brain doesn't have consistent and reliable control over this even if the person has strong willpower and no desire to use substances again. That's how stuff like accidental consumption (spiking etc) or casual consumption can reignite the addiction again. So basically, addiction recovery isn’t about being cured by forcing the brain to stop being addicted to a substance as much as it is about the person developing healthy coping mechanisms and learning how to live a balanced life whilst managing an addiction.
The fact that the trafficking of enslaved Africans underpins so much of western European culture is so severely underacknowledged by white western Europeans that it boggles the mind to think of it. I've posted here before about how pitiful have been the attempts of white institutions to account for the crimes of their past, how they will at best acknowledge only the most blatant and undeniable parts of their history while laundering responsibility for the great majority of it. One particularly striking aspect of that is how little museum space in western Europe is dedicated to discussing slavery.
The British Museum in London was formed from the private collection of Hans Sloane whose collection was funded by profits from Caribbean plantations inherited by his wife. The original museum building was bought by the British government from the children of John Montagu, a man who was literally granted ownership of the Caribbean islands of St Lucia and St Vincent by the British state. The current museum building was constructed starting in the 1820s (when slavery was still legal in the British Empire) funded directly by the British government, around 20% of whose tax income at that time came in the form of customs on imported products, such as sugar and cotton from the Caribbean.
Yet the extent of the museum's engagement with its total historic dependence on slavery is merely to have moved a bust of Hans Sloane's head to a new location with some comments on his slavery connection. There is an ongoing campaign to have merely one permanent exhibit about the slave trade at the musem. (And this is not even getting into the famous legacy of that museum as a repository of looted colonial plunder such as the Benin bronzes.)
It's not just big museums either. A tiny museum like Jane Austen's house in Chawton, UK, has a notice on its website regarding mentions of slavery that actually reassures guests that they won't go too far in doing so, "We would like to offer reassurance that we will not, and have never had any intention to, interrogate Jane Austen, her characters or her readers for drinking tea." An admission that's rather telling about what they expect the views of museum visitors to be. But why not interrogate her or her characters? That is exactly what they should be doing!
It is quite well-known among Austen fans than Mansfield Park is her book that deals with slavery: the protagonist lives in the house of a man who owns slave plantations in Antigua. Many fans are keen to find evidence in the text that the protagonist objects to this, but she ultimately marries the son of the plantation owner and lives on the land of the plantation owner and her husband's income is paid by the plantation owner, so her objections (if they exist) cannot be worth much.
In Persuasion, the protagonist's love interest is a naval officer who fought in the Battle of Santo Domingo, a battle that was explicitly about protecting British interests in the Caribbean (i.e. sugar plantations) from being captured by the French.
In Pride and Prejudice, Mr Bingley has no land and his huge income is derived from investment in government bonds, which is to say that he pays for British military campaigns (such as the same Battle of Santo Domingo) and in return he is paid by the British government out of tax income, of which a big chunk is customs levied on slave-produced products.
And that's without even getting into the question of where the cotton comes from that makes up the dresses which are a frequent subject of discussion for many Austen characters.
For that matter, what about the dresses worn by Austen herself when writing her novels? The sugar in the tea she drank? The very house she lived in was owned by her brother, who inherited it (and all his considerable wealth) from Thomas Knight, a Tory MP (which is to say, a politican from the British political wing which most heavily supported slavery). The world of Austen's novels is entirely about slavery, it is the very thing which makes the lifestyles of the characters possible. The whole museum is about slavery whether the curators like it or not, anything less than mentioning it constantly is a deliberate hiding of the truth. And when I visited it a couple of years ago, I do not recall seeing slavery mentioned even once (maybe I missed one sign in a corner of one room or something idk).
As well as the severe underreporting of slavery at museums, the lack of slavery-specific museums in western Europe is also really remarkable. The Mercado de Escravos in Lagos, Portgual and the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, UK, are the only two that I am aware of, albeit the latter is closed until 2029. A slavery museum in Amsterdam has been proposed and is supposed to open in 2030, but given that a French slavery museum was proposed by Francois Hollande a decade ago and never built I will not get my hopes too high about it.
The London Museum Docklands has a permanent exhibit on London's connection to slavery, which is pretty good as far as it goes, but is utterly pathetic in the context that it is the only permanent exhibit about the slave trade in the whole city. The best I have seen by far is the Suriname Museum in Amsterdam, which dedicates a huge portion of its space to covering the slave trade in great detail. The fact that the museum was founded by the descendants of enslaved Africans who were trafficked to Suriname is surely why this particular museum is so good.
The contrast between that and white institutions like the British Museum is really stark. Do you treat the slave trade with the gravity it deserves, which is to say that you mention it at every opportunity and do not shy away from saying, "The slave trade is why this museum, this city, this country, this continent, why all of it is the way it is"? Or do you move one statue to a new location, put a little sign up about how one man's wife's family owned slaves a long time ago, and say "That's enough, we've dealt with the slavery issue now"?
A full month has passed since the last donation. Please, friends, I need a small amount of money, $500, to buy the rest of my school supplies to finish my studies. Please help me quickly to raise the money 💔‼️
Hi, I'm Tristan from the Netherlands, running this campaign on behalf of my friend Inge. This is her story:
jacobvanloon
jbbartram-illu
stormborns
annaxmalina
2087
pixelskylines
kaledo-art
ellievsbear
